The synpad - a DIY, position sensing midi drum pad

The SynPad is a position sensitive midi drum pad that you can build yourself using simple materials and tools for around 50 UK pounds (depending on what materials you already have, and how many pads you want to make.)

The idea was to produce a pad which can detect where on the pad you have hit it as well as how hard, so that the synth it is driving can modulate the sound continuously according to the x and y coordinates of the strike.

The design is pretty simple - you could easily build one over a weekend using basic wood and metalwork tools (i.e. for cutting and drilling). All the software I've written for it is open source, so as long as you have or can set up a linux based computer (or have the skills to adapt the software to another platform), you could get up and running pretty quickly.

The pad itself is just an interface, which sends information on where and how hard you've hit it over a USB cable - the actual sounds are generated on a separate computer, using the SuperCollider audio processing language. You could also use something like CSound, Pure Data, or any graphical modular synth to make the sounds. I have written a variety of SuperCollider synths for it, which are included in the software release.

If you have come to this page through the ganglion.me domain, please bear in mind that this is an old domain name which I will not be using forever. My new domain name is highfellow.org, and the permanent address of this page is http://highfellow.org/synpad.

• An instructables.com article about how to build one yourself. (I have made some minor changes to the design since posting this. I will update the article sometime soon.)
• The youtube demo video.
• The video of a talk I gave about the pad at the Linux Audio Conference 2011, on vimeo.com. (Ogg theora version for download only here)
• If you would like to stay in touch with what's happening with this project, you can subscribe to the mailing list.

This includes the arduino firmware, the python position mapper, and some SuperCollider synth code to actually make the sounds.

• 0.4 release. (.tar.gz) (27th Jan 2012)
• 0.3 release. (.tgz) (4th May 2011)
• 0.2 release. (.tgz)
• 0.1 release. (.tgz)

• A paper that I presented to the Linux Audio conference in 2011.

You can contact me at this email address: andy on the server highfellow dot org. (replace 'on the server' with '@' and 'dot' with '.' to make the right address).