Beatbox
When I heard that there would be a ‘physical programmable drum machine on show at the Royal College Of Art in London I packed my bags and set off to the city to see it in action. Well, that’s not completely true…I was already going so I made a b-line for the show while I was there! Anyways, the ‘physical programmable drum machine’ in question is the Beatbox, created by Andy Huntington’s, and it’s really great.
The Beatbox is 5 little boxes attached via a cable to a little controller (with start, stop and tempo controls). Each box has 2 switches, one to set each box between record mode and playback mode and the other to input beats. Each of the 5 boxes can be set to play independent loops but here’s the thing, they aren’t playing synth sounds or samples, they are triggering a little rod out of the bottom of the box to hit whatever surface they are sitting on. Therefore, you can move each box around and place them on different surfaces to change the sound of the rhythms in real time.
I had a chat with Andy while I was there (well I ain’t travelling half way around the world to see it without telling him so…we’ve already been through that haven’t we?!) and he’s a top bloke. I wish him well with this project and hope that it gets to production…I’ll certainly be getting my hands on one if it does. If you’re in London between now and the 3rd of July you could do a lot worse than head on over to check it out yourself. It’s nearly worth writing about just as an excuse to show Andy’s Beatbox logo below! [via]
