The cool part about this thing is that it can turn the people that like to tap on the desk into real drummers. The device has a little clip that hooks to the desk and it picks up all the taps made on the surface and turns them into synthesized drums and stringed instruments.

The device has 100 different sounds and an integrated 1.3W speaker. It can strap to your leg for use at a desk and it has a pad integrated so you can drum right on it. Pricing is unannounced but the device should land in stores in Q3.

[via Gizmag]

The Frequency has a built-in speaker and contained six drum patterns created specifically for the watch by Tetsuya Komuro, one of the most successful and influential pop songwriters and producers in Japan.

The Frequency’s other features included a chronograph, an alarm, a calendar, two metronome modes (audible and visual), and a BPM counter. And it also tells the time. And it’s a drum machine!

As of this writing there are two units of the Seiko Frequency on sale on eBay, one of them priced at $350 (USD), while the other one is on auction for a couple more days but can be bought for $195. And yes, they’re both in yellow, although the Frequency also came in brown and red. Sellers, please post a video of the Frequency kicking out some beats!

[via Retro Thing]

Tom Hobson taps his feet, but now, thanks to the magic of an Arduino controller, he can do it with honest-to-goodness drum sounds. From a distance, this seems awesome. If I was in the same room… well, I’m not, so everybody wins.

Friendly and helpful fellow that he is, Tom wants you to be able to rock out at all times, too, so there’s a helpful how-to on his site. Go forth, tappers, and make your own Beat Sneaks. But check out this video first.

Click to View Embedded Video Clip

[Beat Sneaks via MAKE]

Seung yi Lee’s Drum Meister lets you use your fingertips to play drum sounds on little tiny pads that look just like their real-world counterparts. The app includes sampled sounds of a variety of snares, cymbals, a tom and a nice kick drum for that extra thump – 10 drums in all, and all on screen at the same time. The drums support multi-touch and you can slide your fingers across multiple drums to quickly play a riff. And since it’s a true polyphonic sampled drum kit, you can pound on ‘em all you want without the sounds cutting off.

One of the coolest things that Drum Meister lets you do is rearrange the position of the drums to suit your personal style and finger positions – plus the positions of the drums actually influences the position of the sounds with a 3D surround effect. It’s really slick if you’re listening through a pair of headphones or plugged into an amplifier.

You can even set one of the cymbals or the kick drum to be activated by a shake of your iPhone. Drum Meister also supports live recording of sessions and comes loaded with a 25 pre-recorded tracks for your enjoyment. No word on any online-sharing of tracks, but hopefully that’ll come in the near future as many iPhone music apps now have this feature.

But enough of my yakkin’. Here’s a video clip of this awesome application in action:

Click to View Embedded Video Clip

Drum Meister is available now over at the iTunes App Store for $1.99 (USD), a whole lot cheaper than an actual set of drums – and a whole lot quieter, especially if you play them through headphones.

Firestix drum sticks contain internal LED illumination which light up when you first start to bang on your drums with them. As an added bonus, Firestix are made out of durable Lexan, so they’re not likely to snap in two like the cheap wood sticks that ship with the game.

Click to View Embedded Video Clip

As you can see from the video clip, they look really cool when played in a dark room. Firestix are available in both red and blue versions, and you can find them over on Amazon for about $25 a pair.

Created Long Beach, CA textile artist FunkieFresh, the set of handmade covers ties around each of the game’s four drums and helps them keep them down to a dull roar. I’ve seen other solutions to this problem (like some boring adhesive foam discs), but none which were so artfully crafted.

As an added bonus, each pad is crocheted using colors that properly match the original drum hues, so if you’re used to playing by color, not drum position, you’re totally in luck.

You can pick up a full set of Rock Band drum cozies on her Etsy shop for $40.

The Yellow Drum Machine drives around the room looking for things that might make an interesting sound when tapped on. If he likes what he hears, he starts going to town with a little riff. Once he’s bored, he moves on, looking for something else to make noise with.

Click to View Embedded Video Clip

As the ‘bot drives around, he avoids obstacles until it detects an object that looks like it might be a nice musical surface, takes some audio samples, and if he finds the sound to be pleasing, composes a little matching rhythm using the original sound sample and plays a little song.

Click to View Embedded Video Clip

Created by robot hacker fritsl, the little drummer dude is cobbled together from a variety of odd parts, including a PICAXE 28 microcontroller, this sound sampler, a couple of geared motors, an old wood cheese crate and plenty of hot glue.

[Let's Make Robots via MAKE]

Developer MooTheCow has created this homebrew drum machine application called “Drummer” that runs on the iPhone or iPod Touch.

Click to View Embedded Video Clip

Drummer can play up to 15 unique audio samples (one on each finger touch pad), and takes advantage of multi-touch capabilities, so you can play up to five sounds at once. You can even let your MP3s play in the background and provide your own accompaniment. There are pre-installed Rock, Dance, Electro and two Jazz sound sets, but can be easily updated with your own sound samples.

The application is currently in private Beta, so you won’t be able to get your hands on a copy for your jailbroken iPhone quite yet. In the mean time, you can read more over on MooCowMusic.

[via QJ.Net]

First up, there’s the Mini Drumpad, which features a bunch of percussion sounds as well as rhythm an tempo settings to keep the sounds on beat. Keyboard fans will dig the Mini Keyz and its tiny 8-key interface. Then there’s the Mini Lixx, which plays guitar riffs and chords, and features a unique strumming interface. Finally, there’s the Mini Mixer, which lets you add DJ effects to music from portable music players.

Each of the MiJam Minis retails for about 20 bucks. They can be used as standalone musical instruments, or plugged into your current MP3 player and mixed together to accompany your music.

[via iLounge]