Synesthesia Mandala Drums
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The Synesthesia Mandala Drum is an electronic drum pad. It was released to the public in May 2006 after several years development by Vince De Franco and drummer Danny Carey from Tool. It's multi-zone responsiveness means that with a single drum pad, the artist is able to produce a vast amount of sounds and textures using drum sticks or fingers and hands. The Mandala drum is responsive to the velocity you strike the pad, and also the location you strike the pad. It is highly sensitive to the striking, therefore many subtle nuances in your playing can be expressed. The Mandala's controller or "brain" is able to transmit multi channel MIDI information based on your playing, so there are many musicians who are already using MIDI sequencers, samplers, synthesizers and other MIDI gear are able to integrate the Mandala into their setup. Alternatively you can just use the Mandala as a standalone instrument by using Mandala's brains inbuilt sound generator. Other possibilities include integrating the Mandala into your existing electronic drum kit, or using it within an acoustic drum kit to supplement your electronic triggering capabilities.
[edit] How Does the Mandala Work?
The Mandala pad can be sliced up into as little as one, or as many as seven playing zones, all responding to the 128 underlying concentric rings for high resolution control of effects based on strike position. The zones are rings emanating from centre of the Mandala. In its simplest form, the Mandala is a single zone which effectively means one instrument voice can be triggered. You can enable up to seven zones which divide the pad up into smaller rings, each ring capable of having its own instrument assignment and appregiator/scale generation configuration. You can also modify panning and note settings for each zone. The brain also has a global effects section, with Reverb, Delay, Modulation, Chorus and EQ controls, and also has fine tuning settings giving more control over strike velocity and sensitivity. The resolution of the playing surface is actually 128 concentric rings which can be both broken up into a maximum of 7 playing zones and also linked to effects control such as bending pitch or increasing Reverb as you play from centre to edge. This position controller can be scaled to your liking.
[edit] Resources
Some examples and video clips are already available at the Manufacturers web site.
Related Links:
Synesthesia Corp. Manufacturer
Electronic drums
Danny Carey Co-Developer and User of Mandala Drums
Mandala Drums Google Group User community for Mandalas.
