Not directly related, but a singer from a death metal band I was playing in has once had an idea: a death metal drum machine.
In essence, it would be a box with a crank that would produce a blast beat whose tempo would be proportional to the speed of cranking. Something like a blast beat music box.
Can be made digitally by using a stepper motor wired as generator with a hand crank, then picking up the spikes which are proportional to the rotation speed and feed them to a ucontroller with some sound samples in memory arranged ad a rhythm, then play them according with the detected speed.
A simpler one could use the uC only to output MIDI clock data, then a start when the player starts cranking or reaches a certain minimum speed, and a stop when it stops or slows below a given lower limit.
Ha! I thought of doing the same with a motor driving a cam shaft hooked to a foot pedal with a potentiometer - the harder you press the faster the blast beat. Also thought of clutches or stops to change pattern or instruments.
Perfect setup for a one-man death metal band - just add guitar and mic. Kinda like Joe Buck Yourself or Pandiscordian Necrogenesis.
it's ok, my synthesizer GAS (and retro computing GAS) has been taking a backseat to ski gear GAS for the last few years, and the last thing I need is for it to resurrect. I haven't lust-scrolled matrixsynth in years now, I really need to not start up again :-)
It's really cool to see DIY drum machines and synths both in hardware like this and in software with dedicated SoCs that people are programming. This is finally the future we were promised in the 1980s.
Check out Easy Mo Bee on Instagram. He still has the floppies for songs he did in the 90s and it's really cool watching him playing those on the drum machine he made them on!
I love watching artists like this mind melding with their hardware. You can see all that muscle memory from years of loving what they do. Drum machines are instruments too!
In essence, it would be a box with a crank that would produce a blast beat whose tempo would be proportional to the speed of cranking. Something like a blast beat music box.