A tuneable electronic tongue drum that allows you to switch between different scales and a few sounds with metal or wooden timbre. It has optional reverb & delay effects and a MIDI output too!
Easily switching between modes you can play sounds of a handpan, steel tongue drum, xylophone or glockenspiel with up to 9 voices polyphony. Touch pads in the wings consist of a few segments and they are sensitive to how much of the wing area your finger covers. This allows you to play softer or louder sounds dynamically.
Or you can connect its MIDI output to another synth and use it as a controller, expanding the range of sounds without limits. The built‑in accelerometer acts as pitch bend / continuous controller depending on the axis of rotation. Velocity information is transmitted too.
The Wing Drum can be played by anyone at home, outdoors, in the studio, therapist's office, classroom, meditation session or at the live performance.
The round shell is about 15cm / 6" wide and 5cm / 2" tall. It is made from solid wood sealed with natural oils to protect and show the natural beauty of the wood. The top panel is made from fiberglass laminated with matte black polymer or white enamel with gold plated metal elements. It is controlled using 5 buttons made from soft silicone.
There are eight wing pads and one central pad which can either play 9th note or act as a damper. Thanks to the segmented texture you can play them with variable force which influences note's volume.
Internal accelerometer measures the angle at which you hold your drum. This controls various effects; for example by tilting it sideways you can control delay lenght and tiling front and back can adjust reverb depth. This is all configurable.
In addition to setting up effects and defining new scales within default 440Hz or 432Hz temperaments, you can micro-tune each pad individually and then save the result as a new scale for easy access.
There are a few pre-defined scales, and it is very easy to set up your own! Arbitrary custom tuning is supported too.
When considering which kind of drum to buy, you usually need to listen to different YouTube videos and choose the one that sounds most appealing to you. The great thing about the Wing Drum is that you can find all beautiful sounds in one powerfull instrument, and it is not limited to one fixed scale. Check our video to see how cool it is!
For wide variety of timbres, three different synth engines are implemented. Based on sampled, wavetable or additive synthesis, with additional DSP algorithms to pitch‑shift the sound where needed and add optional sound effects.
The Wing Drum is aware of its orientation in 3D space. To make your performance even more interesting, delay and reverb effects can be applied depending on how you tilt the drum. This is easy, as it is smaller and a lot lighter than its traditional counterparts, steel toungue drums or handpans.
In the heart of the Wing Drum ticks a powerful dual‑core signal processor, as found in many digital synthesizers. We also included a dedicated high fidelity, low noise DAC chip to handle the outputs. The MIDI Out connection allows you to control another synth for wider variety of sounds.
Wing‑shaped capacitive sensinn pads react to how stronly you tap them. In fact they are rigid and rather sensing the area covered by your finger, however this is measured in a fraction of second and there is no noticeable delay between tapping your finger and a corresponding sound coming out.
Let us explain a few things about the Wing Drum which might not be obvious.
The headphone connectors is very standard 3.5mm jack, you can also connect the output to an amplifier or active speakers. The other connector (one in the middle) transmits MIDI data at all times, so you can use the Wing Drum as a simple MIDI controller with nine pads and two parameters - emulating pitch bend and cc wheel by tilting it from left to right or back to forth.
It runs on 3 AA batteries. You can use standard disposable batteries, Ni-Cd, Ni-MH or Ni-Zn rechargeables (with 1.2 - 1.6V nominal voltage). All batteries must be charged externally. There is no rechargeable battery included because of the shipping restrictions, however if you can solder, you have an option to disassemble the device and install a rechargeable battery; then it will be charged via USB. It must be a 3.7V Lithium Polymer (Li-Po) with protection circuit (like this one).
Firmware updates are not likely to follow any time soon, we strive to release this instrument as a fully finished product. However, as we get feedback from you over time, we may release an update with small improvements. In such case, you'll need to use an USB cable and PC. The process is easiest on Windows or Linux, but more problematic on Mac (requires installing drivers, and running a Python script). If you do not have access to a Windows PC, we will not be able to give you support or advice.
In your package you will get:
A stream of MIDI data is transmitted at all times, including velocity and PB & CC. It may be handier and easier to use the drum than a standard keyboard, since it presents 9 notes of your desired scale in a very accessible way.
Wing Drum can play a few sounds of real and also synthesized instruments. Two buttons on top select between metallic (represented by robot icon) and wooden timbre (tree icon).