Can Marbles Play Drums Like a Human?

I'm building a prototype to find out the answer to a very important question. Can a marble snare sound like a real drummer? Listen to this. All right. Now, listen to this. The first groove sounds like a machine, but the other human drummer. The difference between these two grooves are the spooky ghost notes. Ghost notes are soft hits between the hard hits. The ghost notes makes a huge difference. And if I want my marble played snare drum sound like it was played by a human, I think it's really important that I can make marbles play great ghost notes. The hard hit sounds great. It sounds like human playing. To play the lower ghost notes, my idea is to use a smaller marble. Let's try the smallest 11 mm. Let's try 14 mm, 18, 22, and 25 mm. Let's see how the marble sounds and the human. Hm, that didn't work. And I think you can spot the problem in the waveform. The softest marble hit isn't soft enough, whereas the human soft hit, you can hardly see it. So, I'm programming the ghost net groove with the marble hits. The marble groove sounds machine-like. The smaller marbles for the ghost notes is not working. We need a better solution. Together with the fantastic live stream chat, we brainstormed six different solutions to make better sounding ghost notes. So first a levitating pad to dampen the impact pad directly on the drum head changing to wooden marbles hitting a drumstick in between and lowering the fall height. All the other tests were done from one meter fall height, one meter, half a meter, 30 cm. A 20 10 smaller marble 10 cm. That's pretty good. Lowering the marble seemed to be the absolute best way to go so far. But there's a huge problem with this solution. Hard and soft comes on the programming wheel at the same time. Reader drops Marble The shorter file would hit too early. If we know that the music is 120 BPM, we know exactly how fast these moves and we can insert an offset distance that compensates for the difference in fall height. If we would read this program, we release the hard marble first and there we release the soft marble and they would hit at the same time. Problem solved. Unfortunately, not. What happens if we play too fast? The faster music tempo makes the profiles goes faster. So the 13 mm that used to be 200 milliseconds is now way less. Profiles goes fast, soft marbles hit too early. I don't want to go for a design that has this built-in timing flaw. I want to find a simpler solution. But wait here just a moment. I say here in the requirement that the marble fall height must be equal. That's actually wrong. What I want to be equal is the fall time. Here we can see the importance of asking the right questions and defining our problems. The height doesn't matter. It's the fall time that matters. If we were able to like introduce some obstacle that slows down the marble, we can achieve the same 450 fall time. Ludvig had previously mentioned an idea to bounce the marbles on another surface first to slow down the marbles like this. And that sounds great, but I'm worried about the accuracy of this bounce and how accurately we would be able to delay the fall. But I took inspiration from this idea and came up with this. In theory, when we drop the marble from this angle track, it should be much slower. And it also sounds great. That sounds perfect. human marvel. It's the same sound. And I think also with this system, we could put it up higher and have a more steeper angle and probably get a little harder hit. Works.

Let's raise it even more. I think we have something here. Let's turn on the recording and record soft to hard with the track system. Interesting. The waveforms of the track marbles looks like the human thing. Different marble sizes. Everything on the same volume. Track marbles. Oh yes. Human reference. Track Marvel sounds as good as human. Let's make a groove of this. Moment of truth. The human groove. And now marble track group. Here's a different size marbles machine like and the track marbles. Boom. Yes, we can play ghost notes with marbles. But there's another drum effect is also important. And that sound is the drum roll. On the second beat, I'm doing this roll. That's not really a ghost note. That's a roll. I love that roll sound in a groove where the drummer plays a short drum roll. And I have already built two prototypes to try this. My first test was bouncing a marble between the snare drum and the top surface. And it actually worked. It was difficult to get the sound really consistent and you can't see the marble playing. So, it's not so visually cool. So, instead, I built this prototype where a marble activates a drumstick that plays the roll. And this sounded great and consistent. Wow. This might be our short roll. Oh, that's a short roll if I've ever heard one. Yes. Now we can take the marble plate groove and add a roll into it and listen to how it comes alive. We have the rolls on lock. We're getting really close to have a marble plate snare drum. Sounds like it was played by a drummer. But there's one more sound. The flam. The flam is played with both hands one before the other. More distance between them. I end the groove with a flam. like that. To play a marble flam, we have to hit the snare drum really quickly with two hits. And the problem is when the marbles hits the center, they would collide. That would result in floor marbles. We can't have that. But if we place some marble drops so that those marbles hits off center, we can play almost at the same time with no collision. Perfect flam. We have our answer. A marble snare drum can sound like it was played by a drummer. Cheers to that. Ah, great news. Now we know exactly what the snare drum needs to do and I can start writing the functional requirements for the snare drum. This is a huge step and now I need to fill out all the other instruments. To help me do that, I built a full-size prototype here. The prototype will help me to make decisions of the functions of all these instruments and this design freeze contract is going up on the wall here. All right, we wanted to thank our YouTube members, Patreon patrons and Twitch subs in a more meaningful way. that we have made. We are building the marble machine wall here. We were blown away by the support on the last video and we're adding all the new names as soon as we can to the wall of fame. And on the highest tiers, we're actually doing something special. So, if you want

to be a cog in the machine that runs this whole project, you can become a wheels on YouTube. If you want to support the project, you'll find all the information on vintan. net. Next week, we're going to have a lot of fun with this thing. See you then. Ciao.