Groupable Playing Pads for Electronic Percussion Instruments
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Solution Overview
Problem
Conventional electronic percussion instruments face issues with operability and maneuverability due to small striking areas, limited playing techniques, and cumbersome tone setting for multiple pads, leading to increased chances of striking wrong pads and reduced versatility in playing styles.
Innovation Solution
An electronic percussion instrument with a music playing manipulation unit featuring a group setting unit for combining pads into grouped zones, a storage unit for musical tones, and a tone allocating unit that allocates tones to pads based on detected manipulations, allowing for enhanced maneuverability and varied playing techniques by treating grouped zones as single pads or separate entities.
Engineering Contradictions & Design Principles
Engineering Contradiction Analysis
1Quantity of substance
If multiple playing pads are arranged in close positions to increase density, then the quantity of pads increases, but the probability of striking wrong pads increases
Solution Approach 1:
The patent combines adjacent pads into grouped pad zones, treating multiple pads as a single functional unit. This merging approach increases the effective striking area for each pad while maintaining the ability to access multiple pads, thereby reducing the probability of accidentally striking the wrong pad while increasing the overall quantity of available pads.
2Adaptability or versatility
If individual tone setting is performed for each pad, then each pad can be optimized, but the operation becomes troublesome and time-consuming
Solution Approach 1:
The patent merges the tone setting operations for multiple pads within a grouped pad zone into a single setting operation. By assigning the same tone to all pads in a group, the system maintains tone customization capability while significantly reducing the time and effort required for setup, making the instrument easier to operate.
Solution Approach 2:
The grouped pad zone functionally acts as a single pad for tone allocation purposes, while still comprising multiple physical pads. This universal approach allows the system to treat multiple pads as one unit for configuration, while maintaining individual pad functionality during performance.
3Ease of operation
If pads are arranged as separate independent units, then each pad functions independently, but the versatility for varied playing manners is limited
Solution Approach 1:
The patent implements dynamic reconfigurability where pad zones can be grouped or ungrouped based on playing requirements. The system can transition between different configurations - pads can be combined into groups for certain playing styles and separated for others, providing versatility while maintaining operational simplicity through a unified control mechanism.
Data Source
AI summary
An electronic percussion musical instrument comprises a plurality of playing pads for playing music by striking the face of each pad. The pads are configured to work either as individual pads respectively for playing different percussion tones or as grouped pad zones by combining some of the pads, each zone playing a same percussion tone. Plural timbres of musical tones are stored in a storage unit and are respectively allocated to the individual playing pads or the grouped pad zones. The grouped pad zone can be handled just as a wide area pad. When an individual pad or a grouped pad zone is struck, the allocated tone will be generated. Some of the pads or grouped pad zones can be used as a special playing technique instruction pad to input an instruction to impart an effect of special playing technique to the tones to be generated. As a tone playing pad is struck with the special playing technique instruction pad being pressed, a musical tone allocated to the tone playing pad is generated with the special playing technique effect being imparted thereto. The pads can be two-dimensional and three-dimensional.