Oh! Gizmo

By Andrew Liszewski

There’s just something more satisfying about playing air drums than air guitar, and I think it’s because almost anything from a pencil to a wooden spoon can be turned into drumsticks, whereas finding a suitable substitute for a real guitar is a bit trickier. Of course drumsticks alone can’t reproduce the sounds from a full-on drum kit, but these V-Beat sticks seem to fall somewhere in-between your imagination and the real thing.

The drumsticks feature motion sensors and come tethered to an electronic control box which is somehow able to detect the positions of the sticks. So hitting the air where a cymbal would be in a traditional drum kit would produce a cymbal sound, and hitting where a snare would be located would produce a snare sound, etc. It also comes with a pair of foot pedals which are used to produce the sounds from a bass drum and a hi-hat. Now the fact that the drumsticks aren’t wireless is kind of sucky, but it does mean the only batteries you’ll need are a set of 4xAAs for the control unit. And you can get it from Firebox.com for about $42.

[ V-Beat Drumsticks ] VIA [ The Red Ferret Journal ]