How to play the footboard

December 11th, 2013
footboard, music
The footboard is an instrument for electronic foot percussion. After experimenting with various ways to play it I think I now have the beginnings of a technique:

Sit in a chair and lift your dominant foot off the ground just slightly so it dangles. Keep your foot parallel to the floor. Let your leg muscles relax in that position so you're not exerting force to pull your foot towards your chair or push it out away from you. This is where your leg will require the least energy while playing. Adjust the position of the footboard until it's right under your foot.

The front and back pads should be set to play a high and low sound, like a closed high-hat or snare and a kick drum. Pick some sounds you're not going to get too sick of.

The two basic movements are tapping your toe and tapping your heel. In both cases the other half of the foot stays down:

You're probably going to need to calibrate your drum triggers before this will work well. If your sensitivity/gain is too high you'll get sounds from one pad when trying to play the other. If it's too low then some taps that should register instead get silence. If you get double triggering, two sounds in quick succesion, you need to set a higher regection time. After lots of fiddling you should have the pads set up where you can trigger either pad while leaving half your foot still.

The other basic motion is playing both sounds at once by putting down the whole foot:

Once you have these three building blocks you can start to build up rhythms:

When playing faster you will sometimes want to keep your foot entirely in the air. This means instead of rocking "heel toe" you bounce your foot back and forth between the heel and toe:

You can also add the other foot if you like:

Referenced in: Footboard: How To

Comment via: google plus, facebook, substack

Recent posts on blogs I like:

Ozy and Vasili Review Lilo and Stitch

Sometimes my seven-year-old, Vasili, wants to see some godawful movie that makes me want to melt my eyeballs out of my head.

via Thing of Things June 27, 2025

Elixir's Last Dance

On May 18th, the contra dance band Elixir had their last gig ever. The dance was packed: there were three hundred people. It was the only dance BIDA has ever done where they sold tickets. People flew from across the country just to hear Elixir play one la…

via Lily Wise's Blog Posts June 5, 2025

Workshop House case study

Lauren Hoffman interviewed me about Workshop House and wrote this post about a community I’m working on building in DC.

via Home April 30, 2025

more     (via openring)