Making a Foot Percussion Board

November 21st, 2010
contra, footboard, music
I made a board for doing foot percussion last weekend and tried it at the brandeis contra yesterday. It's a little "clacky", and I think if I were better at this I could make one with different sounds for the different parts of the board so I could do more of a "thump-clack-a" instead of "clack-clack-a", but I'm pretty happy with it.

I made it by hollowing out a board with a router, embedding a contact pickup, and gluing it back together. The paper shown in the first image I thought I was going to need to use to keep the pickup well embedded, but I ended up not needing it.



I probably didn't need that many clamps, but there are a lot of clamps in my parents' basement and I was curious how many I could fit on it. I also need to test it with different shoes and see how much of the sound is shoe dependent.
Referenced in: Designing a MIDI Footboard

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