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

Comment via: substack

Recent posts on blogs I like:

Microfictions 2

A few more microfictions, still no LLMs.

via Evan Fields August 7, 2026

Linkpost for August

Announcement: for the next while, I’ll be writing the Effective Altruism Newsletter!

via Thing of Things August 6, 2026

Using AI to analyze life patterns

If you’re anything like me, you may have a lot of notes from various introspective activities – annual / monthly reviews, worksheets, therapy notes, etc. Often these notes are just gathering dust in a paper folder or some forgotten corner of Google Drive.…

via Victoria Krakovna July 30, 2026

more     (via openring)