Pad Development

Miura:

The greatest advantage of using the FGDP, a dedicated instrument for finger drum playing is how the pads are arranged and shaped. When we developed this instrument, the foremost matter in our minds regarding its design was not expecting people to learn the pads, but rather for the pads to conform to how people play.

I am originally an acoustic drum player, but I have also enjoyed playing finger drums using pads with a standard grid layout. Some finger drum players use a three-finger style, playing with their thumb, index finger, and middle finger. However, the square arrangement of pads is not very ergonomic for people to play with their hands, which are naturally curved.

Miura:

When talking about playing acoustic drums, there’s a typical drum kit arrangement with toms, snare, bass drum, and so on. There's a reason why that arrangement is used. For instance, this makes it easier to do tom rolls spanning different drums, which makes typical drum playing easier.

This is the same for finger drum pads. Although you might have many pads, you'll use some more than others. Since that’s the case, why not assign more space to the pads that require a more detailed level of control, and then make the other pads easier to play in a flowing style, by giving them a clearer relationship to each other?

In other words, the pad arrangement of the FGDP is a layout that we finally arrived at after thinking about things like the positional relationship between the fingers on our hands, which sound is easier to play with which finger, which pads you play more often, the musical flow you get by having the snare and toms next to each other, and so on.

We examined many different pad layouts and shapes before arriving at the current solution, which finally allowed us to create a pad arrangement that matches the shape of our hands. Although the finger drum players of the world have widely different methods of playing, I think we can proudly say that since Yamaha is now releasing the optimum instrument that’s made especially for finger drumming, this is the form factor on offer for players to more quickly improve their skills and to play the music they want to play.

Miura:

There’s a physical response created by the layers of carbon and gold plating that detect your “input” when playing the pad. This kind of system is widely used, and grid-layout pads as well as the FGDP series are no exception.

Sobajima:

However, these kinds of pads were all the same size and shape. In other words, it was considered all right to give every pad a uniform sensing response to the input from your fingers. However, our approach with the FGDP is different. Owing to our pursuit of playability in terms of finger drums, we chose an extremely organic shape for each pad, rather than making the shape and arrangement uniform.

So, how are the pads on the FGDP different from conventional pads? Let’s take the example of a large bass drum pad. Adjusting the sensitivity is extremely difficult on such a large pad, because the sensitivity differs if you strike it in different places, which leads to differences in the volume of the resulting sound, even though you’re playing in the same way.

Actually, there are an enormous number of conditional branches due to factors (parameters) we must consider just with different pad shapes and sizes compared to a grid-layout pad controller. There are around 20 parameters that influence how the pads sense your input, such as pad size, shape, finger strength and more… and there are up to 100 million combinations of these parameters.

In light of this, our focus was to tune the pad response so that you can strike anywhere on the largest pad on the instrument when triggering sounds at the same sensitivity, and still get a sound that feels good.

Ota:

I should mention that on the first prototype we developed, the sounds didn’t come out sounding uniform at all. We studied and evaluated this problem by creating prototypes on which we adjusted the amount, density, and thickness of ink that’s injected into the carbon layer, as well as the spacing of the gold plating in the gold-plated layer through which electrical signals pass… and we tried other things. Each time, we created twenty or thirty of the same sheet using the same conditions and took measurements. In doing this, we found that there were inconsistencies even on the same sheet, so we used these as a clue to zoom in on what needed to be fixed.

When all was said and done, we ended up creating 1,000 prototypes!

Sobajima:

With musical instruments, the sound that’s produced when you strike the same pad with the same amount of force must be consistent, and the quality must be stable. It’s impossible for human beings to accurately judge what a fixed level of quality is because their physical condition, mood, and individual differences affect how hard they strike the pads and how they perceive the sounds that are triggered. For this reason, we created a special machine that can reliably strike with a certain force every time, to increase the sensing accuracy.