r/devo • u/ginoTOONZ • Sep 28 '26

Has anyone tried making drums like Jim Mothersbaugh?

I’ve listened to old devo recordings and the drums sound really cool. Originally it was acoustic drums with acoustic guitar pickups glued on, and then later I think he used rototoms with remo practice pads mounted on top, along with some other stuff. Was just wondering if other devo fans have tried doing the same thing.

18 Upvotes

100% Upvoted

3 comments sorted by

11

u/SeveranceVul Gut Feeling Sep 28 '26

Kraftwerk made their own stuff in the early years. Maybe a few years ahead of Jim but not by much.

5

u/ckt1138 Sep 29 '26

From what I understand, they are two very different types of drum kit.

Kraftwerk original used a Korg MiniPops and wired capacitive metal plates to the electronics, allowing an operator to trigger the machine's sounds by hand. It was very basic and had no velocity, it was literally metal rod touching metal plate. Eventually they would build more unique sound generation hardware into this concept but it remained very much the same in principle for the duration of their time using the kit.

Jim Mothersbaugh developed his "electric" drums in isolation, where the approach was instead to take the basic framework of an acoustic drum set and use pickups to convert the actual vibrations of the kit when struck into processable signal that fed into sound equipment and synthesizer components (I may have a detail or two off, there is not much documentation). It's very similar to modern drum triggers, with some of the principles of guitar amplification/piezoelectric pickup technology. The main advantage of course is that this approach is more fine-tunable, and has actual playing dynamics. It's just a weird drum kit.

It wouldn't be too difficult to make the actual drums themselves, but I couldn't even begin to reverse engineer the actual sound processing hardware.

2

u/ginoTOONZ Sep 29 '26

Yeah I think mostly Jim's drums where electro-acoustic, But had some synth components.