Drum & Bass For Tesla Coils & Music Robots

This video, via KinetiX, captures ‘an experimental drum ‘n bass piece’, for 3 Tesla coils, a robotic drum kit and robotic bass guitar.

Technical details:

The leads are performed by a Plasmasonic Dual Resonance Solid State Tesla Coil (DRSSTC), and the accompanying parts by 2 microBrute DRSSTCs. \

The Tesla coils are controlled by the Chime Red musical Tesla coil control system created by Josh Bailey and James McVay. The Chime Red musical Tesla coil controller treats each Tesla coil as a 16-note polyphonic pulse-wave synthesizer, complete with velocity sensitivity, ADSR envelopes, LFOs, pitch and amplitude modulation, etc.

The bass part is played by the Mechbass robotic bass guitar which was created by James McVay and Jim Murphy.

All sounds were recorded directly from the instruments with microphones in the space shown, with no added tracks.

KinetiX has several EPs and singles out, which are available via Beatport, Juno and other online retailers.

14 thoughts on “Drum & Bass For Tesla Coils & Music Robots

  1. Id like to see Richard James rig for this sort of thing. I loved his album of robots. It is cool to get the visual though. pretty neat. Its one of those things. If I heard this Id say not interested. Seeing it…the process is so much more interesting. Much appreciated.

  2. LOL.

    The ratio of calories burnt to produce and coolness of result is pretty good when you factor in the visuals and the presence of tesla coils!! Music rarely makes your hairs stand up in such a direct manner.

    Now we need someone to come up with a Tesla VI that models using those sparky things to generate tones. Or better yet, have it be a plugin that you can run your sounds through a virtual tesla coil– complete with a sparky GUI. The only thing that would be missing is the ear-shredding levels and the smell of ozone or whatever it is.

  3. I’ve seen two guys do a tesla coil act and you can’t really beat the sound of electricity ripping through the air in the flesh so to speak. Sadly this video won’t do it justice but I bet it’s amazing.

  4. Not quite Animusic’s Starship Groove, but very nice for machines. All it lacks is Asimo popping and locking around the stage.

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