The Zendrum Interview

Interview by Jeff Barnett and Mark McGouirk
June 2008

About 20 miles west of Atlanta, GA, in the bedroom community of Douglasville, is the Mecca of alternative, electronic percussion otherwise known as ... Zendrum. The modest, ranch-style house belies the fact that this is the headquarters of a company that, for some 16 years, has been producing one of the world's most unique MIDI percussion controllers.

Mark McGouirk came here, for Sonikmatter, to interview David Haney - drummer, inventor and co-owner (with Kim Daniel) of Zendrum. Friends Bonnie Blackstock and Jeff Barnett agreed to come along to take pictures, record the interview and more importantly, get to try out these unusual instruments.

For years, we have seen these instruments played in various places like Disney World's Epcot, and in videos on YouTube and Zendrum's web site, but have never had the chance to actually put our hands on one. Here was our chance.

We came with many questions: How did Haney come up with this idea? What inspired him and fellow drummer, Kim Daniel, to manufacture them for others. How do they work? Who plays them? What has it been like to go from an average, working Joe drummer to a musical instrument manufacturer with some of the greatest names in contemporary music as customers. And, of course, what is it like to actually play a Zendrum?

Haney graciously welcomed us into his home and after chatting for a few minutes in the kitchen, invited us into his workshop/studio/museum.

"I have one of each model hooked-up and ready to play. Feel free to touch anything you want," he said.

Oh, yeah! There is the flagship ZX, the LT laptop, and the newest model, the ZAP.

On one wall hang examples of the evolution of the Zendrum. They include the prototype and various production models like the Z1, Z2 and, the current model, the ZX. On other walls hang a dozen or more Zendrums previously owned and autographed by a Who's Who of drummers, percussionists and other musicians. In the middle of the room is Haney's recording studio. Across from that is the Shipping Department and, over in the corner, the Final Assembly area.

Inspector 109 as Haney is also known, is a big bald guy (his words) who loves to talk. We're here to listen, so that works well. He is passionate about Zendrum, all things music and is in awe of the musicians and instrument inventors that he has come to know over the years. He says things like, "Can you believe it? Billy f#cking Cobham!," when he talks about how amazed he is that his crazy, original idea has led him to meet many of his heroes.

As we listened, he walked and talked us around, pointing out various instruments and photos on the walls.

First up? The ORIGINAL Zendrum!

David Haney: This is the first Zendrum I ever made. That was in '91.

Bonnie Blackstock: Wow! That looks different!

DH: It's basically a hollowed-out 2X10 piece of lumber and it had a big twist-on snake connector in the back of it that I was running into Alesis drum modules to do all of the triggering. This was just me on my own. The one down there on the end you see the shape starting to get a little more compound... taking the final shape. That's where my partner Kim got involved ... the woodworker.

In '93, I made a video of that one in this room with my band guys off camera with me just standing up and playing... what we used to call "White Boys on Green Beer" which was jam night. I sent the video off to Peter Gabriel and about a week later they were calling. "Can you come meet us in Chicago tomorrow?" And we were like, "No!" We finally caught them the last day they were here in Sacramento. We pooled money from friends and family and flew about five of us out there and met them. [Pointing at photos] This is actually that day and that was the first ... well it actually still had a big snake connector coming out of it. It didn't have a circuit board in it. That was Manu Katche, Gabriel's drummer, playing it. They couldn't have been any nicer or more encouraging. And the first question they asked was, "Can you make it wireless?" And Kim, my partner, having more balls than brains said, "Sure!"

So, as soon as we got off the plane from California we started the company, went to the patent office and hired an engineer. The engineer came up with the first MIDI circuit board in about 3 months time.

I believe it was about January of '94 that we caught up to them [Gabriel] in Australia and they used it all over Asia. It was a big hit in that show. They had a song where Peter would go sit down and play the drums just so Manu could come out front and dance with everybody else because he's a real attractive guy and they wanted to get him out from behind the drums. After that, we were able to drop his name. Then, it was like Stevie Wonder and Fleetwood Mac and everybody else that came through town, would call us and say, can you come down to The Fox and show this thing? So, we'd go busting downtown and show it to them. That's when we started, you know, being able to drop a lot of names.

Then we met Billy Cobham who was filling in for Manu, when Peter came and did the WOMAD tour here [Atlanta, 1994].

Jeff Barnett: Yeah. I saw that.

DH: Down at Lakewood?

JB: Yeah. Great show!

DH: We were backstage showing this thing off. This is actually backstage [points at a photo], right here where Peter put the Zendrum on Billy for the first time and what's coming out of Billy's mouth right there is, "You guys are crazy!" He was the last person I would have thought of... because of the big drum set. He was my musical hero when I was eighteen. He was the scariest thing anybody had ever seen at that point, you know?

So basically it went on from there. We started going to all the NAMM shows... doing the retail thing. My partner Kim was on a plane for about 3 years straight going to Frankfurt and Japan and Italy. We set up all this international distribution and basically got our brains beat out, financially, by the fact that it was $5,000 for one half-page ad in Modern Drummer magazine. So by '99 we were just like... we've gotta stop! This isn't going to work.

By that point the Internet had started coming of age and people were starting to understand that they could buy things through the Internet. That's really the only thing that kept it going at that point. We used to have an office right down on Peachtree St., just south of Buckhead, that Kim had gotten. It was an old record store that someone had driven a car through the front of and, being a contractor, he just kept pulling things together one stick at a time until we had a really nice office there.

The beauty of it was that we were right down the street from the Shepherd Spinal Center. They would bring patients down there in wheelchairs and I'd hold my Zendrum out and there'd be some guy with a mouth stick dragging it across the Zendrum triggers, though the doctors had told them they would never be able to play anything. That was sort of like, well... it's sort of a sin not to do something about it when you felt like you kind of had the magic beans. [Picking up an LT] So that's how this came out. This is the first prototype of a laptop Zendrum. For the patients, it's sort of like a motion amplifier. If you've got limited mobility, you know, you can't play a trap set. But you can certainly do this. As I said, there were even people without mobility from the neck down who were able to drag a stick across it.

We kept making different prototypes. Different embodiments of the triggers. But we realized we couldn't make a specific thing for each patient's range of mobility. So we put our heads together and came up with something that sort of resembled a Zendrum shape, had some art to it, and then put it out there. What I wasn't counting on, what Kim and I weren't counting on, were all the adaptations of this from playing drums to other things.

This year, we've developed the first prototype of a ZAP, the Zendrum Articulating Programmer. It's more to get into the MPC sort of market where everybody's been playing these gummy-rubber buttons for so long.

Here are the three different things. This is my old Zendrum from '96. You can't break it. You can beat the crap out of it, but you can't break anything. But it's still very sensitive. So see? It takes all of the work for me out of hauling the drums around and being a singing drummer... it removes the sweat equity. Being able to get out from the drum set and go singing on the front mic makes a lot more sense than, "Where's the singing coming from?"

So, these are basically the three different stages of this. Like I said, it all started in '91, but this [current ZX] is from '96, the LT is 2000, and then this year ['08], the ZAP. They're all different embodiments of the same stuff. We haven't changed anything at all with the electronics since '96. We gave it a few software features that were chip upgrades.

What we feel like we've been doing is waiting for everything else to catch up. It seems like this year, with the advent of the 8-core computer, and stuff like that, it's starting to get to where all of the other gear is getting to the point where it will keep up. I've got BFD in that Receptor over there, which is dead and I'm sending back.

JB: Oh really?

DH: Yeah, it's dead. Rolled it off the back of a truck...killed the drive in it. So all of this stuff is not really made for a working musician. It's meant to sit still and not be moved and "Don't touch it!" Where my thing is that I've been breaking stuff for 30 years. I mean, kind of a bull in a china shop that way.

As a drummer it's like you're the last person on the list. Even though all these cool programs are out there, they were designed to be triggered from a keyboard ... they were written on a keyboard. It's like the drummer got left out but now what's happening is, with all the hip hop and stuff, there's a whole lot more market for this. A lot more adaptations of this than I ever thought about.

This [ZAP] was designed from the ground up for us to be easier to produce. I've got 200 of these started right now. They're easy to store. I've got one of each wood ready to oil and finish. My goal this year is to sell about 500 units. It seems like it was such a hit at the NAMM show and got such good press. I'm getting all over the Internet. I just Googled Zendrum the other day and it's like they'd just taken my product catalog page and put it up everywhere. I said, "Cool!" That's a whole lot better than 5000 bucks for one month in Modern Drummer.

It's really more practical to make something with a lifetime warranty on it. I tell them it's warrantied for my lifetime ... not theirs. I give everybody my cell phone number. If they've got a problem in the middle of the night, all they've got to do is call up if they need to fuss at me.

Generally speaking, I mean, the things just don't break. I've not had one trigger break in all of the Zendrums that are out there.

Mark McGouirk: Wow!

DH: That part of it... it's a non-moving key.

JB: What can you tell us about the trigger itself?

DH: Well, that's the MacGyver part of this.

JB: It's really intriguing. I have a TrapKAT, which, of course, uses FSRs [Force Sensing Resistors].

DH: FSRs. We did experiments with Futureman [Roy Wooten of Bela Fleck and the Flecktones] with FSRs and piezos side by side and there's no way an FSR can be as fast in attack as a piezo. The problem is, you can break them... like when they stick them on the bottom of drum pads. I was just blowing them off the bottom with a stick. So, I got into fixing my own stuff.

The beauty of this is the simplicity. What I can't figure out is that everybody is so in love with the idea of aftertouch with the FSR. Kat and Roland and everybody else sort of went that way. But they're missing the impact of a hit. I'm not going to press down on a drum after I hit it anyway.

MM: Right.

JB: Just a minute ago... the first time I ever had my hands on one at all... I was absolutely astonished at how sensitive it is, too. The FSR doesn't even come close to that sensitivity.

DH: You know, piezos have actually been around since the '20's and they're sensitive enough that they actually use them on sonar to read differences in pressure in the water. When we were starting, we actually had Motorola engineers come and they went, "Wow! You've actually figured out the best way we've ever seen to mount this." And we said, "Well, thank you!"

The bottom line with all of this is that we're trying to make a real instrument and not plastic. And it's easier for us to make something quality out of wood than it is to make something overseas, or whatever, and we go ahead and tell people that it's an instrument. It's supposed to last as long as you do. Everybody else seems to be running from anything other than mass-producing everything. I can't say 'forever'. I mean if the thing took off, you know, and we had to outgrow ourselves, then I'd rather just hire everybody I knew to keep up. Right now we have a basic group of about 6 or 7 people that do everything... help in the woodshop, in the paint room. I'm still doing all of the final assembly and testing myself, but I have people that do subassembly for me, build these triggers, operate the press, and all that sort of thing, and help as we get behind.

The beauty of this is that when we started and were going through the music store route, it was all about selling 500 in a month... which we never did. The music stores didn't know whether it went in the keyboard room or the drum room and they sure didn't know anything about MIDI. What I like is that I keep getting this wonderful feedback from people. That sort of tells me where it's going to go. We were cut off from that with the blind sale before. Just getting to know people like Moog before he died. He's the guy who told me, it's your name and your reputation and you have to test every single one of them. I was like, "God, thanks Bob!"

BB: Rest his soul.

DH: Yeah. He was a good man.

MM: Bonnie, you were just at Moog, recently.

BB: Yeah. I actually got to meet him at a NAMM show once.

DH: And you know, he was a remarkable person. Just like all the people he introduced us to. He brought 'em all into our trade show booth in '97. It was like, here's the guy from ARP, and here's the guy from Sequential Circuits, and here's the guy from Oberheim [synth pioneers Alan Pearlman, Dave Smith and Tom Oberheim]. You know, just to tell us that we weren't crazy and to keep going.

I was looking on the Sonikmatter site and saw an interview with Jennifer Hruska and we had worked with her in '96 or '97. Some of the first stuff she'd done when she'd launched her company was a collaboration where we had gotten a bunch of drum sets and cymbals together for her to sample and at that point I was using a Kurzweil 2500. She was cutting through all of the crap back then because people were not paying attention to making things sound real. It was all a numbers game where somebody had 500 sounds in a box. Then you had to have 1000 sounds next year. Then 1,500, Then 2,000 and I'm like, well... I need 10. I don't need 1000. I don't even want to do all of that programming. I just want to play something. What I'm excited about is that it looks like within a year there's going to be an iPod version of this... something I can plug and play with this. And it will be even more mobile and portable then it is now.

I just sold one [laptop] to Christopher Guest of Spinal Tap and the first question they asked me is if I can make an exploding Zendrum? And I said, "No, you can get your pyrotechnics guys to do that!" But I can picture this: he's got a laptop Zendrum for Christmas. I can picture him having it behind him and the drummer blows up and he whips it around and the band keeps going!

He just went out and bought an 8 core computer to keep up with BFD and to run these programs because the first thing you run into when you get a Zendrum is that everything wants to see key down, hold, key up. This is bad! I mean, [when it's triggered] it's over with... it's a note-off as soon as it's a note-on. What we added was a 1/4 inch jack and this [panel mounted] momentary sustain switch which reverses the polarity so that something will ring out. Because people were doing loops. Futureman was doing these long, spoken-word things behind what he was playing. He would reach up and hit one trigger and it would go on for 30 seconds.

We're trying to keep that in mind. What I'm finding out is that, for instance, if I put this and this into a MIDI combiner, I can bend notes on the Zendrum. I can modulate sounds. There are all sorts of things you could add into the system, but I just can't see us trying to be everything to everybody. We need to focus on what we do well and keep hitting the ball.

JB: Well, your market is percussionists.

DH: It is percussionists but then again, I've got all of these demos on the Zendrum site where people are playing piano on the thing and I'm like, why don't you just go buy a keyboard? It's 200 bucks.

JB: Maybe it's partly the showmanship side of it?

DH: It is the showmanship side of it, too. I've got a bunch of them down at Epcot now and I'm constantly getting emails from people that just got back from vacation. And, oh! They saw the Village Beatniks at Animal Kingdom.

BB: I saw them over Christmas. Really neat!

DH: You know, they are all playing Zendrums and all this stuff. And well, that's not really what it was intended to do... and lord! I don't want to have to tech support all of that! But that's OK.

BB: Ha!

JB: That has to be flattering, though.

MM: So many people have mentioned Disney with the Zendrum.

DH: It's very flattering. But, it's all a little confusing to me. I just go, it's a drum... see? Zen-drum... druuuumm. What we're doing is trying to continue to make something that nobody else will make, because everybody else is married to the FSR. For drumming, you've got to have that attack. That's the most important thing... that sensitivity under the pad.

MM: It's is so sensitive! It's amazing.

JB: It is remarkable.

DH: You can't do that on anything else.

JB: And, it seems virtually indestructible.

DH: It is ... literally. I sent this off to college with my son. He's dropped it several times. I had the strap up like this one day and it bounced on the concrete floor like a 2x4!

BB: Ouch!

DH: I said, "Oh my God! That had to have been what killed it!" I picked it up, pressed some caps back down, and took it to work. They're built like tanks.

JB: Wow.

DH: And if I had done that with any kind of plastic! And that's what the thing was. When I started, I was using a Roland Octapad with a Yamaha drum machine. This was '84. You know, it looked like I was beating on a TV dinner or something. But I was able to play on these little bitty stages with the band and not haul so much stuff.

But I kept breaking stuff. Everyday I would break something. So, I realized it wasn't rocket science on the inside. There's nothing in there that's going to shock you or hurt you in any kind of way. But I also knew better than to call Roland up..., "I broke my Octapad! Can you please help?" They'd tell me it was going to be 6 weeks and it was going to be $50 per element to replace. And I'm like, "No. I've gotta make a gig tonight." You know? It's gotta work. So I started going to RadioShack. That's what those things up there are [pointing to the prototype's triggers]... door buzzers.

JB: Really?

DH: Door buzzers with Velcro.

BB: Oh man.

DH: And the Velcro was the shock mount.

JB: I'll be damned.

DH: That's how it started. I was able to play that thing well enough to make that video to send to Peter Gabriel. That's what this evolved from. But, we realized, we've got to do something of our own... we can't do this. And Kim had this brainstorm. So, the triggers are shock-mounted and you can play one all day long without triggering the one right next to it.

JB: Earlier, you mentioned waiting for other gear to catch up. I'm assuming what you're referring to is MIDI latency. That's part of it?

DH: It's part of it.

JB: So you're finding that hardware today still responds quicker?

DH: Absolutely.

JB: A good, high-end computer maybe....

DH: A dedicated drum module will keep up all day long and never cough. The Receptor when I upgraded it where it had a 400 gig drive and 2 gig of memory ... I was able to play it with my band and never had it hiccup once. I carried it around for about 6 months... obviously didn't' take good care of it! But that's the nature of my business. Something dedicated like that will keep up. Futureman has been telling me since about 2004 that the computer was almost getting fast enough to keep up with what he could play.

As far as I'm concerned, he's kind of like the Jimi Hendrix of drummers where we're going to be studying what that guy has done for another 50 years. He's come and lived with me at times while we were building crazy stuff for him. I can't figure out what he is doing! I can sit right in front of him and I can't figure out what he's doing. It's like a magician's trick. There's so much coming out and it's like, "You're not even moving your hands! I don't see any movement happening! How are you doing that!" And he's got all of this stuff developed where he's going across 2 or 3 triggers at once with different parts of the finger to get a cymbal, a crash and a snare all at the same time. It's like so little movement and you're hearing this Billy Cobham type stuff coming out. I mean... he's the guy. That's a picture from Piedmont Park in '91 with the Drumitar and that's when I came home and made that [prototype], because I wanted one for me. I wasn't thinking about a product. I wanted one for me. We went up to see him in '95. He takes my Zendrum, with my layout on it and flips it upside down and backwards like Jimi Hendrix and proceeds to sound like Elvin Jones! I'll never be that kind of virtuoso on the thing. I'm more like Ringo or Levon Helm or something.

MM: So the Drumitar was some inspiration for the Zendrum?

DH: That was the inspiration. When I saw them [The Flecktones] the first time, I fell down laughing at them because it was so outrageous. They had the harmonica player and piano like McCoy Tyner, the banjo, and Victor Wooten, Roy's brother, on bass. All of them were mutants. I mean, you still can't categorize what they do. It defies description because they pull from so many kinds of things and it's all a high level of jazz but you hear the bluegrass in it, you hear middle-eastern influence and they've toured all over the world. They played in Mongolia! You hear all of that influence in their music.

The thing that blew my mind was hearing Jimi Hendrix when I was 11. That's when I decided I was going to be a musician for the rest of my life. I just went, "That's it!" And coming through all of that starting in '66, '67 and then having to get out and work. I started playing in bands professionally when I was 15 and I'm 50 now. So it's like the show must go on kind of thing.

I've always been my own roadie, I've always been the guy in the band who had to fix everything to keep it all running. It's was just a natural progression for me to sort of evolve into this. When I started this, my wife was a labor delivery nurse working 7 at night to 7 in the morning. We had 4 little kids and I was supposed to keep quiet all day long. I didn't have any place to set-up drums in the house. I was 2-finger typing on an Alesis drum machine with headphones on so that me and the boys could get together and jam.

That's when I saw Futureman the first time and I just thought, "That's ridiculous!" You know, this guy was playing this thing at such a high level. And at that point he was using Alesis drum machines. And, like he says, he was ducking and shading because the sounds really weren't that good yet in '91,or whenever, and that evolved into a rack this tall with samplers and this and that. Now he's finally got some super Mac computer and he's doing everything in Drumkit from Hell. The computer is finally able to keep up. Just barely.

JB: The high-end computers are just now able to.

DH: I'm talking about thousands of dollars worth of computer. And I'm thinking, you know... I'm going to take this into a bar? I don't think so. I wish someone would put those sounds in a dedicated module with no moving parts and no drives. I just saw where there's a 128 GB Toshiba flash chip now. That's enough to put a few drumsets on and have 'em really sound good. With the Receptor, it had gotten to the point where I'd always set-up an acoustic drum set - just to have a parachute... in case everything blows up... the power goes off. The best compliment I ever had was the guys in the band said they would have to turn around to look to see if I was playing acoustics or electrics and I said, "OK, now we're there!" It's not the drum module sounds anymore, it's like you really can't tell the difference. It really is real recordings of drums. It's not waveform stuff that somebody synthesized.

It's been a long and interesting road. It's definitely been a labor of love to stay in it this long. What I see now is that we've kind of treaded water long enough that there is a market now. Instead of one guy at a time seeing a UFO and giving up the drum set, now it's all the programmers and studio musicians and all the hip hop guys. The ZAP is the first time we've been able to break that $1,000 plateau. There's still 20 hours of labor in a ZX from a block of wood to a finished instrument. Where with the ZAPs, you rub some oil on them and they're finished.

It used to be like some these you see up here. Yamaha Piano did the finishes for us for a while. The problem with them was that they'd use us for guinea pigs and you'd get all the way to the end of it and put the last screw in and the thing would crack like glass. And that wasn't going to do for a drummer. I mean, come on! Don't give me a piece of glass! Everything we produced at first was outsourced... computer carved bodies, Yamaha paint finishes. Until we realized that nobody was going to care about it like us.

We were trying really hard, back then, because the first people we got them to were our musical heroes, you know? The story goes, we didn't have a Zendrum to send to Earth, Wind and Fire, even though they wanted one "right now!" So Kim, my partner, sends his. And we get the word back, "Well, the cap came off and went rolling across the stage in the middle of a song." And we were like, "Man! That can not happen!" So this was before everything was the way it is now. You don't want to be there with your pants down, you know? I mean, I still wake up with screaming fits out of deep sleep dreaming that something's wrong on stage.

BB: Oh wow!

DH: You know, I still do it every week. That's ingrained in me. It's always going to be something!

JB: Don't you know the CEO of Roland has the same problem?

DH: No! I don't think he does!

[Everyone laughs]

MM: [Pointing to the ZXs on the wall] What are all of these over here?

DH: That was one that was on tour with Janet Jackson. The one above it was Earth, Wind and Fire. The red and the white one were the first 2 we ever sold. One was Leon Russell. The second one was Roy Orbison's drummer. Ry Cooder, Prince, Elton John - any number of people that had the reason for it. They saw the benefit of it. The most impressive thing to me was the drummers that I used to worship. They are saying the same things that I'm saying which is, I don't want to have to haul the drum set, set it up, all the cartage and all the other stuff. Billy Cobham was actually the first person that told me, in 1994, that on trans-Atlantic flights, he had a laptop computer and a Zendrum and he was writing music into the computer and I was like... I don't even know what you're talking about! I'm thinking, "Bill Cobham! With the drum set that big!"

Here's one of the things we made for Futureman here. This is actually a baby grand piano shape with 400 inputs of circuitry in it with a combination of FSR and piezo triggers in it. That thing had 800 feet of trigger wire in it.

JB: Good night!

DH: So I mean we've been doing some stuff over the years. That was about 5 years in the making. He's got these mathematicians working with him where they're able to micro-tune between all of the notes. Instead of the scale being based on A 440, it's based off the atomic weights of the elements. So, it's music you've never heard... it's sound you've never heard. Sometimes it sounds like angels singing, sometimes it sounds like a calliope burning down! It's like, boy that's dissonant because it's all blue notes. That's what I'm saying. That guy is Jimi Hendrix for drummers. He really is. He's a brilliant musician and one of the most dedicated dreamers I've ever seen.

MM: And that was just a custom piece you built for him.

DH: That was 1997.

MM: Never made another one.

DH: No. The thing about it is that I keep running into people who have tried to make their own stuff but they just can't get all of the mechanics of it. You know, there's a bunch of frustrated mad scientists out there.

MM: A lot of websites dedicated to it too.

DH: Yeah, but the point is that their creativity is trying to come through and they just don't have the means to put it together. Where what I think I bring to this is the practical aspect of, "Yeah, you can throw that on the ground and pick it up and play it." Everything else seems to have been over-designed to me. Peter Gabriel actually said it's all about having a simple series of choices where you let 'em in. If you can get them to play it then they'll want to learn more about it. But it's almost like you have to make it simple enough so they're not overwhelmed. I think that gets lost in the industry. It's a numbers game. They're all making just more and more and more... every year... every 6 months they have to come up with new product for the NAMM show. I just so glad to be out of that rat race.

MM: There seems to be a thing in the industry as far as instant gratification. It's like, if you can't just pull up a great sound immediately, then nobody wants to work at getting there.

DH: That's great if what you want to do is dissect something down to the atom to figure out how it all works and then recompile it to be your own thing. I say if somebody had something with 10 good drum sets in it, I'd buy it. Just 10 great drum sets is more than I'll ever use in a night's work.

JB: Well after all, as a traditional drummer, you only have one.

DH: You only have one. You might have 2 snare drums, but you have the same drums all night long.

JB: If you have a good drum kit and you can replicate that 9 more times then that's fantastic.

DH: Exactly. I also have to say that first one I made for me, everything else has been trying to please somebody else. What is their idea, what do they think, what's good, what's bad? Then just noticing what works and what doesn't work. What I think over all is that if somebody gets this flash drive idea together where you've got something you can slip in the gig bag pocket, you know? With some professional ins and outs on it? Man, I am a happy guy. I'm a real happy guy about that. I'm just not much of a gearhead. I've broken everything I've ever owned. There's that $3000 worth of Receptor sitting there right now which is proof of how expensive a paperweight can be and that's going off to them right now. And right next to it I've got a Zendrum I just rebuilt, put a new chip in it and it's going back out to Billy Cobham. It's been working since '96... not a problem.

JB: So before you broke the Receptor, were you pretty happy with it?

DH: I loved it! It was actually so good it made me completely start over again in how I played the Zendrum because there was so much nuance under every sound. There's so much going on under my hands. All of a sudden, instead of this Polaroid snapshot of a sound that's just softer or louder or with maybe a little filtering on it for the articulation, now I've got 127 different samples under one trigger. So, it's all the different things I can do with drum sticks.

And that's when it was like, oh! Now everything has caught up to the potential that the Zendrum has had for 15 years. The sonic part of this is finally real. That actually took John Emrich, my friend who designs sounds for BFD. Because he's a drummer, the sampling was done from his perspective on the seat where everything else is like looking through 2 panes of glass at the engineer, you know? It's the producer's idea of the drum sound. And I know that's really what it sounds like because in recorded music, the drums are usually larger than life. You can't play ghost notes if everything's going tub, tub on every hit. You've got to have that little stuff where you drop it and no one even hears it.

But that's where the music is for a drummer. It's all the ghost notes and inflections. One guy sitting down on the drum set and another guy sitting down on the drum set sound completely different because the sound is actually with the drummer, not with the drum. Somebody's been paying a lot of attention to everything you can get out of a drum now and that really was what was missing. It's the video version of the Polaroid snapshot. The most exciting part about this for me is that there's nothing holding it back now.

MM: You're talking about like BFD, Drumkit from Hell...

DH: BFD, Drumkit from Hell... any of those now. Especially BFD, because it's a memory hog of a thing which is why it's still choking computers. But every sound that I can play all the way around a head is in there and you never hear it make that machine gun sound. It's always running through the samples.

JB: It's got a round robin thing.

DH: A round robin thing, so you never hear the same sound twice, which is what happens with a drum. No matter how good of a drummer you are, every note is going to be a little different and that's where the music is to me. Not so much just having the control of it but being musical with it.

MM: Superior 2.0 looks like it's going to be awesome.

DH: And I can't wait to get my hands on it. But that means I've got to go out and buy some hog of a computer to run it, too. I still say the software is out-running the hardware. The libraries are better than the machines to play them on and until somebody thinks about it like Apple would and turns it into a Garageband version of that, it's going to be a niche thing. I just don't see how they can sell enough units to make it worth their while.

JB: Well, I suspect that because computers are constantly getting faster, cheaper, and everything else, that it's just a matter of time before catching up.

DH: A matter of time.

JB: And it's not so much a matter of new technologies, it more a matter of...

DH: A natural progression.

JB: Exactly.

DH: It's just like this Toshiba chip with 128 gig on it, you know? Somebody puts that together in a GameCube... something like a 3, 4 or 5 hundred dollar piece. Then you're going to have something that working people can afford. That's where it's all headed I think. I hope so. And I just hope that whoever is steering this keeps their eye on the ball about it, because what generally happens is that marketing departments seem to get in the way of engineers. Engineers want to give you everything you can possibly put in something and marketing departments want to create a big ad. I hope that the continuation of this is that, within a year or two, I'll have something that I can highly recommend. I have recommended the Receptor on our website forum. And at the time, it was a real breakthrough. It really was. It was like, I'm never going to play a drum module again. But what I missed about the drum module was the ease of use.

JB: Yeah, it's a great blend of the two because with most any synthesizer, drum module, or anything like that, you're pretty much locked into whatever those sounds are and that's the end of it. If they're great and they last you for years ... fantastic! But if not, you know, that's what you're stuck with. Whereas the Receptor, which is essentially a rack-mounted computer, allows you to put any software you want in there, update it constantly...

DH: But don't you agree that this is just the first such machine like that. It's kind of like the original room full of Moog just to play one note.

JB: Yes, I absolutely agree. I hope so.

DH: Well, it's gotta be.

JB: Well, the thing is, you're talking about performing musicians.

DH: Right.

JB: It's one thing in the studio, having a laptop or a desktop or something fragile. Who cares...

DH: If something glitches you rewind it and start again.

JB: Yeah. But as a performer, it's either using modules, where you're stuck with what you have, or it's going toward something like the Receptor.

DH: I find that most of the people who are out gigging live with Zendrums are still using stuff like Roland TD-20's and TD-12's just because of the simplicity of it. And if they broke it they could go to the music store to replace it and be working the next day. What's wrong with that is that they don't make a way to rack-mount it. And the sounds still sound like 1997 to me. It's yesterday's technology and Roland is scrambling to catch up. They're basically dissing all this VST stuff where anyone with ears knows that VST is heads above that. So I think the whole hardware industry is struggling to catch up to this new wave of technology.

JB: Almost like an identity crisis.

DH: It's the same thing that was happening in '97 when people were starting to do online catalogs and all the retailers were freaking out. It's like, "How do we control this?" Like the same thing that happened with the recording industry. How do you control it now that the genie is out of the bottle? And they're still trying to figure out how to manipulate it... and control it. Roland seems to want to put everybody out of business that's any kind of competition at all. I know some folks who've had cease and desist orders on the NAMM show floor because their pads were too close or whatever to the V-Drum stuff.

MM: I've seen a lot of copies of that pad.

DH: In '94 we debuted at the summer NAMM and the Roland engineers were standing in my booth taking notes because we had a packed booth constantly. You just had to push people out of the booth. We always had famous guys in there and they were wailing on Zendrums. In '97 Roland releases the HandSonic, which is everything the captains of industry told us we should turn the Zendrum into... plastic, sounds onboard, sequencing, D-beam controllers and all this stuff. You know, that's another reason we got out of going to NAMM shows, too. Not only were they incredibly expensive, I mean it was 30 grand to go to Frankfurt, 20 grand to go to LA, 10 grand to go to Nashville, but I just got tired of doing somebody else's R&D for them.

I think if we had put sounds inside of the Zendrum it would have dated it that day. It would have come and gone and already been history. Whereas it's a controller that is open-ended, it allows for people to bring their creativity to the show. I've even heard stories about people at Georgia Tech controlling lasers with a Zendrum! Some experimental laser they've got there and I'm like, "I don't even know what that means! Hey, what are you doing?" We had a doctor show up who was one of the first guys to ever do remote heart surgery and he said these triggers are more sensitive than the device he has to do heart surgery with.

MM: Jesus!

DH: And I said, "Well that's disconcerting!"

And who knows where the golden application is going to come from. That's why I don't think we try to over-reach. We just keep doing what we do... different embodiments. I am stubborn as a mule when it comes to adding new features. People get absolutely beside themselves arguing with me about this stuff. But I'm like, look. All this other stuff exists in software... everything you want to do. If you want to extend the decay time so that Stylus RMX will work with this, because it's just not fast enough to keep up? Why do I want to slow a Zendrum down? You know? Go buy a keyboard... please! So, we are pretty much still a percussion controller. That's what it does better than anything else that's out there. I dare anyone out there to try to pass it... because they won't go to this. This is old technology. They love that FSR! Oh, it will do so much more.

MM: Back to the hardware industry. What's your opinion about some of the changes like Yamaha buying Steinberg, Roland seems like they bought Cakewalk, Apple buying Emagic?

DH: I think they are scrambling not to become obsolete. I think that's the way big corporations do things. Look at the infrastructure they have to support. They can't make changes in a hurry, so naturally they're behind the curve of the little guys who get out here and do like, one-off things. They can't respond. It's like waking up the KGB. Once they know about you, you're toast. They're not going to be where the new ideas come from. They may adopt them and turn them into mass-produced things, which is what I think they are trying to do. But I also think they're trying to figure out how to control it because if they don't, somehow, figure out how to get up to date on this stuff then they're done.

I think their day is almost done... the day of the static hardware box. When you have all of this flash around, why would you want a box of sounds you couldn't change? You can't be that in love with it. But the whole retail industry is based on a new box every year. Blow out prices on last year's box. New box this year. And that whole pattern of built-in obsolescence is almost gone.

What I would love to see is an open-ended box that you could go to a website, pay specifically for the "iTunes sounds" that you want to download and put 'em in your "iPod". You don't have any fluff. You've got only the stuff that you like and you pay for the stuff you like. But it's yours. It's the exact library that you need instead of there being 20 drum sounds in there that I like and the rest of it I'll never use. Why is all that memory there just to give you 100 snare drums? I mean, what's the point? What is the point?!

They're trying to be everything to everybody, every time, and you can't do that. You either have something that connects with people or you don't. This industry is such a mammoth thing. It's like government or something. It's all overkill and a million different salaries to pay. They have to keep doing this. They have to build in the obsolescence in order to have a product to sell next year.

Speaking as sort of an outsider, I guess I can't blame them. I don't think they have a choice.

-MM/JB

The authors' impressions of Zendrum:

Jeff Barnett: The first one I played was the LT (laptop). I was instantly amazed at the response and sensitivity of the 25 triggers and impressed with the ergonomics. Obviously, a well conceived, designed, and crafted instrument and very well suited for someone used to playing hand drums. It includes 2, 1/4" footswitch jacks... one for sustain and one for an extra trigger.

Second was the ZX. This is the "crazy guitar-looking" one most people are familiar with. It has the same trigger components (24 of them), electronics and quality, but requires a very different playing style. I could quickly learn to love playing this thing!

I then tried the ZAP. This (most compact) instrument requires an altogether different playing style. Its different trigger layout will be more familiar to MPC or HandSonic players. Again, it uses the same (though 19) triggers and electronics. However, in addition to the 1/4" sustain jack of the LT, the ZAP adds 3, 1/4" jacks for triggers.

Though Zendrums are built from substantial (and beautiful) hunks of wood, because they are hollowed out to accommodate the electronics and hardware, they are lighter than they appear. Nevertheless, they still have the heft of rock-solid instruments. I would never want to drop one, but only because it would damage the finish. One would be hard pressed to kill a Zendrum simply by dropping it.

MIDI implementation of Zendrums is perfect for drumming of all kinds. While not designed specifically for playing melodic instruments, Zendrums provide a sustain function (with reversible polarity) in the form of momentary switches and/or 1/4" jacks (depending on the model) to accommodate playing all kinds of sounds. David informs me that they are working on new circuitry, with flashable updates, that will allow them to add many more features, such as MIDI channel per trigger, note duration, gain, etc. Yes, it's a Zen-DRUM, but he recognizes that players want some of these features and he does listen to his customers.

Last, but by no means least, the wood grain and finish on these instruments is wonderful! The 15-16 coats of finish on the ZX and LT not only make them durable, but bring out the wood grain so well that I swear it actually looks etched... almost 3D. And the ZAP has a smooth, hand-oiled finish with a warm look and feel. These are true, hand-built instruments.

Everything about these practically indestructible instruments screams craftsmanship. From the wood and finish, the solid, responsive triggers, the mounted hardware, to the display with the cool Zendrum badge.

Although Zendrums are only available directly from the company, many of the enthusiastic Zendrum community are willing to demonstrate their instruments to interested buyers. Contact the forum to see if a player is in your area. You will likely find someone willing to let you try theirs. When you do get a chance to try one, your first impression may be, "Wow! That is a beautiful instrument!", but your second will be, "This thing plays like a dream!"

Mark McGouirk: We had a great time hanging out with David. He was a wonderful host and a very funny and intriguing guy. Jeff, Bonnie and I left Zendrum very excited and totally inspired.

The Zendrums are amazingly sensitive and feel absolutely wonderful to play. Many musicians like to play percussion with their fingers, be it a drum head, steering wheel, a table top or whatever. The Zendrum piezo triggers are the holy grail for playing in this manner. Couple this with the brave new world of software sounds and samples and you've just tapped into a universe of musical possibilities. The super fast and sensitive piezo trigger is the only way to go for triggering percussion sounds but I feel like there is much potential beyond percussion.

One thing I tested was a harp sample in Garageband which sounded nice but triggering it with one of the ZX models was a fascinating exploration of melodic possibility and new fingering techniques. I played a regular drum kit library with the LT and again, the sensitivity is just exquisite!

Jeff already mentioned the beauty and craftsmanship of these instruments and all I can say is that they are indeed gorgeous. Whatever your choice of graphics, favorite guitar finishes and more, the Zendrum Custom Shop has it covered.

Kudos to David Haney and Kim Daniel for such a unique and powerful contribution to the world of MIDI controllers. I believe it is a rarity to find a manufacturer with such a passion and with such pride in work as David and Kim have, especially in an age of mass production. Zendrum's strong commitment to it's users was very evident to us and it's a model approach for any business to follow.

Bonnie was in the UK and was not available to offer comments at the time of writing, but it's enough to say that she wrote a check for a ZX the day of the interview. Two days later, Jeff ordered a LT. Neither are drummers!

Zendrum currently offers 3 models of MIDI percussion controllers. Prices vary by model, woods, and finishes. Catalog, pricing, ordering, manuals, demo videos and forums can be found at www.Zendrum.com. Please have a look for yourself!

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Jeff Barnett is a graphics specialist and electronic musician. Mark McGouirk is a business owner and guitarist. They have worked together and with Bonnie Blackstock on recording sessions over the years in Atlanta including original music for the Fernbank Planetarium. Jeff can be reached at badger55@bellsouth.net. Mark can be reached at markmcgouirk@bellsouth.net.

Zendrum Photo Archives provided by Gina Boger-Haney.
Additional photos by Jeff Barnett and Bonnie Blackstock.

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