On Displays in Musical Instruments
I'm Justin DeLay, founder and designer of SpaceDrum, and these are my thoughts on displays on musical instruments. What is absolutely necessary? What are the limitations? What becomes the design trap? What becomes the design goal? What ultimately becomes something inspiring, charming, useful, and delightful that stays out of the way, but can really enhance your experience?
When I first set out to build SpaceDrum, I was attempting to create an all-analog interface without even a screen. The idea was that if the interface was natural enough for sculpting drum beats and performing rhythms, you wouldn't need a screen at all. If you challenge yourself to take the awesome power of a generative instrument and harness it into something knob-per-function, something grounded in muscle memory and deterministic behavior, it can become something you can play without even looking at it. You can reach across a stage and know, with certainty and feel, that when you perform a gesture, it will elicit a specific response. You can predict it, and you can perform it.
That's something I've always valued in analog instruments, going back to guitars and analog synthesizers: the idea that I can play with my hands and allow my eyes and mind to be doing something else, to be away from the instrument and simply feel it. So I wanted to resist relying on a screen, creating menus, and making the experience more technical.
But in the process of designing SpaceDrum, and through artists' feedback, we learned that simple things like 'What is the BPM?' are obvious questions inherent to a rhythm instrument, and they need to be answered. So the display became a necessary portal into the mind of the instrument, into what it is doing. I always wanted it to be just that: a portal, a peek at the parameter you need to focus on in that moment, or the value you want to check in on.
What I really wanted was to take that precious space on the instrument and, instead of relying on a screen, create a visual that was more necessary and fundamental to the instrument. Something that could become a signature contribution the instrument makes to the room, for everyone.
Our timeline across the top takes that very premium space. We started without it, then added it, and ultimately elevated it all the way to the top of the instrument because it became so fundamental to see the rhythm. Instead of relying on small, information-dense displays, we wanted to break the visual down to its essence and give you more insight into the rhythm and into the instrument.
You can see the beats. You can see the bars. You can actually see, and inherently feel, the specific swing value as it moves across the timeline. You know with certainty when it's going to shift into Part B and back. You can see when fills are going to occur. If you want to dive more deeply, you can use that visual space to inspect the specifics of a pattern, to see exactly what the drum is doing across the whole performance spectrum. You can see the rhythms you've recorded yourself. You can see all of it in this big, visual way. And frankly, so can everybody else.
That's an exciting aspect of what I'm trying to accomplish: making instruments more transparent and, in a way, more of a teaching tool. Unveil the clock. Unveil the time. Unveil the beat. Unveil the bar. Unveil the feel of the swing. Some people are visual, and there's something unifying about being in a room and seeing that beautiful amber moving gracefully and organically across the musical space.
So the conversation about any kind of display becomes a conversation about the visual character of the product, about its visualization. We want to make sure that, with real certainty and specific intent, you always have a view into the essentials of the instrument and its key parameters at any time. We also wanted to think deeply about how best to represent aspects of the product visually. Our solution was the combination of the timeline and the display, an expression you'll see consistently across our instruments.
There isn't a single setting that has to be adjusted via the display. There are no menus at all. There's no knob to turn to adjust anything specifically on it. It is only ever a peek into, and a portal into, the deeper workings of the musical instrument.
Additionally, we offer a very in-depth, full-screen, widescreen, beautiful, modern visualization of the instrument through our desktop and plugin Command application. You can see every knob and every parameter, recall parameter settings, upload and visualize samples, and visualize beats in real time. For those looking for a widescreen experience, we offer that. There are use cases where it makes a lot of sense to pull it up in a studio or a production environment, but I never want to rely on it.
I always design from the user's hands and physical human-computer interaction first, and work upwards from there. We're going to challenge ourselves to bring that perspective to every instrument we design and create at ALAN Instruments.
