A few years ago I saw Manatee Commune[archived] perform in San Francisco, and I loved that he was playing two toms that would light up on each hit from the drumsticks. Seeing him performing inspired me to add real drum playing to my songs. One of the first songs that was inspired by his drums was Gökotta[archived], and when I played it live at The Laundry I used a drumpad MIDI controller (the Keith McMillen BopPad[archived]) to trigger samples on a MOD Duo[archived].

The MOD Duo is a fantastic and super versatile guitar pedal, but as a sample player it's very limited since you can't load your own samples. Because of that I recently bought a used Akai MPX8[archived], which I'm planning to use with the BopPad to trigger custom samples. One problem I had when loading samples into the MPX8 is that it's very picky about the format: you need 16 bit WAV files without any metadata headers. Fortunately, it's straightforward to do that using ffmpeg:

$ ffmpeg -y -i input.wav -map_metadata -1 -codec pcm_s16le output.wav

Another problem I had was connecting the BobPad to the MPX8. Both devices support USB MIDI, but making them talk to each other requires a USB host. I ended up building one with a Raspberry Pi Zero, but I'll talk about that in another post.