One thing I was worried about was the EL wire not being bright enough. Well, I was right. Yes, I realize this picture was taken during the day and my window shade was open, but even at midnight with the lights off it's not that bright.
So that sucks. But there's always my first plan of using LED's. Thankfully I had a spare white LED hanging around, so I threw that under the head. A lot more impressive.
A lot brighter, and that's only one. This will also work better with the beat sensing feature. I tried switching the EL wire, and it didn't work. Switching LED's with transistors, childs play. I think I'll make a video for the transistor switching, so look for that in a little bit!
The wire arrived a few days ago! I feel like this will add a great ambient glow behind the white heads of Josh's toms, snare, and kick drum. Now I'm waiting for some MOSFET's to arrive from Mammoth so I can achieve beat sensing! Hopefully I'll have more to share at the end of the week!
The band I'm in is hoping to do shows in the near future and we want to leave some sort of impression on the audience. What's one thing smaller bands don't utilize [often]? Light rigs. Yeah we've seen bands spend $5 on multicolored Christmas lights and drape them on their amps, but that just won't cut it for us.
I decided to take it upon myself, along with the artistic insight of the other members to design a unique lighting rig.
First up: Drum Set
The drummer, Josh, likes the idea of a kind of ambient glow coming from the drums. At first I was thinking of just using those bright LED strips you can get from Adafruit, but after some thought I'm too afraid it'll look like this rather than the desired glow:
Then I thought back to a video I saw a while back from the insanely talented Jeri Ellesworth, where she was experimenting with electroluminescent (EL) wire.
I'm thinking that EL wire will give the glow we want, but there's only one way to find out. The next installment of this series will focus on my first experiments with the EL wire.
