Multiple drum pad isolation

DETAILED DESCRIPTION Briefly stated and in accordance with the presently preferred embodiment of the invention, the foregoing and other objects are accomplished by providing an electronic percussion sythesizer which includes a plurality of pressure tranducers each mounted within a drum housing having a striking surface designed to represent the striking surface of a percussion instrument.
Each transducer is responsive to an external striking force for generating an analog drum signal comprising analog drum pulses each representing one beat of the respective musical instrument.
The amplitude of each pulse is proportional to the magnitude of the striking force.
The individual drum housings are mounted to a common synthesizer housing in a manner which mechanically isolates each transducer from the other transducers so that the force striking one transducer does not cause any of the other transducers to produce a pulse.
Sound generating circuits are provided which are responsive to the analog pulses for generating sounds comprising the beat of the respective musical instrument.
The amplitude of the sound generated is proportional to the amplitude of the respective analog pulse.
The synthesizer of the present invention also includes storage and playback circuitry for digitally storing a series of pulses, each pulse representing a percussion beat; for playing back the stored pulses; and for storing additional pulses in an interleaving manner.
The storage and playback circuitry includes a digital memory having sequentially addressable memory locations, a tempo control circuit for establishing a clock rate at which the memory locations are addressed, and latch circuits responsive to the respective analog drum signals for latching into a first state in response to the occurrence of an analog drum pulse.
A computer circuit, responsive to the tempo control circuit and the latch circuit, interrogates and resets the latch at the clock rate established by the tempo control circuit.
The computer circuit also sequentially addresses the memory locations in a recirculating loop at this same clock rate