Creating a puppet which is beat box triggered or triggered by actual drums

Report · Feb 05, 2020

I'm making an instructional video for guitar-music threory integration, and I'm running into a couple of small issues that i was hoping to get some help with.

First, one of my puppets is a guitar neck with individual, articulating fingers. I've rigged it up somewhat, but it could definitely be better. It's a little too.... sticky.....

The really issue I'm having is with my Robot dude. I'm trying to figure out a way for him to "perform" drum beats live. I'd like to know which of the following two solutions would be worth more time investment for the desired results.

A: is there a way to trigger off of something like a drum sound..... meaning: if i isolated a drum track, is there a way to have my character "hit" different drums in an animation, depending on what drum strikes in the track...... ?

or B: should I just trigger him to hit different drums based on an approximation of the drum beat using a "Beat box" (Boots and Pants = Kick, hat, snare, hat) technique? Would that be Kick="B" sound; Snare="P" and so forth?

I'm totally ok with experimenting with all of this and getting there slowly. ...no.

No I'm not. I'm like Veruca Salt man. I want it now.

Report · Feb 06, 2020

I think there was some kind of audio trigger - but never used it, it i doubt it would be mutltiple triggers. Keyboard shortcuts is a logical way to go.

The other alternative is you can wire triggers up to midi notes, so if you had a midi electronic drum set you can probably play the drums and it will generate midi events that you can wire up to triggers.

Report · Feb 06, 2020

That's a pretty great couple of alternatives! If I can't figure out the trigger side I'll probably go that route.

Thanks for the suggestion!

Report · Feb 08, 2020

I believe you can add a trigger based on volume, but I don't know about actual sounds. I saw it recently in a video on Dave Werners Youtube page, but I can't find it now.

The midi drum idea works well. I've used it.

Report · Feb 09, 2020

so having a midi keyboard you could set up the keys to work as triggers? and they wont play any music?

Report · Feb 09, 2020

Correct. They would only play a sound if you assigned a sound to them. You can think of a midi controller (keyboard) as your regular keyboard that you type with.

Report · Feb 09, 2020

I agree with Joshua, but going a little further, MIDI has I think 16 channels. So you can have 16 different instruments attached to the one computer (the one MIDI bus) - you just give them different channel numbers. So if there is no "instrument" (something that makes sounds) listening to the MIDI channel, then no sound will be made. So at worst, if you are hearing noises created by your computer, just change the MIDI channel number of your device (most can change it, a few have it built and its not possible to change) then the instrument/synthesizer will ignore the MIDI signals.

If I recall correctly, Adobe ignores the channel number (it listens to all channels at once). It never generates any sound, so this generally is not a problem. Normally people don't play music at the same time as using Character Animator - you may therefore be a first if you really do it! 😉

Report · Feb 10, 2020

Agree with Alank, also here is a very relevant video by Mr Werner: https://youtu.be/ahOjHPK3HCE

Triggering audio and animation at he same time with a MIDI controller.