Trying to build a home made Electro-Tongue Drum

 A what and a-why?

I'm just getting into a new hobby, electronics. It's subject about which I know absolutely zero, so obviously I think I can build an electronic instrument! I've liked tongue / tank / hank drums for a while now, but can't justify buying one for the little use I'll make of it. So why not make an emulation of one?

The idea is to make a pad with keys laid out similarly to the tongue drum, where each key is touch sensitive so that touching a key triggers a sound in some way.

I've made a start but am still at the experimentation phase. If you want to follow my progress I'll be documenting it over on my "Cahamo's Electronic Adventures" blog so I won't go into details here.  Start with this post to follow along.

It's not yet decided whether this will be simply a MIDI controller that I can use to control a virtual instrument or whether I will trigger on board samples through a built in speaker (along with a line / headphone output). It would be nice to make the instrument self-contained with the option of battery power.

If I go down the MIDI controller route I've got two virtual tongue drums that I can control. Here's one of them from Quiet Music:

Of course I can play the virtual instruments from my existing MIDI keyboard, but it's not very intuitive because the piano layout doesn't fit the tongue drum key pattern. Hence the desire to have a controller with the correct key layout. There's just the minor problem that there are several different layouts used by tongue drums!

And if I make a self contained instrument I'm going to need samples. A quick trip to Freesound.org turned up a public domain sample set that I can use for starters:

Now, will I be able to make this thing? Watch this space!