LiveSpark's Answer to the Starbucks Pumpkin Spice Latte
Every Halloween we let loose and have some fun with fire and pumpkins. For this year’s back yard hilarity we invited a couple LA drummer friends, Kevin Katich and Danny Finneran to come by and play on our pumpkin fire drum kit.
The ABC TV show Right This Minute has some nice coverage including behind-the-scenes footage, and this video got picked up on Reddit and even topped the Halloween viral videos list on imgur.
It works by piezo drum triggers attached to small pumpkins which send a signal each time the pumpkin senses a hit from a drum stick to an Alessis Trigger IO MIDI interface. These MIDI notes stream into Ableton Live where the LiveSpark Max Plugin converts them to flame commands. From there, the commands arrive at the LiveSpark Controller which pushes them to the FirePixel device array.
In all we used 21 FirePixels and 9 AfterBurners fueled by two 25 gallon propane tanks. In truth we can run for hours and hours on that supply, but to get the really big double AfterBurner poofs only the peak supply from two tanks will do, and we didn’t even use an accumulator.
This isn’t the first time we’ve set drums on fire, either.