NAMM: Korg?s Wavedrum Adds a New Beat to Your Next Hippie Jam

ANAHEIM, California — All you Trustafarians have a cool new tech gadget to show off at your next drum circle.

The original Korg Wavedrum was released in 1994, but Korg has updated the old favorite for the 21st century. The company is showing off its new version of the device at the NAMM Show industry exhibition here. It’s available now for about $600.

The synthetic drum pad is about the size of a fat frisbee. It’s small and light enough to sit in your lap, where you can play it with your hands, or you can mount it on a regular drum stand and tap on it with drumsticks, mallets or brushes. A set of controls along the top lets you dial in literally thousands of percussion sounds, both natural and synthetic — the demo unit I played at the Korg expo booth came with a double-sided sheet listing all the sounds in tiny, 10-point type.

The Wavedrum is most impressive when it’s mimicking common hand drums. Turn it into a djembe or conga and the different parts of the “skin” respond as you’d expect a real drum to. The drum head has a satisfying spring to it, and you can bend the pitch by pressing down on the head while you beat it. Just like a real drum, the rim makes different noises when you hit it in different places.

I also tried it with sticks, assigning a snare sound to the skin and a kick drum sound to the rim. In this mode, it produced a natural bleed like a true cocktail drum kit — a hard hit on the kick drum makes the snare reverberate, and vice versa.

When you move into synthetic territory, it gets a little silly. The Wavedrum lets you blend melodic synths sounds in with your natural drum textures, so it sounds like a robot is singing along to your beats. There are truly wacked settings that are entirely synthetic-sounding, as well, so you can play Moog-like basslines by striking different areas of the skin. There are also about 100 built-in techno grooves and patterns you can play along to.

The Wavedrum is less elegant when it tries to mock more esoteric percussion sounds. I tried the settings for caxixi (a Brazilian shaker), some different tambourines, a Balinese gamelan and an African balafon. All of them sounded pretty cheesy. You’re better off sticking to the basics.

The Wavedrum requires an amp and a power source, obviously, so it won’t be replacing the real drum you carry to the park on Sundays. But it’s a pretty wicked electronic instrument. If you bring this thing to Burning Man, I bet everyone would want to try it. Don’t forget your hand sanitizer.

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