Accessible drums!

00:03 S1

Hello everyone. Welcome to Talking Tech. This edition, available from April the 22nd, 2025. I'm Stephen Jolley, great to have you with us - listening maybe through Vision Australia Radio, associated stations of the Radio Reading Network or the Community Radio Network. There is also the podcast. To catch that, all you need to do is search for the two words Talking Tech - and down it can all come, usually on a Tuesday afternoon just after it's been produced. Another option is to ask your Siri device or smart speaker to play Vision Australia Radio Talking Tech Podcast. Vision Australia Radio Talking Tech Podcast. 

With me: Vision Australia's national access technology manager Damo McMorrow. Hey, Damo.

00:45 S2

G'day, Stephen. How are you?

00:46 S1

I'm good. You must be pretty excited. You've got a new toy.

00:50 S2

I do indeed, yes.

00:52 S1

Tell us about it.

00:52 S2

It. So my wife has often joked that I should have been a drummer rather than a guitarist because I'm forever, you know, tapping rhythms on things like my desk, you know, when I'm thinking or trying to work something out or whatever. And... the other week I was looking around on the web and I came across a device called a Yamaha FG 30 finger drum pad. As soon as I said to, mentioned it to Marian, she said, Well, you've got to have one of those. So I now have one. 

And... the idea of it is it's essentially a drum machine, but it has a bunch of touch-sensitive pads that represent each of the different types of drums in a conventional drum kit, and you operate those by tapping them with your fingers. So the device is the same sort of footprint as a small iPad, you know, iPad mini, something like that. But obviously it's quite a bit thicker. It's about two centimetres thick on the the sides and the back of the device. There isn't much on the back. You've got a headphone out and an input jack. You've got a USB micro for charging. 

All of the other controls are on the top of the device, and I'll sort of talk through what they look like in a moment. But the thing that really grabbed me about this thing and as I said, I'm not a drummer. I, you know, I'm a guitarist, really. But, you know, I'm one of those people that, you know, the old saying, when I was a kid, I wanted to play the guitar really badly, and now I can play the guitar really badly. So I'm certainly not an accomplished musician by any means, so I'm still learning. 

But the thing that really grabbed me about this was the fact that it has no screen. So out of the box, everything on the device speaks. So if I was to navigate, for example, it has there's a number of different types of drum kits that you can select. And as I cycle through those.

Automated voice

Four house rows, five R&B, six dubstep son.

02:55 S2

So these are all different types of drum kits, and they all obviously have different sounds and that kind of thing.

03:00 S1

No screen. So it's designed to be listened to?

03:05 S2

Absolutely, yes. And all of the menus and settings and everything are all spoken out by that same voice. So it's not even a situation where you have to enable the voice guidance. It's just there because there's no other way to really drive it.

03:20 S1

Did you have much of a challenge to set it up?

03:23 S2

No. The power button was kind of obvious because it's in the top left hand corner and it's slightly recessed. So I sort of thought, hmm, that's obviously the power button. And then I just tapped on the various pads and things and... experimented with the buttons until I... figured it out.

03:38 S1

So tell me about these pads and buttons. How physical are they?

03:43 S2

The pads, they're raised sort of rubber surface, if you like. And so across the bottom of the device, you've got... one long rectangular pad, which you operate with your thumb. It kind of feels a bit like a... spacebar on a keyboard is sort of what it reminds me of, I get it. And you can operate that normally with your kick drum with either either of your thumbs. So if I tap that... and the harder I tap it, the louder the the drum sound. So if I'm... tapping it softly, if I... so the pad is... touch sensitive.

Then we've got above that, we've got... a row of smaller pads that represent... our tom-type drums. And then so there you've got... seven... pads in that row, and then we've got another row above that. We've got two smaller squares which are our cymbals. And then we have our snare drum above that. And that's a long pad like the... kick drum. And then, we've got another row of five... pads that are other different... symbols and things. So... then above that we've got... the power button on the left, which is slightly recessed, and we've got... a couple of rows of small oval buttons which are for navigating your menu,  adjusting the volume, selecting the type of drum kit you want, setting up your metronome so you can have, like...what they call a click track. 

And then on the top right is... a square with... little holes, which is the built-in speaker. So you can have it coming out of the built-in speaker if you just want to sit there and drum with it on your lap, or you can plug it into your mixer, which is what I've done today, so that you can hear what's happening.

06:01 S1

So what, you use it in conjunction with someone using a keyboard?

06:05 S2

Say you could absolutely. You could also do things like record some drum sequences and save them to a USB stick, or record them to the device and then play them back so that you could play keyboard or guitar or something like that over the top of them. You can use it as a Midi controller. So if you're if you're a musician and you want, let's say, for example, you do live gigs where you sing and play guitar or sing and play keyboard. You might use this to record a bunch of, you know, drum tracks to play along with, to sort of fill out your performance, that sort of thing. 

You might also use it if you're a music producer and you want to sort of show, you know, you've come up with a song idea or something like that, and you want to show your band or your drummer, you know what you're thinking in terms of rhythms or that sort of thing. You might use it in that scenario as well. You might use it as a metronome if you were, you know, playing drums, you know, playing on a proper drum kit. There's a... load of different ways you could use it, or you could just be a, you know, a hobbyist and a tinkerer like me who... has always wanted to play the drums but doesn't have room for a drum kit and doesn't have neighbors that would necessarily appreciate it if I did. So, yeah, there's lots of different ways that you could use something like this.

07:26 S1

How did you find it, Damo?

07:28 S2

Oh, just sort of randomly. I was... chatting to a friend of mine over in the US, and... she happened to mention it, and then she sort of pointed me towards... another podcast where the male... host of the podcast had gotten one for his birthday, and I sort of thought, Oh, this sounds cool. So I then started looking to see whether they were available here in Australia and looked at all the different features. And so there's an FG 30. So if you think FG for finger, DP for drum pad, there's a 30 and a 50. The 50 does have a screen though, so I would... and I don't think it has the voice guidance. So the 30 is the one that is more accessible to us.

08:11 S1

What sort of money are you talking about?

08:13 S2

I got this one for, I think, $349 from... store DJ - slash - Manny's music. Turramurra Music. Better Music. Any of your online music stores... would either have them or be able to get them.

08:30 S1

So let's go back to your demo and show us a little bit more of what it can do.

08:35 S2

Okay. So when I sort of demonstrated the different sounds before you heard that there's a number of different kits for... different types of things, and that sort of changes the sounds that you get out of it. So if I was to scroll through, for example.

08:50 Automated voice

For five R&B, six dubstep son.

08:55 S2

So if I do that, some of the cymbal sounds are a little bit different. And so instead of the rim shot that we had before on that pad, we've got that sort of synthetic sound that you tend to get in a lot of electronic music. There's even a, beatbox kit, Seven Big Beat which I will...

09:17 Automated voice

Ten Modern Jazz 25 hip hop 26 Beatbox Pine.

09:25 S2

So if we select Beatbox Pine, which is the, um, beatbox kit, that's. And for people who don't know what beatboxing is, that's where you where someone kind of makes vocal sounds to represent drumming. So, you know, we still have our kick drum. We've got. Things like that. So all the sorts of vocal sounds that people make when they're impersonating a drum kit, which is what beatboxing is quite remarkable. It really is. And the samples are really high quality, too. You know, it's very clear that the audio quality is really good.

10:05 S1

Terrific. So it's a Yamaha FG 30. Have I got that right?

10:11 S2

That's right. Yamaha FG for finger, DP for drum pad 30. I would just do a Google for something like by Yamaha FG 30 in Australia, and all of the online music stores will come up. Alternatively, you could have a look on Amazon. They do have them up actually a little bit cheaper than what I paid, but it was going to take a week and a half to get there and I was impatient. I wanted something to play with over my Easter holiday, so... but you can definitely, probably pick them up on Amazon or eBay as well, if that's what you want to do.

10:44 S1

Good on you Damo. Your Yamaha FDP 30 device a drum kit. While we've got time, a couple of other matters to ask you about. One, you've got a bit of news about the We Walk, which is the smart cane we talked about over the last few months.

11:03 S2

Yes, it is a brilliant device. Let me say that I was very pleased with mine and I took it to CSUN. And I'm hoping that for next week's show, I'll actually be able to give you a little bit of a demonstration of it. But there is an issue, a known issue with it at the moment with battery drains. So even if you leave the device sitting and you're not using it, if it sits for 3 or 4 days, you'll probably come back and find that it has a flat battery. Now We Walk are aware of it and they are trying to address it. 

But just a note to anyone who has one of these that you may want to, until this issue is addressed in firmware, you may want to put it on charge every night just so that you're not let down by, you know, taking it out and finding that it's gone flat.

11:48 S1

And the other one I wanted to ask you about is the Meta glasses that have been around now for, well, probably just on 12 months. Updates continue to flow.

11:57 S2

They do indeed. Yes. I got mine in May last year, mid May. And at that stage we were up to, I think version 5 or 6 of the software. They have now just released version 14.1 and there's some nice features in it if you use... things like Spotify. So with your music services, you can now tell it to shuffle a playlist. You know, if you have a workout playlist or something like that, you can play it on shuffle. You can get more information about the weather, so you can get things like air quality and a UV index and some of those things, rather than just a generic sort of forecast. 

Unfortunately, we still don't have the live AI feature. They did say that we were supposed to get it in March, but... it hasn't materialised yet - which is a bit of a shame, because that's one that I'm really looking forward to taking for a spin. Every time I sort of see a new update, I think, Oh, I wonder if this will be it, but... no. Not yet. Unfortunately for people who... have these and have experienced the frustration of it not reading documents... in full. The trick for that seems to be read this document verbatim, or read this text verbatim, and that stops it from summarising and... makes it actually read what's there rather than trying to... summarise it for you.

13:29 S1

I'll keep that one in mind. Read this text verbatim. The Meta smart glasses. Before we go, a reminder that you can find details of what we've been talking about in this and previous editions of the program by going to VA Radio. VA. To write to the program...

13:51 S2

You can email me at Vision Australia.

14:01 S1

Damo McMorrow at Vision Australia. This has been Talking Tech - with me has been Vision Australia's national access technology manager Damien McMorrow. I'm Stephen Jolley. Take care. We'll talk more tech next week. See you.