Overview
Elements of Fingerdrumming is a book that introduces readers to the art of fingerdrumming and provides lesson plans to help them practice and develop their skills. Incorporated into the book is a MIDI controller that users can plug into their laptop to play sound available to download from online.
Initial Ideas
- The History of Super Smash Bros Melee — Cover the history of the competitive scene from 2002-present based on the documentaries The Smash Brothers and Last Stock Legends
- XXL Freshmen Class of 2016 — Artist profiles of all the entire hip hop class with page designs inspired by their physical appearances and music. Build sounds into the book so that when you open a page, the artist’s ab-lid will play.
- How To Fingerdrum — A tutorial/lesson book for fingerdrumming since nothing similar exists. A built-in 4x4 drum pad, metronome, kit selector, and speakers so that people can practice and play straight from the book.
Sketches
My only sketch was of how I envisioned the cover of the book: text with a flat AKAI MPC 2000 vectored in Illustrator.
Reference Material
While iterating on my designs, I referred to books that I have actually read while learning about music. My hope was that by using them as inspiration, I would be able to communicate the content of my book as efficiently.
I liked the way that the pages were laid out in “How to DJ Right” and the use of grids in “Mastering Audio”
For the musical notation, I wanted something that was as compact as sheet music but still easy enough for people without musical training to read. I referred to the piano roll’s in DAW’s such as Logic and Ableton for this.
Electronic Components
Originally, I wanted to include a fully-functional drum machine including 4x4 pads, a kit selector, speakers, a metronome, and a rechargeable Lithium-Ion battery. I ordered the parts and after 10 hours of assembling, soldering, de-soldering, and tinkering with the code, it became clear that the components I purchased would not work for my project. The audio board I purchased (https://www.adafruit.com/product/2220) was not powerful enough to playback multiple audio files without significant lag. I tried using compressed/uncompressed audio files, optimizing the code by minimizing artificial delays, remove delays in the library code, but the issue was simply weak hardware. In the end, I settled for a simple MIDI controller, and decided to design around it.
Digital Iterations
I didn’t have a clear idea of what I wanted my book to look like and struggled with sketches. I knew I wanted each spread to feature a single element of fingerdrumming so I experimented with this spread. I used the left side of the spread to describe the element and the right side to describe tips for that particular element.
Notice the empty rectangles on both sides of the spread. Originally, I wanted the electronic drum pad to be inside each page so I marked where to cut.
The green background was used to visually separate the exercises from the additional information about the element.
For the musical notation, I indicate which pad to hit on the left by coloring the pad in and using that same color in the musical notation.
Feedback I received on this iteration included: use a white background for the musical notation instead of black, make the book smaller (originally bigger than 10" x 16"
For my second iteration, I used a lighter background for the musical notation and changed the pad image to text. I planned on mapping the names to pads on a different spread in the book. I moved the color to the top so that the color doesn’t dominate the spread.
Feedback I received on this iteration included: use smaller text (12pt at the time), add padding to the tip box, use a different color that suits the content better (green was too calming), and choose between Helvetica and Avenir since they are very similar.
Final Iteration
For my final iteration, I made many significant changes. First, I removed the green color in its entirety and instead used grey lines to border the content of each page. Rather than including tips for each page, I added a fun quote related to the element or artist feature on the spread. The tips were generally the same from page to page, so I thought this would be a more interesting use of the space.
Final Thoughts
Although I really enjoyed the topic I chose for my book, I wish I chose something more manageable for this project. Fingerdrumming is a rarely covered topic that I could write an entire, full-length book about, and I spent too much time trying to make the content perfect and getting the electronics ready for a final version of this book. Because of this, my design suffered and the majority of the text in the book is filler text (Lorem ipsum…).