A drummer in Australia has been telling the Guardian how he has broken the record for the most bpm – despite having lost his arm in an industrial accident.
His name is Jason Barnes and he was a keen amateur musician, in two bands, and with a place at the Atlanta Institute of Music lined up, before he was electrocuted at work.
“I had lost my job,” he remembers. “I moved back in with my mother and spent day after day watching TV or playing video games with one hand, thinking about everything I might never do again: play the guitar, piano, drums. Even with a standard prosthetic, it felt impossible to imagine holding a drumstick again.”
One day, he decided enough was enough. He dragged his kit out of his mum’s attic, and taped a drumstick to his amputated arm. “Playing was incredibly painful, but I could still keep a groove. For the first time since the accident, something shifted.”
He started to build his own drumming prosthetic. After a couple of attempts, he made one that worked well enough to play once more with his bands. Incredibly, a year after the accident, he had recovered enough to take his place at Atlanta.
Over in the US, he hooked up with the students from the nearby Georgia Tech who were working in the field of robotics. Since then, they and Barnes have developed a prosthetic that uses cutting-edge tech. “For the current prosthetic, one of the engineers suggested filming my intact arm in slow motion to study how I strike the drum, and trying to replicate that through sensors and motors.
"The prosthetic has six electrodes that read the electrical activity in my remaining muscles. When I think about moving my hand, those muscles contract and the prosthetic responds. The accuracy is almost perfect.”
The prosthetic has “opened doors I’d never have imagined,” says Barnes. “I can play timbres and speeds other drummers can’t – up to 20 hits per second.” In 2019, he broke the World Record for most drum beats per minute using a prosthetic. “Technically, it’s the record for most drum beats per minute ever, but that felt misleading – I clearly had an advantage.”
Barnes isn’t, of course, the first drummer to lose their arm and bounce back in style – we’re all familiar with the incredible story of Rick Allen of Def Leppard. But Barnes’s prosthetic sounds like a step down the road to a genuine human/ drum machine interface. “What motivates me now is making these tools cheaper and more accessible,” he says. Indeed, he’s started a non-profit organisation, Limitless Sound, to help develop prosthetics for other disabled musicians.
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