Another Seattle Boom -- With Its Drum Kits, A Funky Start-Up Fuses Music, Digital Magic And Medicine

AP Boom Theory epitomizes Seattle's talent for honing a cutting edge.

Its one product is elegant and customized - and assembled in a turn-of-the-century Kent granary.

But this is more than a single-facet start-up company. It combines digital development with both musical and medical progress.

AP Boom Theory makes alternative drums.

The company already boasts a broad spectrum of players and sponsors: Soundgarden's Matt Cameron, The Presidents' Jason Finn, Super Deluxe's Chris Lockwood, The Lemons' Nabil Ayers, Rey Guajardo of Christ Analogue. Not to mention Gunnery Sgt. Leon Joyce Jr. of the Georgia Marine Corps - and a Rolodex of churches that spans the country.

It has a home page on the World Wide Web; it exports drum kits to Holland, England, Japan and Australia. It rewards endorsers with the glamour of stock options. And it works for a range of Seattle institutions, from Harborview Medical Center to The Experience Music Project.

AP Boom Theory makes two kinds of drum kit: custom acoustic setups (as seen on MTV), and electronic kits that merely look acoustic. The latter drums, called Spacemuffins, were invented by the company's founder-guru, Al Adinolfi.

Adinolfi is a popular, hyperactive entrepreneur, one who pens unusually frank advertising for his products. (Sample: "CUSTOM ELECTRONIC AND ALL-MAPLE ACOUSTIC PERCUSSION HAND-CRAFTED BY ONE ANGRY ITALIAN FOR NO-TALENT SCUM LIKE YOU.") He grew up in the Bronx, where he "drummed from the age of 8." Adinolfi ran away from home at 14 so his band could open a show for The MC5, and he saw another legend - Jimi Hendrix - playing in the same capacity for The Monkees. When it comes to music, he is a lifer.

He moved to Seattle in the late '70s and was soon in charge of a music venue. Then he stopped playing drums - but not for long. "With the early '80s and the birth of electronics, I knew it made sense to start up playing again."

More than that, it made sense to enter a changing market.

Birth of an entrepreneur

To understand what Boom Theory has accomplished, one must understand the drums at the core of that change.

First, electronic drums function differently than "acoustics." Most are not huge kits but sets of rubber pads, each mounted with a "trigger," or sensor. These convert hits from a drumstick to digital signals, which are then fed into a "brain," or sound module. Modules can convert as well as broadcast such signals, and they make the hit sound like a drum - or anything else.

But the rubber in such pads has little "give"; its lack of vibration helps it react to nothing but the drumsticks. If the same sensor were mounted on a drumhead, that head's vibrations - or those of other instruments - would cause "false trigger." Then the drum kit starts to play itself.

Yet the pads are cruel to wrists and elbows. Not only do they mock ergonomics, but pads lose many aspects of the drummer's art. On acoustic drums, the harder you hit, the louder the sound. On pads, even playing at half-strength, you can't get louder.

Adinolfi: "There are lots of negative factors just like that. It's like you can already play great tennis and you've got this great big racket. Then someone says, `Hey, man, take this ping-pong paddle!' And they put you on a court up against Jimmy Connors."

During work on a Boeing soundtrack five years ago, Adinolfi lost patience with the problems of these pads. He was tired of work that made his hands balloon, hurt his back and left his elbows burning. He also worried about losing his motor memory, his drummer's knowledge of aim and velocity. Yet he wanted in on the digital revolution. "There just had to be some kinder, gentler way."

Within five months, he had a prototype: an electric drum kit that looked - and played - like acoustics. But when he took it to the drum moguls for backing, he heard one mantra: "If it could be done, we'd have one."

False triggering, said everyone, was insuperable.

Adinolfi stubbornly kept on working, via credit cards and equipment loans. Slowly he evolved a kit based on piezo ("pie-zoh") wafers. These - ceramic caps that sit on a thin brass plate - are the sensors used in electrocardiograms. They pick up vibrations, change them to electrical impulses, then send them down a wire to trigger the sound. Adinolfi's big problem was controlling these pickups so that his triggers would not react improperly.

It took four years, but he perfected a baffling system. Now, thanks to layers of foam, Spacemuffins work beautifully. Operating as they would on acoustic drums, players can electronically access any sound. There are some exceptions, such as brushes, but drummers using brushes aren't the target market. As a plus, the system is velocity-sensitive: Light rolls are as accurately tracked as hits.

Soundgarden's Matt Cameron helped "beta-test" the Muffins. "When it comes to drums, I'm pretty traditional," he says. "But Al's doing something absolutely great here. For one thing, the guy really is a drummer. He knows hitting those pads is like hitting a table."

Cameron took two of the drums on a Soundgarden tour. "I was real concerned about things like the volume, and I worried that the decibel levels would false trigger. But those drums responded incredibly well." Soon he was a Spacemuffins company endorser - and the trade press echoed his excitement.

Drumming up digital change

Listeners may be oblivious; purist rockers may resist it. But electronics truly is changing the face of pop. The digital magic that turned rapping into "hip-hop" is now audible all over the globe. Real-time playing is sent down fiber-optic lines, just as "performance data" can be captured on disc.

For many young musicians, this constitutes rebellion. Where one generation exhumes Ludwig drums, they talk up "the old '80s electronics." When that quest leads to the likes of Adinolfi, they unwittingly turn into pop's vanguard.

Says Tony Farsides of Britain's Music Week magazine, "Electronics really are the new frontier. They mean you can hit a drum and get a bass guitar sound. All these `new' guitar groups, guys like Oasis, are really making a kind of prehistoric music.

"Eventually," he says, "it could break the visual axis. No more drummer in back, singer in front, guitarists to each side. Nor will you need all those mikes and amps onstage; you'll just have a central MIDI sampler and a guy who triggers it."

People may not see the possibilities now (who really thought that hip-hop would change an industry?). They can be both skeptical and nostalgic. But, says Farsides, look at the pop stars' idols: "Even the poorest bluesmen weren't some kind of primitives. Those guys always bought the newest stuff they could; they were always looking out for the latest thing."

Adinolfi sees this difference in generations. "The real rebels of today are the kids who play electrics. They're like, `I'm gonna be an intricate part of this music, I can access every part of what my band's about. I'm not gonna sit there and be a metronome!' "

This is one reason Adinolfi may be working with the Experience Music Project. Paul Allen's nascent EMP is a lot of things: educational programs, varied projects and a vast cache of pop memorabilia. Someday it will all be inside a museum. But today, EMP is considering Boom Theory's electronic model for a debut installation.

The installation opens July 1 at the Tacoma Art Museum under the moniker "It's Only Rock & Roll." This, a show of art inspired or touched by rock, could boast three "percussion stations" by Adinolfi, each operating interactively, offering drummers and nondrummers equal use. Each would center on Spacemuffins technology.

Cameron is EMP's exhibits project manager and one of three EMP staffers planning the show. He played drums in high school ("thanks to Sears and Roebuck") and saw Spacemuffins praised in a music trade mag. He thinks them perfect for the aims of the project. "For us it's a good moment to go public and begin to clarify our intentions.

"Our collection started out Hendrix-o-centric. But it's broadened out quite a lot since then. We're now trying to tell a story about Seattle, about the do-it-yourself music aesthetic of its community."

But there's also the digital Seattle - which, in surprising ways, has a role in that story. "The average person isn't aware how digital music's become," says Cameron. "We need that input, we need to expose that. But we also want to please a range of people.

"These drums do that. They intrigue anyone - but also educate."

Drums and therapy

They also do it without hurting your health. One of a drummer's great fears is some form of RSI - repetitive strain injury. All are at high risk for syndromes like carpal tunnel and epicondylitis ("tennis elbow," "golfer's elbow"), plus a variety of injuries to the legs and knees. Usually these are incurred on acoustic drums, but the rubber pads are considerably more hazardous.

Nabil Ayers drums for The Lemons, who will release a CD called "Sturdy" on June 4. Ayers: "It'll be the first major-label CD saying `Nabil Ayers plays AP Boom Theory drums.' " Ayers, son of legendary vibes player Roy Ayers and one-third of the label Collective Fruit, owes more than his drum kit to Adinolfi. He can also thank Al that he's able to play.

Through a friend who played Boom Theory drums, Ayers became percussion pals with the maker. Then, last summer, his knee started hurting. Ayers: "Three songs from the end of a gig with The Presidents, I thought, `Oh, it's gonna snap!' " Having checked out the Spacemuffins, programmed for safety, Ayers made a 911 call to their inventor.

Al sent him to Dr. Anthony Margherita, Harborview's attending physician in sports medicine. Margherita treats a number of performers, many of them injured drummers.

Their complaints, he says, echo the office worker's: "Folks who work with their arms out in front of them - from clerks filing to bass players or drummers - get strong in front, but their neck and shoulders weaken."

Margherita calls it "the Linus syndrome," a skeletal-muscle imbalance that is basically postural. "Once you have a problem with the neck and shoulder muscles, anywhere downstream can be affected. You look carefully at every person, then you try to see where their special problem lies. How do they hold their sticks? How do they sit? In the kinetic chain, where does injury happen?"

For Ayers it was hitting the bass drum pedal, which Margherita notes was "positioned badly." Ayers normally sat below - not parallel to - his powerstroke. And he hit the drum pedal "toe first," which pitched both his weight and velocity toward the floor.

Margherita: "We gave him a brace, taught him how to ice his knee, gave him a set of stretches and re-positioned him." Two weeks later, Ayers was on the road again. And he's ordered new Boom Theory drums.

Both Ayers and Margherita like the Spacemuffins. For the former, they represent "a whole new instrument." For the latter, they can help with diagnosis. Playing a set, injured drummers reveal the source of their problems. And they can be fully computer-monitored.

Worshipful drumming

Spacemuffins help drummers, both literally and artistically. They sell to Microsoft employees and jazz players. But their biggest market yet may be the church.

"There are 75,000 churches with music ministries," says Phil Weatherill, who handles public relations for AP Boom Theory. "Drums are their only instrument without volume control, so they all want to go electronic. But, of course, the guys hate banging those pads."

Adinolfi may seem an odd fish here. But his clients relish his irreverence - and he treats them just like fellow musicians. "They don't want to be `Christians,' with quotes around it. They want to cuss on the phone, have a chat about Playboy, hear all the industry gossip."

Spacemuffins are a "big plus for the Christian community," says Mike Kinard, president of Rockwall, Texas-based Hi-Call International. Hi-Call makes videos on drumming in worship services, and Kinard gives lectures and workshops on the subject. He says he is "amazed at the Spacemuffins' quality" and feels "they were made with the worship drummer in mind."

Tennessean Michael Traylor is a worship drummer and resident columnist at the magazine Worship Leader. Worship Leader covers "technology trends within the church" and has evangelized for Spacemuffins. When Kinard uses them at Nashville's Abundant Life Mission, he says he is freed of common worship-drumming worries. "I feel like I'm playing a killer drum set . . . I can really lay into them and not be too loud."

It's not surprising that drummers like the AP products. All are custom-made, come in a choice of colors and will be constructed to please. Then there is the price, which is extremely competitive. For acoustic sets, it is $1,800 to $2,600 ($2,000 to $3,000 less than "cookie-cutter" companies that tailor nothing).

For electronic kits - which save your arms and dignity - prices run from $1,200 to $4,000. Here the price depends on the number of outboard appliances.

For now, Spacemuffins are a hot trade secret. But should Adinolfi get his dearest wish - research money to build his own drum "brain" - they will take off on a global level. The market they could reach, says one industry source, would bring in "at least $12 million a year, maybe something more like $20 million."

Most of Al's young endorsers see this. They sit happily on their drum stools and stock options, rooting for Seattle to conquer again.

AP Boom Theory can be reached at 206-850-8656. Their Web site is at http://www.blarg.net/philw