Project idea: percussive foot controller

I’ve been playing around with my live setup recently, and I’ve become quite interested in foot controllers. Some common types are MIDI program change and CC expression pedals. There are also foot switches such as the sustain pedals found on most keyboard controllers.

However, I’ve been looking at expanding beyond this for live performance. There are a few interesting foot controllers that mimic organ foot pedals such as the Roland PK7A but as you can see, they are quite expensive.

There seems to be a gap here. I don’t see any foot controllers that have a center detent that would be useful as a pitch bend controller, and I don’t see many that are velocity sensitive.

I’m thinking about building a simple drum pedal that would use a piezo element and a large rubber pad to make a percussion controller that would be used underfoot. This could be an Arduino-based project that would generate MIDI data either via a proper MIDI connection or maybe using USB.

I’ll fill out some more details as I think of them, but these are my initial thoughts.