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Hmm. Still feeling tired and dizzy. Also feeling twitchy. Was thinking, "I want to hit something, but it's too late at night." Then I remembered I've got a practice pad for one of my snare drums. Let's see whether that's satisfying enough to take care of this feeling.
More and more often I lust after electronic drums (i.e. a set of percussion MIDI triggers and a drum synth, laid out like a conventional drum kit). Not in the budget; not gonna be in the budget for a long time; I don't even play drums often enough to justify it as anything other than "a toy I want" -- it'd come in handy, yeah, but not often.
There's something viscerally satisfying about pounding the skins (and hitting drum triggers into a synth into headphones would suffice), just as there's something similarly satisfying about the feeling testing your sword arm against someone of comparable skill, or (and this has been a looooong time ago now) that perfect sliding tackle to take the ball from an opposing forward (I was a fullback). My main instrument, by a ridiculously huge margin, is guitar, but playing guitar well, loudly, and fast, while satisfying on a primal level, is a different satisfaction than that from a pair of sticks and a kick-pedal.
Edit at 23:50 -- Nope, the practice pad is quite useful for practice (it doesn't bounce quite right, but close enough to be useful for working on technique) but it's no good for the "I want to hit something" urge. I need the noise. Headphones would do. Feeling the shock waves bouncing back off the wall would be better. Oh well, I'll rat-a-tat-tat on the snare drum just enough to quell the urge in the morning and try to ignore it tonight.
(no subject)
Synth drum pads are little more than fancy wrapped piezo sensors.
They've gotten fancier with layers and stuff to log delays and compute touch sensitivity, but it sounds to me that you would be perfectly happy with something that just sends a trigger to a sample bank. It's not at all that hard to mine piezo disks from dollar store toys and noisy greeting cards. This is easily within your budget or even that of a collection of pals on a lark on the mall. Mount the piezo disks on whatever you'd like to pound on and "Ta Da!". The *hard* part is to design a circuit that makes "piezo trigger" = "midi trigger". Like that's hard to do when you have friends who are circuit designers. Heck you could probably cannibalize some thrift store or pawnshop acquisition to do that if you didn't feel like building it yourself.
Of course you could always simply send the raw signals directly to a mixer, and simply amplify whatever noise these things make. That would be different, and dirt simple, but maybe give you some of what you want. I kinda suspect that you kinda want the sound of a "kit" tho.
So start small and build up over time. Start out just amplifying the whatevers and upgrade to "home made Midi triggers".