HappIndie Holidays!

I love these guys! A Ludwig Vistalite 22x16" Bass Drum... enjoy!

Sonor Designer Snare

I'm a happy owner of the Sonor Designer Snare kit-piece now. :) Get it today for $1!

Sonor Designer Snare Demo

INDIE

Today's hot release from XLN Audio's Addictive Drums forge. So there are 3 ADPaks now which I can't choose from. Life is hard!

Steinberg CMC-PD Pad Controller - I want it!

I was mapping the drum track of a song I want to remix yesterday with my LPD8. All the takes I recorded were sluggish. Of course not because I cannot play well, but my LPD8 are not sensitive enough. ;) So I googled sensitive pad controller to see if there is any better. After scrolling through the ones I have seen before I noticed the whole new CMC-PD from Steinberg. It's one piece of the many modular controller they have released recently. Pretty shiny. :) As Kiran explains it, all I have to decide is which one I need and which one I only want.

Pandeiro

A new percussion I have found today on the Roland TD-9.

Pandeiro Jingle on Roland TD-9 sound module

  1-Baiao by Cassio Moura

Yep, it's quite familiar from Rio carnevals, isn't it?

Second to none

Second gig, Second to none.

We had a TGIF party tonight at the office. It was a special occasion as the "Karaoke from Hell" band was invited. So people could sing karaoke while a live band is playing! I think it's a pretty good idea! Some of my friends tried to sign up for singing, but obviously the free slots were sold out quickly. Apart from the familiar name I didn't know what this event is all about so I haven't even consider signing up. Actually I thought that the local band from the office is playing and others can sign up for singing karaoke. Ok, that's already too much background so let's get to the topic:

I was playing drums in front of ~200 people, second time ever on acoustic drums, on the top of that they were my colleagues and I switched with the official drummer in the middle of the song. =)

Hard to describe the feeling. I remember I was happy last time at the small bar when the crowd were shaking their head. And now I feel that's nothing. The audience was even beyond my senses apart from two faces for a short moment; two girls actually, but I don't know why them. All my senses were focused on the rest of the band and the music. They were all turned to me as they immediately accepted me when we switched with the other drummer: It's not a solo game after all and being part of a band, actually a professional band is a feeling second to none. They were helping me signaling the changes & the intensity of the songs with all their bodies. E.g. when the kick-drum part begin or, when the song was ended. I didn't need the help at the end, but the their help was really helpful for realizing the beginning of the kick-drum only part. E.g. even if I missed the end, from their signals it was obvious that after the ending two strikes it's over. I couldn't play more, even if I didn't know the song. And by the way the song was Sex on Fire from Kings of Leon. =)

I'll have a band, because the feeling is awesome.

Update: Thanks for Csaba & Zoli for the video!

Beat

BEAT from or bar-el on Vimeo.

Midi interface for Android?

I was seraching for a solution to get my drumming recorded while I'm playing on the e-drums at the office. Ideally all my drum hits could get recorded so later I could analyze it and measure if I'm getting better at timing.

Since it's not my drum-set, I was looking for a pocket-sized solution which I can set-up easily every time. No. There's no stand-alone midi recording hardware out there which is smaller than a medium sized kitchen-table.Then I was looking for some midi interface for my Android smartphone, similar to Line 6's midi mobilizer  for IPhone. No. No such ones. No USB midi interface for android nor any generic bluetooth midi interface is out there. There are some nice hacking projects, but I don't have time to put some micro-controllers together, and they wouldn't be a pocket-friendly solution either.

Please comment if you know any solution for this!

Drumming System first impressions

After watching the first ~3 DVDs of the Drumming System out of the 20 I can tell that Mike is chatty and thorough; Still, It's good to be reassured about basics and I already decided working more with the metronome and I'll practice the patterns he suggested too; The first ones are very basic but you can find some interesting ones quickly. What's totally awesome: play-along songs without drum tracks are included! :) I was about to prepare my own such songs but it would take too much time to be serious about it.

My favorite quote from Mike: "We hit things, and people like it. How cool is that?" ;)

Drumming System

I ordered the Drumming System DVD package at 50% off. They claim it's on sale b/c the packages are not sealed. I.e. I guess these are the returned copies of the money-back guarantee program of theirs. Fine! I don't care, especially b/c they also gave on-line access for the same material which is much more convenient! That's a great deal! Or did I just buy access rights to an expensive set of videos which also have free alternative? Well, I'll let you know.

Mike Michalkow's Drumming System DVD package

Rain, sunshine, cajon

The weather was pretty daunting over the weekend. The first real cold days reaching the bones; Rain all days drying the hearths. But on Sunday afternoon the rain had suddenly stopped and the Sun started shining through Autumn's sneaking attempt to hollow her glorious pride! .. Err... Bla bla bla.. As you can see I have hard time figuring out if I should be a drummer, photographer or a poet. Anyway, below you can find the photos which I made on this "glorious" ;) day about my newest percussion instrument. Enjoy! :)

Meinl Pick-up Cajon (CAJ9SNT-M)

Kings of Leon

Awesome night on the stage!

We just planned to play with a new colleague for 20 minutes before the in-house band takes over the stage at the office. But they missed their drummer so we ended up playing 3 hours instead! The top hit of the night was Kings of Leon. I never heard them before but I figured out almost the same beats for their song "Sex on Fire" and I even like my pattern better for their song "Use somebody". :)

Kings of Leon - Sex On Fire

Think out of the box

Juliana Richer and the Doyle brothers

GTG DrumSampler II

I was wondering if there is a simple VSTi for your own drum samples. Yes, there is.

GTG DrumSampler II VSTi

Note to myself: Experiment with it if you have some time!

Blast from the past

Süleyman showed me some patterns which I can easily practice on my own back in January. It's funny to see that I improved so much since then so these patterns are not difficult for me anymore. Watch & learn! :)

Four drum patterns to practice

Improvisation

I was playing today in the office as well. I thought I'll record it.. So here you are. Raw, unplugged original from Neo Drummer. ;)

Improvisation 01 by neo-drummer

Addictive Drums + Roland TD-9.

So I installed my Addictive Drums on my Mac since my external soundcard got broken. Macs are good for music out of the box with no delay. Since I already put away my kit, I thought I'll try it out with the Roland TD-9 on our stage in the office. :) I couldn't wait until the end of lunch so I went instead. Time flied quickly! =) I played mainly with the Ludwig Vistalite kit. It has a great voice & dynamics which goes really well with the e-drum's pads. After reading the tutorial about the compressors I listened more & played more with the dynamics, that's why I found this kit today as the best. It's really interesting how rich sound you can make with a single Tom!

Ludwig Vistalite in Addictive Drums

Compressors explained

I found this great, easy to understand tutorial for compressors. After reading this I understand the concept & its actual use to compress the crash cymbal by the kick drum. That's the effect I tried to explain in my previous post. I still lack the experience to properly configure the buses & the compressors in Addictive Drums so I rely on the presets; maybe once if I have some time to play around with it.

Mandelbrot Drummer

I found an interesting software called Mandelbrot Drummer which generates drum patterns based on the Mandelbrot Set. The concept is very interesting and it's probably good for the claimed purposes: to get some ideas for your unique patterns. I found the tool a bit hard to use, e.g. you have to configure a lot of parameters for the individual kit-pieces. I didn't really find the generated patterns very unique either. E.g. usually one kit piece is either increasing or decreasing in intensity then stops.  Then the combination of the kit-pieces result something unexpected, but still they follow the same pattern. It's still fun to play with it for some time.

Mandelbrot Drummer

Addictive Drums (on sale!)

Thursday I went home a bit earlier & assembled my DD-65. I usually don't play at home b/c I arrive late and the sticks are too loud even if I use headphones. But I was early at home so I connected it into the Addictive Drums software I bought in March and played like an hour. I never really played using this setup before; I mainly used my LPD8 because of my neighbors. I had a great time! I enjoyed especially the preset kits with distortion & other back-chained effects. Let me try to explain: when you hit the crash cymbal, it's just a normal crash, but then you hit the kick afterwards, and the kick 'sucks the air' from the crash. Suddenly the crash sounds like if it was put underwater. The toms have similar effects on each other, and since all of them are driven through an overdrive processor each hit lasts long. The end result is that even by playing 8th notes the sound is rich because the different patterns result in highly different voice. So today I ordered the AD Retro extension for my basic Addictive Drums bundle. Thanks to http://www.google.com/shopping I found it on sale! So I ordered it and saved $100 and 40¢. I think it's a big deal. :) I have to wait for my license number until my purchase gets verified on Monday, but if it doesn't turn out to be scum I might buy the additional expansions kits as well. They are on sale too!

Her name is not Susan

Yesterday I was practicing in the office at the in-house stage we have using my earphones. A girl & a guy were playing table tennis in front of me. I was playing along one of the songs I can play really well. Then I realized that the girl waiting for the serving was moving her buttocks on the beat. It was a nice visual motivation to not lose the beat. =) I guess her name was not Susan.

Lessons on YouTube

Check out this awesome resource of drum lessons! E.g. this one is about ghost notes:

Latency

I decided to buy a low latency USB sound card: In Synthesia I only hit the notes 'Barely!' instead of  'Great!' or 'Perfect!' clearly because of the poor performance of the sound card and not because of mine. ;) The other problem was that because of the high latency I could only use my pad controller with my drum kit's built-in synthesizer which is not ideal.

I choose UGM-96 because of its small form-factor and because it doesn't require any external power. The low latency microphone input will be also handy if I ever organize a SingStar like party and the Cubase LE 4 and the free Virtual Guitar AMP it came with were also interesting add-ons: Cubase is the midi sequencer which I used ~10 years ago and some of my colleagues might have fun with the AMP if they ever bring their guitar over.

I also found out that there is a dedicated driver for my E-MU XMidi 1x1 Tab USB midi cabel. It has even lower latency compared to the default Windows driver. Using Cubase's soft synth also eliminated the low performance default midi synth of Windows. Using all of these Synthesia become much more easy to play! I also found out that Synthesia itself has a big latency so using my pad controller with Cubase and using the ASIO4ALL low latency driver with my built-in soundcard has good enough performance for real time drumming. Awesome! :)

ESI UGM96 and E-MU Xmidi 1x1 Tab

Some more hints: The driver for UGM-96 is pretty crappy; it can handle one program at a time only, and the device does not always work in all USB sockets. The free ASIO4ALL driver is much better. You can switch the output device from the laptop sound card to UGM-96 on-the fly without exiting the audio program and the device works in any USB socket without many plug & un-plug of the device and exit & restart of the audio application.

Breaking news: The First Gig

Yes! I had my first gig! Never thought that I'll have it today. Playing on acoustic drums for the first time in front of twenty people, I cannot tell what a good feeling it is! :) Kati & Csaba invited us to listen to some blues music in the Club Hey at Bellevue. We’ve been there before. It's a nice place, free entry, good music and cheap drinks. I was in the office till late, and my new low latency USB sound interface had just arrived, so it was not a trivial choice. I thought that it can wait until tomorrow, so I went to the club. I just arrived when they started playing. There was a guitarist, a bass player and a drummer. They played good music, and we had some drinks. It was good; what else could I say. The guy who introduced the band said that after them there's gonna be an open jam session and everybody can participate. I still didn't think that I'll play tonight. But during the band's play I was bantered with questions about when me and Csaba will play publicly. I still didn't think anything seriously. But when the band left the stage and some other people were getting together for some jamming, there was no drummer. So, will I play? My friends asked. Sure! :) I already had some drinks, and they needed a drummer! I went to the people and said that I can play if they want but I'll ask the sound engineer to make the drums quieter. They said sure, we'll play some Rock and Roll tunes, just stay in beat. Awesome! Then I went to the sound engineer asking him to make the drums quieter. But then what did he say? They have another drummer! Maybe the next song. What a shame! So I went back to our group. But in less than a minute he came to me and said that he was wrong, they don't have a drummer, so I can play. YEAHHH! So he gave me like ~6 sticks...What??? I chose two sticks which looked alike and then I sat down in front of the drum set. That's a feeling! I tried to hit the snare drum quietly, but after the first strike it was obvious that you cannot play on this drum set quietly. Probably even if the sound engineer muted the drums it would have been loud enough to overplay the others. But it seemed to me that the he didn't touch the knobs, so I had to be confident. We started the song immediately.. and it was awesome! First I just played quarter notes with the high hat with one kick on the kick drum and one hit on the snare drum. After some verse I started playing eighth notes on the high hat and being more virtuoso with the snare & with the kick drums. And with the crash cymbal of course. I had a great time! The best feeling was to see the people at the bar shaking their head on the beat when I started the eighth notes. It was obvious that I'm a beginner, but they watched me and it seemed they like it. At least nobody had left till we finished the song. :) Csaba also joined with the harmonica. When the song ended it was obvious that my performance ended for tonight because there were more experienced drummers, but this one song already made my night. I didn't want anything else. I'm still smiling.. :) My first gig, with acoustic drums for the first time... Awesome!!

Update: Thanks for Egmont for the pictures!

Synthesia hero

As I said I can't wait till next weekend, so this evening I played even more with my MIDI setup. While I was searching for a program to drive my MIDI gear over the weekend I came across Synthesia. It's a free practicing game similar to Guitar Hero except that you are using a real keyboard to play real songs. Its graphics are fairly good so the fun factor is high. The only problem is that I'm more into drumming and not so much into playing the piano. Anyway, this evening I downloaded it just to try it out. It claimed that it's possible to play & practice any MIDI song. If it's true I thought I could hack it so I can control it via a drum controller as they are not so different from a MIDI keyboard.

When I first launched Synthesia it welcomed me with a nicely polished interface. I selected a song from its collection. After that it offered me the tracks of the song to select for playing. There were nice grand piano icons next to both tracks. Then I got suspicious. Instead of starting the game I downloaded a random song which I knew it had drum tracks and opened it.

Instrument selection screen of Synthesia

As you can see it has native support for the drums. =) You can select any instruments you want to play and the ones you want to play along. The only thing left is to assign the same drums for the pads and the fun begins. :) It worked nicely with both the DD-65 and the LPD8. I'm telling you, it's way better than Guitar Hero. :)

Playing the drums in Synthesia

Controlling instead of practicing

I don't practice at home during the weekdays because the sticks are too loud on the DD-65 even if the sound is muted. I thought that I could practice the patterns on the computer keyboard with some music software or - to have more fun - on a midi pad controller. After some research I found this one:

AKAI LPD8 MIDI controller

It has arrived on Wednesday but I only had time for investigating its potential over the weekend. First I had problems to make any sound with it. It took some time until I found a software which routes the MIDI messages to the built-in MIDI synth of Windows XP. But it was useless. The latency was so big that it was not possible to play any rhythm with it. I was hoping that it's because the poor performance of XP's soft synth and not because of the controller. Then I found a very simple MIDI enabled sampler. The latency decreased a lot, but it was still not good enough for playing. Then I thought.. why not just use my DD-65's brain for the music synthesis? I plugged it into my computer and routed the messages from the LPD8 to the Yamaha drum kit. And then finally the magic happened. The drums responded immediately once I pressed a pad on the controller. :) And we have arrived at the end of the weekend. I can't wait till the next one. :)

The guide

So I thought since I'm already in the music shop I ask if they have some books for drummers. The guy showed me a thick & dusty book. I wasn't very impressed. He kept on searching and found this one:

Pocket Rhythms for drums by Dirk Brand

The book contains explanation of the musical notation and instructions on how to use the book in both English and German language. (Awesome!) Each page has a pattern for the hi-hat, snare drum, bass drum and the pedaled hi-hat which you can practice together. The funny thing is that the pages are cut into four pieces so you can combine the patterns from the different pages. Basically the book contains 40^4 = 2.56 million grooves which you can practice. Times 2 if you turn the book upside down. Since it also contained a CD the choice was obvious. You can listen to the CD to copy not just the pattern but the feeling of the music style as well. When I left the shop I had everything to do some serious drumming over the weekend.

5.12 million grooves in one book

Let's be serious. (Just kiddin')

Last Saturday I decided that from now I'll take drumming seriously. After all I have a Yamaha DD-65 drum-kit for about half a year now. I should really invest time and energy to do more with it other than storing it under my bed. Since my original skiing plans for the weekend were cancelled I had to act quickly. I went down to the music store in my street which was only open in the morning and I bought this awesome instrument cable from the shop window which I was ogling for weeks. After all it's much more serious than my RCA cable I used to connect my drums to the amp with. My drum-kit qualifies as a real instrument now.

Custom Pro Planet Waves instrument cable