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