I'm going Pro

I had my first drum lesson today.

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

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.

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