This Friday I'll be playing my first gig with Voodoo Saints, at The Viking in Novato.

While going through and getting all my equipment ready, it dawned on me that this will be my first gig on acoustic drums in at least a decade! It'll be interesting to see how well I can slip back into it. Not that playing gigs with acoustics is at all physically different than with electronics, but there definitely is a different mindset to it. Particularly since this is a small enough venue that I won't be being mic'd at all and will have to rely on the sheer volume of my kit. Lucky me that I hung onto my 'rock' kit all this time -- it'll have no problem cutting through the amps :)

All in all it should be an absolute blast! So if you're looking for some fun this Friday in the North Bay, drop on by The Viking and say "hi" -- we'd love to see ya! Shows starts at 9PM.

I threw together a quick template for jotting down mapping ideas for the Zendrum. I find it more useful to work out ideas on paper rather than by fiddling with trigger settings or sysex directly.

Use it in good health.

So I've been trying for the past month or so to get a Jazz combo going on the side. I need more Yin to balance the Yang of the other two groups I'm working with and the moment (Blues and Hard Rock).

Things are starting to pick-up and the first decent tracks from this outing are up.

Some random thoughts from someone who hasn't played any serious Jazz in nearly 20 years:

1. 20 years is too long to go without! It's going to take a bit for my chops to come back it looks like.
2. I'd forgotten just how fun and liberating Jazz can be. This is just what the doctor ordered right now!

I really can't wait to see how far we can take this.

My new rock maple Zendrum arrived the other day! I truly haven't been this geeked about getting a new instrument in a long time, I feel like a five year old on Christmas morning!

The learning curve will be steep -- general consensus is that it takes about a month to become proficient -- but it's going to be a fun, rewarding journey for sure!

It won't be suitable for every gig of course, but for ones where it is, the benefits are simply huge. I won't have to tear down my kit, shove it in the car, unload and setup it up, etc. Nope, I'll be able to gig outta just one or two bags. What's more is I won't have to sit behind a kit to perform, after already having to sit in the car for an hour to get to the gig in the first place.

Ergonomics and back pain avoidance aside though, it's pretty clear after fiddling around with it for only a short while that the Zendrum is going to allow me to do things that I couldn't do before, even with my electronic kit. Likewise there are things I won't be able to do at all with it, at least without some trickery (cymbal swells and press rolls come to mind). But I think that this just reinforces the fact that this isn't meant to be a drumset replacement, it's a completely different instrument.

This is gonna be fun!

So despite my previous dragging of feet, I finally went ahead and preordered a TDW-20 after I heard through the rumor mill that Full Compass was offering them for around $360 USD, shipping included.

What really gets my goat though is why this isn't their advertised price? At the time I placed my order, their reported list price was $599 and the price they were offering under their "low price guarantee" was $495. I'd never before encountered a situation before where phoning in an order resulted in a nearly 30% savings over an Internet price, especially one that claimed to have a "low price guarantee".

Look, I'm not complaining -- $360 was low enough for me to take the plunge and buy the card. It does make me wonder though how many times I've gotten the shaft by paying what seemed to be the lowest price on the Internet. I guess we should all start getting quotes over the phone again.

I've added a new section to the site for archiving audio recordings. I've got stuff going back as far as 1994, if I ever get off my hinder and encode them all to mp3.

For now you'll have to settle with my most recent stuff, from Hadley Hill. I promise to get some of the older, more embarrassing stuff up soon! :)

A permanent link to the audio section can be found in the sidebar, near the link to my profile. You can also get there by clicking here.

This article details step-by-step how to fire off a TD-20's percussion samples from an SPD-11 or SPD-20. The concepts work pretty much the same if using other modules or pad controllers as well.

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We took the munchkin to Chuck E. Cheese's yesterday for the first time and I realized I hadn't been there since about the time I first started playing drums, about 25 years now.
While I like to think that my playing has aged gracefully, I'm sad to say that the mouse has not. What happened Chucky? Your place used to be dripping in 'cool'.. now it just drips toddler pee (literally, don't stand under the habitrails).

Also, a sonnet to the redneck that cut in front of a line full of kids just so he could buy a beer...

"..oh dearest redneck that cut in front of a line full of kids just so you could buy a beer.... you suck."

Started work on converting the 13" snare from the Chameleon kit. I don't anticipate running into any major problems with this one, seems pretty cut and dry. I am however looking forward to applying some of the lessons learned from my first attempt, with the 10" tom.

Here are some pics of the snare before I started:

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