Monday Drum Day: A little achy

It has been a while since I did a drum cover, but I am going to try to do more of the Drumeo collaborations this year. The latest course I have been doing there is on sight-reading. That sounds a bit boring, but it is a useful skill for musicians as you can play along straight away if you have the music in front of you. Drumming has its own notation (tab) where the various drums are mapped onto the musical stave with special symbols to indicate different hits. This course has some fun tunes to play along with that include various techniques. You need to look ahead to see what is coming up.

This song is the 'classic' Achy Breaky Heart by Billy Ray Cyrus. It might not be my first choice, but it is a fairly simple song to play. I pretty much sight-read this as I did not get around to practicing it much. The performance is a little scrappy, but I submitted it for inclusion in the community video.

I was recording my Tama Club Jam kit with my Yamaha EAD10. I had my 3d-printed trigger unit plugged in, but the bass sample is not that audible. I need to experiment with levels, but the overall sound is not bad. I just have to combine the audio from that with the backing track and the video from my phone that requires a little guesswork in the Kdenlive video editor.

I found a phone mount to 3d-print that could fit on a proper tripd. This gives me more options of where to set up the camera. Actually I printed it and then found it did not fit my particular tripod, but I was able to find a flat mount that I could print and glue on.

I have not used 3speak in a while and it has seriously improved! Firstly you can log in with Keychain and then the editor is much better with full preview. Before I would often compose the post in peakd and copy it over. You can also select a thumbnail from the video instead of having to upload an image. Well done to the developers.

Rock on!

▶️ 3Speak