A track I’ve been working on these past few weeks. This mp3 of the midi version is pretty much its final form and an accurate transcript of what I’ll be recording in the coming days. I have some ideas for bass, chords and whatnot, but unlike Molten Dry Bips which sounded perhaps a bit too dry without the extras, drums only seems fine this time so not going to risk another disaster and shelve that thought. They’ll end up on my bandcamp page at some point. Feedback is welcomed, so are any tips and support sent.
The cymbals are close but not quite like the same as what I have setup on my drum kit. The hi-hat is mainly played half-closed or so most of the time, but here I don’t delve into the editor enough to give it more variety in sounds. There’s some more snare and floor tom rimshots and assorted accents here and there too that’ll come out once I get around to recording. 80bpm is my overall maximum currently, but it’s not quite the same at that speed. Although I think it sounds best around 72bpm, it’s where I’m at in practicing my triplets on it, it holds up okay at 60bpm too, like a similar feel despite a somewhat different personality to it. Haven’t decided for sure yet, though I’m leaning towards recording it at 60bpm.
So here is the result of one of the practice pad exercises I’ve been working on these past months. It will no doubt go through a few more transformations in the times ahead as I move over to practicing it on an actual drum set. It does use a few more cymbals and toms than I currently have on my kit, and obviously my original practice pad sticking will need to be modified slightly to accomodate for the fills, and for the toms’ and cymbals’ physical setup (no point in trying to fast-switch hands on the ride bell in-between snare hits, for example, when you can paradiddle them instead… duh). The placement of kick-bass hits might get tweaked a bit as well as I get comfortable with the groove, but mostly the main bass line’s modulations is where I’m thinking it could use additional changes.
In a no-doubt overambitious plan that’ll never get done, there’s also a few ideas for extra instrument add-ons floating around in the back of my head (like flutes, whistles, horns and trumpets or other wind/brass, etc), potentially making it much longer. I’m open to suggestions, so send your collaboration ideas, comments, feedback and such. It will be greatly appreciated.
In any case, it’ll join the other tracks in my experimental drum album on bandcamp sometime in the not-so-distant future
Molten Dry Bips:
Morsels of specialty engineered V-Drums and E-Bass carefully melted dry, and meticulously blended together in self-contained bips to strengthen the teflon in your brain and keep it safe.
Ingredients:
v-drums
e-bass
like most of my work this track is licensed CC BY-NC-SA, so you’re free to do with it as you like as long as it’s not for commercial purposes. Just drop me a message if you do end up using it in any of your own projects
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59 individual line segments with their bends, corners and curves, aligning to form a total of 60 separate shapes which are colored so as to have each shape in frame be directly adjacent to at least one of the 13 black filled spaces. 10 of them are colored blue, 9 of them red, 8 of them grey and 7 of them white. The remaining 13 shapes retain the paper background’s texture.
Badly drawn animal #50 (click thumbnail for gallery and full-size image) :
This bda, like most of them really, is not properly done justice to by the usual descriptive rundown of its main and predominant features. It’s been said about it however, in fact again like most of the other bda featured on this site, to have been known to reveal the secrets of its inner workings to one who’d dare stare at it for long enough. Or in other words, and from a certain point of view perhaps, to one who’d dare stare at it for far too much longer than is necessary.
So it’s been over a year now since I started to learn to play drums and I wanted to revisit Traffic Jam, a track that basically got it’s start when I was hitting various objects laid about in my living room. With some relative success I managed to transcribed the beat, melody, or whatever it is, into a midi file to use as a trainer for the drum kit I had by then already decided I was going to be getting. Never did learn it on the actual drums though, beyond the basic groove and trying out bars a couple at a time.
Listened to it repeatedly these past weeks. At some point I was thinking of fixing it up, rearranging parts here and there, but one year later I’m still stumped. This’ll remain its final form I guess: the same track, basically identical but for a few details here and there, repeated five times at different tempos pasted together starting fast and slowing down to the middle section (the part with crickets and such in the background, the speed at which bar by bar I was trying it out on the drums) before then speeding back up again and fading out. Traffic Jam, the full commute.
Apart from rudiment practice, exercises, basic motions and licks, fills and whatnot, most of my time spent playing on the drums has been dedicated to Liquid Volts and, to a lesser extent, Ride Muffins. The mid section of Ride Muffins is a tad (cough cough) out of my reach right now, to say the least, so I’m not putting that much effort into it. I do very much enjoy its feel though, and playing around looping its variations much fun.
Liquid Volts Pie (or Liquid Volts π) has in 3/4 a target tempo of 90bpm – actually I initially wrote it in 120bpm, using triplets and the odd shuffle on the bass. So far, I’m quite consistent and very comfortable with it at 72bpm, reading off the 3/4 notations, and getting better at 80bpm although that pretty much seems to be where I’m capped out for now. Warmed up and in good shape I can manage up to 83bpm, slowly bumping up the ticker as I repeat it over and over. I still have much ways to go for a tight and smooth take at 90bpm. Not so much in the first half which is very much in my reach, but particularly in the second half where… eh…. yeah. Getting better and better however, every time I feel up to the challenge.
This is the best record I got for so far, not bothering with the slower tries. Beside the obvious timing issues, my by problem is with loudness and hit detection on the cymbals, which is why I’m peaking at around 80bpm where I’m currently having a hard time keeping their hits consistent and even, with appropriate accentuation while also keeping the snare crunchy. I’ve tried tweaking the kit’s sensitivity since I seem to find myself often riding the mid point between soft and hard hits (seeing as they are an electronic drum’s virtual cymbals), but it’s mostly just a question of practice.
Speeding up the video by about 15% would produce the result I’m looking for here, as in a 3 minute 14 second playtime. Getting there, 1 bpm at a time :)
bleedleaf 