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My covers/original songs on youtube!
I've always wanted to play drums. I think it was because they were large and expensive and too noisy to practice on and because I was a guitarist/songwriter given to going off to open-mike things that I never did. Also, I could use sampled drums in Acid Pro or MIDI patterns in Cakewalk/Sonar. Actually getting a drum kit never quite came about. I did play a lot of drums on tracks using MIDI operated by keyboard and that was the closest I came. Until now! Because this kit is electric, I can put it through headphones. It's light. If I wanted to carry it about it would involve messing with a lot of wires (not shown in the picture) but I could easily do it. If you do put in through headphones, the bass drum pedal still makes too much of a thud to use it in a house at night. However, it's not that bad if you have a room set aside. If you put the thing through an amp and speakers then they're simply indistinguishable from a conventional kit and just as anti-social. If your amp and speakers are big enough then even more so! The Alesis DM5 has mesh skins which are white giving more bounce so rolls and feel are better. My DM6 rubber ones have greater durability and - as my son has adopted my kit and won't stop rocking on it - this is vital. I've found that the bass pedal slips away across the floor so that after, say, Stairway to Heaven, you might find yourself in the garden or on a neighbour's patio. I solved this by putting a mat under everything. I need a bigger one really.
Ah ha! I've found a way to stop the kit slipping into next week. Aim it at something solid like a desk. Job done! |
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No more Youtube for me! After all the decades I've been writing and teaching music one of my last places to showcase it has been on youtube. I like youtube. You get political pundits, funny stuff, great musicians and some not so great that never make it in the main media. I especially like finding shows on demand. That's brilliant. However, the fact is that whatever you do on youtube some complete twat is going to come along and try to rubbish it. In Pat Condell's case it's with death threats. In my case I got fed up with people slagging off my drumming which was really good. When I got the kit in the picture and had used it for a few hours over about three weeks at Christmas, I happily whacked out 'Born to be Wild' and sang along, stuck it on the tube, and got on with my life, killing whippets, etc. Nearly two thousand people suddenly listened to my whackings and that's a lot more than I really expected or even wanted. On the one hand there were some very nice comments and questions about drumming which - as a guitarist - I obviously couldn't begin to answer - but there were also the vindictive, heckling cracks and they irritated me. One person suggested I had a weak left hand. That's because that isn't the hand my sex life revolves around I expect. Then another reckoned I held the sticks like chickens. It's a great image on reflection and maybe I was being oversensitive. It was probably a good opportunity for fun with Photoshop. However, when someone else reckoned it was nice that they let mentally subnormal people play the drums and sing I realised I was getting fed up with my fifteen minutes of drumming fame! My wife was amazed that they knew I was mentally subnormal. I think - on the whole - my favourite heckle on youtube was probably the one about the chicken drumsticks. But the point is that I didn't see the funny side with the last one. And the bigger point is that - even as I clicked to check the comments I was murmuring to myself 'Some plonker's bound to have said something rude. Don't look if you don't want to upset yourself...' then I did look, saw that someone had realised I was mentally subnormal, and realised that it was quite hard work, looking at youtube, always braced against the next brilliant insult from a youtube online genius. So, I ended the account and went to bed. The bad side of this is that I'd had ninety nine percent positive interactions. Ex-pupils had requested a song about a goldfish that I used to sing to classes. It was mostly worthwhile and a great place to audience music to my guitar lesson students and others all over the world. It isn't like I cared that deeply that some fools like nothing better than to insult people online. There are always hurtful, insensitive clods who think they're wits. I've never played anywhere without spotting them mouthing off whilst most people are all smiles. It's just that being insulted isn't fun. It does little lasting damage but the moment of clicking on the comments and seeing that someone has had a dig is still disappointing and somewhat unpleasant. It's more trouble - I decided - than it's really worth. I can still play my drums really loud and if I want to I can use chickens for sticks. |
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The Mac Band
were on form, November 28th at a newly refurbished pub, The
Kingsbury Arms, in the Minworth area, where they played their
excellent set of covers with great enthusiasm. With their strutting
master-of-camp bass-player pouting and boggling wildly, their
bespectacled wizard keyboardist, many-pedalled lead player,
sledge-hammering drummer, ingeniously clattering and hamming-it-up
percussionist, and excellent vocals, this is a band to book. They're
available for civic functions, military luncheons and policemens'
truncheons. There were young people sitting in the 'impress us for
we're not easily swayed' seats who were leaping around like mad
Morris dancers by the end of the evening. Nearly everyone in the
place joined in on the regulation 'Mustang Sally' as well as
'Valerie', and 'Hey Jude'. Everyone had a great time dancing. My wife had me up... which is unusual these days. They have a website and it's here. |
Thanks to John
Ravenscroft, Mick, etc, for a lovely evening at Atherstone Cricket
Club. We collected lots of crickets, a wicket, two bats and a packet of Twiglets. Once the fire had died down there were plenty of willing volunteers to carry all the stretchers. If John hadn't lost his eye in Vietnam the helicopter ride home would have been smoother but, on the whole, a good time was had by all. Merrykins Winch, proprietor of the Grubby Steak Inn, had never seen such a big chopper so, all things considered, the evening was a victory for cricket, music, aviation and biology. We look forward to doing it all again at a later date. Our eyes being located in the front of our heads we look forward, too, in a general sense at many other somewhat less relevant things. Mr Ravenscroft's hat contains orphans less fortunate than his head. Merry Christmas to each and to all a good one. |
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Latency in Sonar 6 When I recently came to record a song about weeing with my new drums, I ended up revisiting an old issue that I thought I'd seen the back of years ago. The drums, once recorded in Sonar 6, were late. Every beat that I'd played was late - not just one or two! I had to mess about with clip properties and change the start position by about 20. In the audio properties it's possible to nudge the position of your recording slightly and that can make a bit of an improvement but the real question is: why is it even happening? The old answer would have been that I didn't have a kick-ass processor or that I had a slow hard drive not running DMA, or that I didn't have enough RAM, or that my trousers were too tight. These days, machines are whizzy. It just isn't the machines unless you have a cheap and nasty one - then it is. Maybe it's the program? Well, why? Admittedly, Etcetera have done a couple of new versions since Sonar 6 but Sonar 6 isn't really old and it's had two major patches to update it, both of which are installed on my machine. The soundcard then becomes suspect. I have Soundblaster X-Fi Champion Pro Death-Sperm card which was hyped at the time I bought it as being the fastest, most ultimate, super-alien technology known to man. It could calculate the meaning of eternity whilst boiling an egg. It was the dog's. Since buying it, I've found forums slagging off Creative for poor Vista support and many writers in forums who say it isn't even really a soundcard. M-Audio and others, say wry tech-heads, are soundcards but the X-Fi is a noob pretending to be a wanabee in world of fools. Nobody, they say - sucking on their pipes - should go near one without a peg on their nose. Still, I've had Sonar running without obvious latency before so what's happened now to change it? People talk about turning off virus checkers but - unless you're actually running a scan as you record (!) - I think that's probably not vital. If you're actually defragging as you record you're a moron and your bus is waiting. No - the answer - slightly later than I played it - comes ringing across the room: 'DRIVERS' and 'DRIVER SETTINGS'. Sonar 6 sets itself up - having done a sound test to make sure everything is lovely - with a rubbish driver that gives you so much latency that you could go out for a meal with friends and come home before notes actually sound. They were fine under XP but under Vista and Windows 7 you'll be pulling your hair out. The latency is awfuller than poo now. So, in your audio properties, change to ASIO drivers. You have to restart to get them to show up. Having done that, go back into audio properties where you'll now find an ASIO Panel. Use this to get at the 'ASIO Buffer Latency' slider. Sliding it to the left will effectively reduce your latency. All the way to the left will probably stop the recordings from working and you'll get the sound of a Dalek being crushed by a falling tractor. This is where you've set your latency to something like one. It's worth a try, of course, but it won't work. With latency at, say, 49 or 50, and definitely at around 100, then your results will have sloppy timing. A well-played guitar will be out of time. Drums will sound like someone who couldn't count was playing them. My latency is currently 5. Hopefully this is 'it' now. The wee-wee song was a case of struggling against the program and the software in order to get my creativity recorded. We shouldn't have to jump through hoops to make these things work. Tape recorders never did this when multi-tracking. I could have bought something standalone for 175 quid rather than software that makes me fight for the right to be rhythmic. There are various ways to test for latency to see how bad it is. I think that recording a heart-felt performance and dressing up in your frillies 'specially is a bad idea. I suggest merely clicking your fingers or clonking a snare to a metronome for a while and listening to the playback with your ears. If you can hear the playback taps are missing the metronome, that's it. You've got the lurgy. Get into that Asio Panel in audio properties and live a little. FlameDruid Xmas 2009 And you'd think that'd be the end of the story... After reading various forums on this, I've tried various things to get these drums to sync-up and my latest current setting is 4ms on ASIO and chucking a huge buffer of 1024 at it. No read or write caching to disk. No 64 bit enabled. No audio offset manual or otherwise. It seems tight now. Fingers crossed! |
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Song writing - Folk - Roots - Rock - Comedy |