David's Grip

Okay...has David ALWAYS played traditional grip and I'm just noticing it now?



What the fuck is wrong with me?

Ok, if this is true it explains a bunch...because he always has the hella whip thing going on the snare and I always wonder how that is possible to whip that much. But maybe it is just that he doesn't use matched grip. It bothers me that I've never noticed this before.

Other weird thing about this video...Joe has a mic.

UPDATE:
Observe...1988...matched grip.

Okay. I feel better now. What is it about old farts that makes them think that they have to switch to traditional grip? It's like age-induced jazz disease.

The Theory of Repetition

I have this theory about myself...though it is probably true of most humans in general. If I listen to a song enough times I will like it.  There are songs or groups that you like the first time out. And there are songs or groups that you'll never like no matter what. But for everything in between...listen enough and you'll like it. It's why people hear a song at wedding that they hated in high school and go "I love this song." It is because it is familiar.

I've been following RR over the last year or so not because I loved the music...but because I admired the artists as people. But today...just now...listening to a live recording session after a week of hearing the songs several times in a row...I began to like their music. Going to a show tonight and it'll all be familiar and appropriately beloved.

This probably somehow reduces the value of music...that if you listen enough you like. But I guess I'm just happy to be happy.

The Strangest Weekend of My Life

So I have two blogs currently...in addition to twitter and facebook...which end up being kind of blogs. I try to keep the blogs anonymous as possible and to not advertise them around. The writing is really just meant for me, my long-distance partner, and the odd person that I've never met on the internet to stumble upon and maybe enjoy. I try to keep the blogs topic-focused and not veer off into too much navel gazing. They are really tools of record-keeping for me to mark progress and track resources. I try not to link between the two blogs...or link to them at all.

I recognize that all of this pretend caution is for naught and that some day something on the internet will destroy me. It has happened before and it will happen again. And again.

So it is in passing here that I'll note that on Saturday I spent much of the day with KeD and her current bandmate (one hell of a guy) and that she slept on my couch. I have gone into nausiating detail about this on the other blog and will leave it there. And probably regret having written it someday. I kind of already do. But it feels like it happened in a dream and I'm still trying to process it into concrete. I don't mean a dream like "it was a dream come true"...I mean like I feel like I took some kind of LSD or something and this all happened in that kind of haze. Like watching a movie of yourself. Lack of sleep, lots of driving, and pet health emergencies over the last several days have probably contributed to the effect.

Item of pertinent interest to this blog...she liked the color of my Billy Sheehan knock off bass.

The big take home...I am a little boring but perhaps not too scary of a person. And people are people. And I ought to keep focusing on doing all this music stuff and not worry too much about how well I'm doing or what it all means or where I'm headed. Just keep trying and hopefully having a good time. And try to be nice to people...to everyone...not just the people who seem important at the moment. Everyone ends up being important in the end and you won't know who until it's too late. And remember that, even though it doesn't always SEEM this way, everything is always better done without alcohol. At least anything that matters. And the secret is...everything matters.

Bass Lessons: Week 0, Preamble

It begins again.

I keep trying to take music lessons or classes over and over and not being able to stick it out over and over. This has been been true the length of my musical experience except in those times when I was forced to take lessons by parents.

I'm not sure if I have an inability to stick with structured activities or if I don't like being helped by others or what. But it is chronic.

I met a gal at GRC who seemed personable enough, and so I'm going to take a few bass lessons from her and see how it goes.

I'm not entirely sure what I want out of lessons.


I think that I learn best when I have things written out in tab + hear a recording and/or see a video/person playing it. I feel like I'm kind of a slow learner. I tend to take things away to a dark corner and mull and fiddle and eventually get it...but in lessons (mostly with respect to drums since I've not taken many bass lessons) I've often had a sort of performance anxiety. The teacher will say...do this...and then I have to figure it out right there on the spot, which freaks me out...and then whatever we did usually isn't written down or recorded so I can't refer to it later and practice. So I get discouraged.
What I'd like going forward is to feel like I can hold my own in your average kind of rock band. Like I could answer a Craigslist ad for a bass player and not be laughed out of the room. Nothing fancy, but maybe a bit more than the root note based stuff I've always fallen back on. I'd like to be able to write simple but effective parts for original songs...and be able to work out more songs by ear and not need the tab hints so much.

I've recently just begun to teach myself a bit about playing "in the box" and I sit down and jam with friends who write originals once in a while. I feel like that's helping and I'd like to build on that ability to write complimentary bass parts. I think that I understand scales and the theory behind them...but I don't have that stuff memorized or well applied to the fingerboard. And all of that theory feels overwhelming.

So we'll see how it goes.

I feel like my potential on the bass is greater than my potential on drums. It comes more easily to me and is more fun for that reason. It's also a lower profile job than drums and I like that.

Cymbals...the final frontier

So the kit is coming together nicely. I'm happy with the drums, snare, pedal, throne, and hardware. But the cymbals still need tweaking.

I love my Zildjian New Beat hi hats. Those are keepers. I also love my 12" Wuhan splash.  And the Sabian AA crash (17"?) is also great.

I'm not totally happy with my ride selection and I'd like a different 16" crash. The Paiste 16" Colorsound, while a great cymbal, doesn't really sound right in the kit anymore. I cracked my CB 16" crash that I'd been using as a kind of China. As for rides, I've got a 302 Paiste which is kind of crap and Sabian AA El Sabor.  The El Sabor also doesn't sound quite right.

I think that I've decided that I like Sabian cymbals...preferrably the AA series. You don't see them around much though...usually you see AAX or HHX or HH.  So I'm keeping my eye out for an AA 16" crash and an AA ride used. No rush.

The Snare

So when I bought the Sonor I noticed a bunch of sympathetic snare wire vibrations due to the massive and awesome bass drum. I read somewhere that you could minimize this by getting snare wires with the center wires removed. These were harder to find than I thought, but I got a Puresound 16 wire snare with the middle taken out for a reasonable price online. I installed it and found to my dismay that, while it did cut down on sympathetic vibrations, that it essentially was impossible to get a clean "snare off" sound. The things virbrated like crazy in the worst possible way when the snares were off. I think this might be because essentially you are tightening the wires from the center...and that's where there's no wires. So the sides kinda hang loose all the time. I'm sure that a good drum tech could fix the problem, but I couldn't...so I took them off and put the old wires back on. I also put on a new reversed dot controlled sound and the snare sounds and feels great.

Related, this snare...my maple Pacific (by DW) has a chronic detuning problem. I've since read that this is really common with snares. Literally the lugs will fall out onto the ground after just one session of playing (I'm worried about forgetting this and losing some screws someday). I bought some tuning locks a while back to help with this, but think that I was using them wrong. So I put the entire set on the bottom lugs and we'll see how it goes. I went to Guitar Center to buy a second set for the top and they didn't have them any more. They also didn't have any snare straps (string, but not straps) or bass drum pedal straps (I wanted a spare). I went over there to be nice and buy local and all that crap (though it isn't really buying local) and they didn't even have what I needed. Same thing happened at Office Depot. All of this makes me want to always just shop online. Which I know isn't very progressive, but what am I supposed to do?

The maple Pacific snare does look great with the maple Sonor kit and I think it sounds good too. It's a slightly different color, but totally complimentary.

Floor Tom Leg Memory Locks.

I've been looking for floor tom leg memory locks with no luck. My Sonor has 12 mm floor tom legs (the black Pulse kit has more like 9mm legs). I had never thought of memory locks for floor tom legs, but it came up while I was looking for a replacement memory lock for the 3/4 inch tom mounts for the Sonor (the replacement parts from Gilbralter KIND of work, by the way, except the tab doesn't fit in the hole). I remember borrowing someone's kit once and they had used duct tape to create tom leg memory locks. This worked great for them...but horribly for me because I couldn't adjust the height (and he was tall). Adjustable floor tom leg memory locks would create the best of both worlds...easy set up OR adjustment. Anyway, floor tom leg memory locks seem to exist, but don't seem to be easy to find, especially not as replacement parts.

On some forum I read that a guy used hose clamps. I wondered if this would lock terrible and might scratch the legs or the tom. But I was looking at hose clamps for another home repair project and so I picked up three of the smallest clamps that they had at the store. They just fit on my finger.

 I wrapped each tom leg in old rubber bicycle tube (to avoid scratching the chrome, if there is any) and put the clamps on.

They work great and there's nothing that seems in danger of scratching the tom finish. It doesn't even look that bad. The below pic is upside down. The locks are such that the legs can easily be removed entirely for storage or transport.