Drums 2


Oct 22, 2013

Tonight I practiced drums until I felt like I could fairly easily reproduce all patterns given to me by my instructor at low speed. Some of them I can do at full speed (which for me is around 100-120 bpm). Of course not everyone agrees that full speed is 100-120 bpm, but that's another discussion. Tomorrow when I take my second drum lesson, I should be past the eighth note feet and the first beginning rudiments. I recorded the practice with arecordmidi (alsa's command-line midi recorder) and Rosegarden. If I clean these up or perhaps after my next review of those beats, I should have a handful of very good rock beats. I have seen these beats repeatedly in Rock Band songs because they are so common to rhythm. I've decided to do 2 hours of lessons in November despite planning a long vacation around Thanksgiving.

So I decided to spend a few minutes recording a quick jam, kinda like the ones I've been doing at the EMP. I only recorded for 4 minutes (a song at most) but I spent a lot of time listening to it. I decided to quantize it to 16th notes (something I can totally do but not totally reliably) and listen to it. It's a lot better than the original in many respects. The rhythm really comes together and the worst part about it is that the quantizing will cause there to be gaps that drop the beat for a short bit. That can be fixed really easily. Then I quantized to 8th notes (something I am quite good at now, but am still working on) and it turned out really good. There are the rests which make the rhythm drop from time to time, but if you only listen for things you like, you get a quite reasonable drum session. There are different sections and no single rhythm last more than a few measures. That's by design. I don't want people to think of my beats as being regular. Of course there's rhythm to be maintained which is why I have a pretty steady backbeat with the hi-hat and snare for many parts. What I was really exercising was my control over choice of rhythm, bass variety, and breaking the tempo. Why would I want to change the rhythm rapidly? I'm trying to give the listener something to distract them. They aren't going to get a steady beat from me. Of course part of art is being able to do anything and choosing to do something you want to do. So that's why I'm practicing and taking lessons. Once I can keep a beat and mess around, I will make some pretty crazy stuff. Until then you are stuck with this. Since I want to conserve disk space on my server, I'm not making flac or mp3 available, just Ogg Vorbis and midi. Let me know if you'd like either of the other formats and I'll post them. As usual, these files are available under the Creative Commons Attribution license.

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Drums


Oct 6, 2013

I went to the EMP again yesterday. I blogged about the first trip, so what's new? I played by myself. This is my third and fourth time on a real drumset. I've signed up for my first drum lessons this week at Seattle Drum School through their very reasonable Groupon. I plan to take a handful of lessons so that I can get some direction. I've been invited to play in a band. That makes two informal invitations and I'm currently not very good at the drums. But I'm kinda destined to become decent at the drums, I can honestly say that it'll happen. So these early recordings are going to become really valuable, right? Nope. They're going to become Creative Commons.

Creative Commons License
2013-10-05 16:11:24 by Javantea is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.
Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at http://sono.us/cc.

2013-10-05 16:11:24

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Experience Music Project


Sept 24, 2013

My friend Colin and I went to EMP this morning. We both became members at the dual price. We went and played a jam. I played a real drumset for the first time in my life. I've been practicing on my electronic drums for years but this was my first real drum set. I'm a natural. It's just like playing electronic drums but you have to play as lightly as possible in order to not hurt your ears. I didn't get a recording of my first playing (that would have been cool) but I got two recordings of Colin and I playing. They charge $6 to burn a CD with your 10 minute jam on it. If you bring a recorder, you don't get the beautiful mixed version, but it is a cheap way to get that beautiful sound.

Below are download links of the awesome recording.

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Music for you


Dec 27, 2012

First of all, check out AI3 because that's really important and fun. I've added two features. See if you can find them. Google has started indexing me slowly. I hope they don't spend too much time before they decide that it's not worth a high ranking. CPU time isn't free. I've been slowly promoting words and sentences that I like. You can tell that my favorite vocabulary is very biased toward things that I think about but don't get the opportunity to speak about. That will change as my power of linguistics improves.

Now for the music, 2012 December 27 [flac]. I actually made this today in a few hours. Don't expect too much from it, it's an experimental 3 instrument song, (plucked instrument, bass, and electric snare) played on keyboard with Rosegarden, ZynAddSubFX, and JACK. It shows the progress of my musical composing skill, still quite amateur. The plucked instrument (aka guitar but it wasn't really a guitar so much) is by far the best part of the song. I rerecorded the first 4 seconds because the original patch (which is quite good in the middle and end) started off with a cacophony of horrible discord. You might say that the entire thing is a cacophony of discord but I rather like it. The bass was put in when decided that the plucked instrument had too many silences that I didn't feel like removing. So I figured out how to make the bass work and then just hit 5 keys over and over again in any rhythm and melody that made sense. It doesn't sound very good at high volume, so I took it to its lowest audible volume so that it'd only pick up the silences and a bit the rest of the time. The drums were quite easy copy and paste and took almost no time to work with. I tried to do a really fast paced drumming session and it totally didn't work at all with the slow plucked instrument, so I chucked it. The end is rather abrupt because it ends on a short high note preceded by another high note instead of a long low note. I left it that way because endings are overrated and this is a quick experimental song and should sound like it. The middle contains quite a few silences which don't make sense and you get a little bit of the bass and snare and then a few more notes. Once I have more practice, I will certainly make my songs a lot cleaner. I wonder how many rests a rock song can get away with. Maybe 2 if it's long. Also note that the entire song is in the key of C. I haven't figured out keys well enough to use any other key than Major C so it sounds like I don't know anything about music. Well, I don't. I have spent maybe 6 months of free time in my entire life working on music and this is the output. Half of that was practicing keyboard at age 10 or so. Some of it was practicing drums with RockBand (1, 2, 3, and The Beatles) which I didn't use at all because this song didn't seem to call for it. I spent a few months of free time in 2003-2004 working on CSound, SoundTracker and MusE. Skills you learn in one music editor transfer fortunately. In CSound I created a ton of original samples which I didn't use in this because ZynAddSubFX has completely changed the way that I deal with instruments. If you're interested, there are other samples of my music here on this blog:

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