1939 Ensemble

It's saturday night, my GPS isn't working but I am off to see a show! After some roundabout trekking through Portland suburbia I found The Know, a small club on Alberta st. Playing was a two person group called 1939 Ensemble consisting of Jose Medeles (of The Breeders and AKA the guy I bought my drum set from ;) ) and David Coniglio.

Here is a collection of clips from their show. It was pretty awesome. They also played with Old Light but I didn't stay long enough to see them play. Stupid getting up early for work and its negative effects on how late I can stay up any other time. :P

Canada EH!?

So... I can be random sometimes...
About a month ago on a Friday morning I saw a Facebook post that Todd Sucherman (who is one of my favorite drummers) was doing a clinic in Langley, BC on Saturday evening. Sooo.. Of course I want to go. Only problem was (besides being less than a day away to pack/plan) it was about 6 hours away.

I didn't have any time I could take from work so Saturday morning me, my mom and my sister (the poor people I suckered into going with me) left for Canada.
I had never been there so I had a ton of fun navigating (especially since I found out data roaming rates were $16 /MB so I couldn't use my Google Maps on my phone O_o). I had fortunately printed off backup "hardcopy" maps of the places we were going.

The drum clinic was in Langley but everyone else was more interested in visiting Vancouver. So we stayed in a hotel in downtown Vancouver. I found a cheesy tourist's map that was my new best friend for navigating the strange land of Vancouver, BC.

The clinic in Langley was awesome! Todd put on a great show and I wish it would have lasted all night. I even got to have him sign a drum head for me and I got a picture with him *fan girl flail* ...

HEY! I allowed to fan girl flail once and a while :P
*shifty eyes*

After the clinic was over it was back to Vancouver for a short night of sleep. In the morning we did some shopping around Vancouver and headed back home.

Overall, we spent more time driving and traveling than we actually spent in Canada but it was worth it *grin*.

A Little Nerd Pride

So I was having a particularly bad evening. I HATE to drive and I volunteer to pick someone up from the airport without thinking that it would involve lots of panic attack inducing traffic and people. Anyways.. that much aside, On the way back I noticed my seatbelt latch was not working properly and was preventing me from latching the belt. Pissed off and ready to be done with the whole ordeal of driving amongst people, I saved fixing it until I got home.

A little tiny piece of plastic (non-important bit o' plastic) had busted off and fell inside interfering with the latch mechanism. Being too late in the evening to have it looked at by someone who actually knows anything about cars I decided to fix it myself.

What I ended up with was nothing short of brain surgery. My assortment of get-things-out tools on the left I spent a good 40 minutes carefully fishing the tiny piece o' @#$!@ out of the tiny slit in the top of the latch enclosure. I didn't want to take it apart unless it was absolutely necessary.

All of that nerdy effort and the result was this:



Not much to look at but saved me a lot of headache and made me feel a little better that the night wasn't a total bust. Huzzah! Nerd Pride...

EMP (round 2) and Music School stuff from May 2010

I am a little late posting this stuff but back in May I went up to Seattle to visit Randi. We had a ton of fun. We hung out for a while after hours at a Seattle music school she teaches at. I fail at every other instrument on the planet but they had an old beat up Chinese drumset in the corner that has seen one to many 4 year-olds beating on it and hasn't seen a drum key in ages (although it needed more than tuning and we didn't have anything to work on it with lol). The kick drum sounded a bit like GWAAUUUNNNGGGG when you hit it so I ended up sticking my sweatshirt in front of it. Helped a little.. We spent a lot of time just goofing around. She played piano and guitar and I screwed around on the drums. Here is a short clip. I make some silly faces heh. lol.


We also made another trip to the Seattle Experience Music Project. It was a monday morning which was nice because we got to spend a lot of time playing in their music rooms without waiting in lines. I love the DW drum kit they have.


This trip was a lot of fun. We did a lot of goofing off, shopping, playing music, and just hanging out. Don't get to do all those things at once very often.

Rube Goldberg Drum Recording Setup

So I thought it would be kind of neat to be able to record my playing of the drums without the need to have someone actually film or to have to actually record the sound out of the amp with the other room noises. I didn't want to have to obtain any new equipment but I didn't realize how many steps it would require to make it work.

So this is what I roughly ended up with.

The camera being used is a 'bullet' camera that I had from my Zero-G trip a couple years ago. It is velcro-strapped to a mic boom that I had from a Rockband game video spoof that I made a month or so ago. The feed from the camera goes to my mini-dv camera for recording and as a make-shift video monitor along with the remote camera's battery pack and the LANC for triggering the camera. The camera on the boom has a microphone but the only thing I use it for is to help sync the video when I edit later.

The audio comes directly from the Roland TD-6. I am taking both the line out as well as the MIDI into Garageband on the Macbook. I ended up just using the line out audio but having the MIDI data is useful. The music I was playing along with came through an iPod going through the mix-in on the TD-6 which made its way through with the rest of the audio signals to the laptop.

Putting everything together requires just about as many steps..

Exporting the audio out of Garageband to be usable in my video editing software requires converting the .m4a to something else (I used mp3 this time). The video is more complicated. My camera does not support USB/Firewire/etc. output so I had to go a more 'analog' route. Going from the camera to the computer I used a USB tv-tuner and a collection of various adapters and splitters to manually capture the data off the dv tape.

I put the video and Garageband audio into Final Cut Express and sync'ed it up as well as I could. (the version that is compressed via Blogger is slightly worse on the sync than my copy it looks like.) This is what I ended up with. Nothing fancy. But a change from my other videos, there is no drum track other than me. Still have a lot to learn and I kinda forgot where the end of the song was but anyways.. enough of my babbling.. here's the video. The song is a Tommy Igoe practice track.

Randi spinning poi at the EMP

Random short clip of Randi spinning poi whilst we wait outside the Experience Music Project in Seattle.

Faith and the Muse with Soriah

Cool concert, I was there!


(In fact I took the show pics in the link).
http://musicartery.com/showreviews/FATM.php
Go forth and read about it.

^ Soriah (in the pic) is awesomeness.