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.

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.

Massive update of updateyness

Soo I have been kinda slacking off on putting stuff in this thing lately..
A couple weeks ago as part of a work thing I had the opportunity to participate in the regional FIRST robotics competition. I was a volunteer in their "machine shop" area tending to the needs of the ~61 participating highschool robotics teams. It was pretty straight forward.

Something broken: fix it.
Something that doesn't work right: figure it out.

For the most part it was pretty fast paced. Every kind of job from cutting off pieces of wood, plastic, aluminum to figuring out how to make shaft A fit into bearing B with very limited equipment. Fab work, machining, and a very small amount of welding. Our "shop" was basically a few tables with some fab equipment and a motorcycle trailer with a Grizzly mill/drill and a lathe along with a MIG/TIG welder.


It was pretty cool seeing all this happen. People running around everywhere, lots of enthusiasm for the science and technology end of things and just an all around fun (and tiring) time. Wish they had this program when I was in school.

I am working on a video of my footage from this event. I *plan* to get it done soon. But we'll see.


This last weekend was a ton of fun. I visited my friend Randi up in Seattle. During our travels we ended up at the Experience Music Project / Sci-Fi museum. Two things for me to nerd out about. Music and Star Trek.. The sci-fi end of it was pretty cool but I ended up doing most of my nerding at the EMP end of things. Upstairs they had soundproof studios where you could play instruments for 10 minutes at a time (as to not hold up lines forever) and I tried my hand at some real drums. I love my electronic drums to pieces but there is something just downright cool about a real acoustic kit. My friend Randi (who I did my best not to blow her eardrums out with the drum noise) has the nifty talent of being able to play just about any musical instrument she picks up and we spent 10 minutes goofing around. She flip flopped between guitar and bass and I did my best not to mess her up too bad and played the drums. It was pretty awesome. She worked around my in-experience and for a short period of time we sounded not half bad. I wish I had been able to record our goofing around.

If you have never been the the EMP I *highly* recommend it. It is a blast no matter how much (or little) musical ability you have. I have more to post but that's it for now!

Practice, practice, practice...

Well it has been a little less than a month since I decided to try the insanity that is learning the drums. It is a ton of fun. I'm not real good and I usually look pretty dorky but whatever, at least I seem to be improving. With the continued help of my friend Dave I have been learning some of the basics and practicing them daily. One of my biggest challenges seems to be getting my left leg to not effect what my other limbs are doing. Things go much smoother before I try adding all 4 limbs together. :)



BTW: Ask the dog what she thinks of all this...
















I thought I was my worst critic... :D

Roland Drums

I got my new drum stuff today *happy dance*
*runs off to play*