Romey’s Ramblings

Last night Greenfoot played a show over at Herman’s Hideaway (for which I’ll offer some additional thoughts in a later post).  As part of the “New Talent Showcase”, one of the important stipulations were the two dreaded words drummers hate to hear “House Drumset”.

I cringed when I heard the news, and after playing the set last evening, my dread was justified.

I understand the reasons why venue owners and concert promoters want to use House Drumsets.  When you have multiple bands in one evening, you want to do everything to ensure bands get on and off the stage quickly.  Having a large piece of equipment remain stationary makes sense, especially when the drums have mics attached to them.  However, I can guaranteed that the person who made/promoted that decision is not a drummer.

When I’m asked what it’s like playing on a house drum set, I give the analogy of driving someone else’s car in a race: Yes, you’ll be able to drive the car and you know where the gas, brake & steering wheel are, but you don’t know the intricacies of this car. You don’t know how it accelerates, how it breaks, how it handles around curves.  The same things goes with drum sets.  It bothers me that people wouldn’t fathom telling guitar players to play on someone else’s guitar, yet have no problem telling drummers they have to play a drum set that gets pounded night in & night out.

This particular drum set appeared to have a 10″, 13″ & 16″ with Pinstripe heads torque’d pretty high.  What this means is that they were “ping-y” and “ring-”, a stark contrast from my darker ebony heads that produce a warmer tone that works with our music.  In addition, I had to grow used to 3 toms pretty quick, a departure from my 4 toms.  It doesn’t help that I flip the order of my two rack toms - the non-standard configuration probably a bad habit, but it’s what I’ve grown accustomed to.  In my bass drum I have a pillow, which produces a more muffled sound, while allowing a good bounce response.  The House Drumset had no such pillow, and it took an adjustment.

The policy allowed us to bring in our snare drum, pedals & cymbals. At this point, the only thing that was left of the drum set was the bass drum and three toms - which makes me wonder how much time was really saved. 

What owners/promoters don’t understand is that if you give them a staging area to set up their gear off-stage, a good drummer can get their drum on stage and ready to go in roughly the same time it takes a guitar player to set up their amp, pedals, and tune their guitars.

When I was in high school, I played on a foreign drum set each and every day - but school drum sets are different than House Drumsets.  With school drum sets you typically get a period of time to be acclimated to the kit before you play it at anything meaningful.  With the House Kit the sound check is the first chance you get to sit behind the kit.  To borrow a line from A.I., “We’re talking about practice, not the game”.  I’m all about rehearsing on another drum set to help save time - but when you’re essentially putting on an audition it’s pretty lofty to expect drummers to be in their elements in a kit they just started playing.

Like I said, I understand House Drum set may make sense to some, but it doesn’t make sense to drummers.

One of the blogs I read, TheLefsetz Letter shared a compelling perspective from the day that DMB’s LeRoi Moore died.  Very chilling and sad.

LeRoi

As many of you know, drumming is an important part of my life, and something I thoroughly enjoy.  In addition to Greenfoot and playing at my church, I’ve also joined the Wiseacres Jazz Band.  Jazz drumming has been a challenge, but it’s also been a blast.  Between these three groups there are numerous gigging opportunities, so I’ll make an effort to consolidate and list them on a new page on my blog called “Drum Calendar“.  There’s a link for it on the top of the blog as well.  Feel free to check it and see if I’ll be playing close to where you live. I’d love to see you make it out!

My new work laptop arrived at work today, so now I’m in the midst of getting everything set up and running.  I’ve posted in the past about the applications I install by default. But I wanted to offer an updated listed, as things are always changing.

Personal Productivity Apps (covered by work)

• Microsoft Office 2007 Enterprise (Students can get Ultimate for Cheap at MS’s TheUltimateSteal.com)
• Microsoft Visio 2007
• Microsoft Project 2007
• Microsoft Expression 2 Suite
• Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 (Students can get both Expression and VS from MS DreamSpark)

I’ve included the list from last time, and updated what I’ve stopped/started using:

Internet:

• Mozilla FireFox and the following extensions:
  • Del.icio.us Bookmarks
  • AdBlock Plus
  • ForecastFox
  • Web Developer
  • FasterFox
• Mozilla Thunderbird (for personal email)
• Pidgin (for IM)
• Digsby - Awesome client, new test version uses 1/2 the memory Filezilla FTP client
• Office Communicator
• Feed Demon an outstanding desktop RSS reader which recently became free (I was paying for it prior)

Apps & Utilities:

• MS Office 2007
• FoxIt Reader a PDF alternative to the bloated Adobe Reader
• PDF Creator
• Primo PDF
• UltraVNC - The viewer on my work desktop, VNC installed on my home desktop
• Burnaware
• Totally Free Burner
• Launchy - Perfect application launcher for keyboard junkies
• ObjectDock - “Sidebar” application launching
• Windows Live Writer - What I use for blogging
• MRemote - To manage multiple MS Remote Desktops/Terminal Servies, I haven’t had great results with VNC though
• MS LiveMesh
• Evernote

Scripting:

• NotePad++ - Best general purpose editor hands-down

Photos & Multimedia:

• MediaMonkey - Incredible media manager, especially if you have a large library (I paid for this one, but there is a free version).
• Last.fm - Scrobble and track what I listen to (my profile)
• TagScanner - For updating ID3 Tags
• SharePod - Managing my iPod without iTunes
• VLC Media Player - For videos, DVD’s and single-file playing
• Windows Live Photo Gallery - Easy way to manage, edit, tag and share photos (there is Flickr integration as well)
• FastStone Image Viewer - On-the-fly image preview & browsing
• FastStone MaxView
• Paint.NET - More in-depth photo editing

System Utilities:

• Defraggler - Disk Defragmenting
• AutoRuns - eliminate annoying startup programs
• CCleaner - Get rid of crap, cookies and temp files
• Unlocker - Gets you out of those “access denied” binds during deletions
• Process Explorer - Task manager on steroids
• Java Runtime Environment
• Tugzip - Great alternative to Winzip, not quite WinRar, but free and open-source
• Synctoy - to synchronize files between my work desktop and laptop, works great if you’re on the same network

Security:

• Windows Vista Firewall works pretty well, but at home I use Comodo
• AVG Anti-Virus (for the home computer, we use a separate solution at work)

I woke up this morning to the horrifying news that Dave Matthews Band saxophonist LeRoi Moore has passed away.  Not much to say except that this is a tragedy - he went before his time.  Thoughts and prayers go to him, his family and the rest of the DMB.

RIP LeRoi, thank you for all of the wonderful memories and bringing us awesome music.