Those crazy japanese

And I guess it's time for the first food related post to make it's way in here.

I bought some new cooking books, to inspire me when I move into my own place again in a couple of weeks. One of them is 15 minute meals, another is 4-ingredient meals (meals you can make with only buying 4 ingredients. There's some quite tasty stuff in there. The other night I made Peppered shark, with a greek salad and lemon potatoes. And the other night I made teriyaki beef (that was one of the 4-ingredient ones).

I also bought a Japanese cookbook though, and can't wait to start serving up some delights from that one.

Mmm food.

Syncopation of the nation

Another week gone, another lesson down. Progressing rather smoothly now, playing along with the 1-2 minute tracks and only making 1 or 2 mistakes at the most, so happy with that.

Moving on to some tricky syncopated stuff now, telling the left hand to do what I want when I want is a bit annoying, but I've got some snare exercises to even it out. Starting to get into some 4-way independence stuff too (not in the book, but my instructor wants me to practice), basically adding extra bits over the examples in the book, so each limb is doing something different.

Once I get better at that, I should progress quite steadily I think! In a couple of weeks, I'll be into funk drumming. Looking forward to that.

Calling all bass players

My lesson went great too. My ABC of drumming book is completed and signed. I can file that away now.

I can now work through my Rhythm Section Drumming book. It has a cd to play along with, and I'm allowed to do the first track. I play along with the bass part, so if I knew a bass player, I could say "Hit it" and jam away. Time to get busy!

Snared one

So, I went to my drum lesson early, keen to purchase the previously mentioned snare drum. They didn't have any in stock, but they had the next model up (a bigger one). The guy said they were about to go on sale anyway, so would you like it for half price?

Would I? hehe :)

It was down from $949 to $465. Bargain of the year! Probably cheaper than the one I wanted anyway. I paid for my kick drum also, but that won't be here for a week or two.

Deluxe.

Keep walking

Thanks to Matt, I now have a CD Walkman. Old school you might think, but it will serve a great purpose.

Music books come with CD's to play along. My drum kit takes an auxiliary input for a CD player, or MP3 player (I use my iPod too). This enables you to play along with backing music through the headphones. A CD Walkman should make my practicing much easier. And save me having to rip all the cd's to mp3. And since it has Shock protection, I may be able to mount it on my kit, and not worry about skipping. We shall see if that works :)

99 bottles of beer on the wall

I have 99 preset drum kits on my electronic kit. Obviously some of them are of not much use to me, but even after I've been using the same kit for a long time, suddenly another one sounds better. I guess it really depends what type of music you are playing. I can see about 20 probably which I may want to use regularly, so I need to move them all to the beginning of the preset numbers, so it's easy to flip between them.

Maybe I shall do that on the weekend.

Renegades of funk

I've started flipping through the Rhythm Section Drumming book for my next lesson tomorrow. Lots of goodness in there, and a backing CD so I can be ultra cool. Looks like a very comprehensive book, I think it will take at least 3 months to finish that one. There's lots to practice. I recognised one of the beats in the first section as the beat from Faith No More's, "We care alot". Ace.

New kids on the block

Here's the snare drum and kick drum I was talking about before. I can just replace the snare pad with this one, and immediately I have a snare with a proper mesh head. The kick drum also allows for two pedals, and should feel a bit more realistic then the one I have at the moment.

The wedding singer

I can now officially play at weddings for money. Well that's what my instructor told me. Now that I've got these beats in my repertoire:

Waltz, Swing, Shuffle, Polka, Tarantella, Cha Cha, Rhumba, Beguine, Bossa Nova, Mambo & Samba.

That's tabtastic

MXtabs is back up again. After the RIAA went on a spree of shutting down music tablature sites (reason: tabs are breaking copyright and deprive the artists of sheet music money), there was almost nowhere to find drum tabs for my favourite bands.

Now they are back up, with this letter:

...The entire purpose of Mxtabs was to aid musicians in learning their instruments. Simple guitar, bass, and drum tabs, even if inaccurate, are invaluable in helping people to learn the rudiments of their instrument. In no way was the site designed to circumvent copyrights, in fact, Mxtabs has linked to Sheetmusicplus from its inception, asking users to buy the official sheet music (when available). By December 2005, Mxtabs accounted for over $3000 in sheet music sales monthly, via affiliate links to Sheet Music Plus....

Rhythm & Gangsta

I have just purchased this book entitled "Rhythm Section Drumming" for my next few lessons. It's 138 pages, so may take a while to get through and cover everything.

I feel like a newborn

With my lessons, I wanted to start from the very basics again, and work my way up from there, hoping to do everything the right way this time :) Even simple things like reading music, counting, time signatures etc I had not really ever done. My first book (pictured left), went through all this and more. I learnt/relearnt note values, practising simple rudiments, quarter notes, eighth notes, eighth note triplets and sixteenth notes. I have just finished it and have now learnt a bunch of beats at the end. Now I feel like I'm getting somewhere!

4th birthday

After 3 or 4 years of self taught on and off drumming, I decided to take lessons to improve at an increased rate. 5 lessons/weeks in, and I feel like I am at least twice as good already.

I own a Roland V-Club electronic drum kit (pictured left). I plan to modify this with a new snare, and kick drum, and double pedal setup over the next few weeks. That should see me through my advancements in skill for the next year or two. I'll post photos of the additions soon.