Media - drums - Page 2 | virtualwolf.org

Sans Metronome

And the song is finished! I wrote up a full blog post with the details: https://blog.virtualwolf.org/sans-metronome/

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Posted on 12 January 2025, 21:03

I was in the office today for another post-work jam session! It was a lot of fun, I just stuck with the drums this time and we played along to a number of songs before we did some general improvising. The best thing about drums is that I don't actually need to know how the drums REALLY go, I can just get the tempo right and off I go. We played Creedence Clearwater Revival's Bad Moon Rising, and a number of other songs I've never heard of, but it was great.

There was a non-work university friend of one of the work people on vocals, and while we were improvising and she didn't have anything to do I asked if she could take a video of us, longer than the six seconds from a couple of months ago. Next time I think I need to get it taken from where the speaker is actually pointing to because the sound is not great in this as the speaker was over by the bass player and pointing out to the right, oops. I also managed to get the recording done RIGHT before 8pm which is when the lights in the building automatically turn off, hence why it goes dark right at the end. 😅

(We have a big multi-channel mixer that I could probably hook something into and record the proper audio straight from the instruments, which I think I might need to look into at some point...)

me friends video drums in the office jamming

Posted on 5 December 2024, 22:04

I'm Staying Home This Christmas

As part of our #LPlatePlayers collective, our esteemed leader @[email protected] wanted to write a Christmas song for #RememberingGeordie since he was such a mad fiend for all things Christmas. It was very collaborative, she did the base song with vocals and details of the key and chord changes, and then the rest of us piled in for the various parts and she pieced it all together and mixed it. I offered to do both bass guitar and drums, and am so impressed at how well the song turned out!

I'm definitely getting a feel for the drums at this point, for the song it was pretty much free reign other than wanting to ensure there was an open/close hi-hat at the last beat of the bar, and of my original take there were only a couple of minor improvements that @[email protected] suggested (well, that and a bit of quantisation needed), plus some back and forth figuring out how the intro should go. For the bass guitar, my timing was quite good and there was only very minor quantisation needed. For both instruments, I ended up recording it in sections rather than attempting to go through the whole song in one go, and that made it FAR more manageable.

I'm also going to get the original stems for the song and see if I can turn it into "I'M STAYING HOME THIS CHRISTMAS (DEEP TECHNO MIX)". 😈 (Or at least, some sort of electronic version anyway; we'll see how good my Logic Pro skills are. 😛) I did something similar a couple of years ago and it was great fun.

music drums audio bass guitar

Posted on 23 November 2024, 14:50

A photo of an electronic drum kit sitting in a corner, with a mesh snare and three mesh tom pads on it, and four black cymbals. Three of the cymbals are noticeably larger (and also cleaner) than the fourth one, and they're the new ones.

It's aliiiiiive!

Three crash cymbals are go, and the drum module is smart enough to assign a different crash sound to each of the inputs (the default single crash that it came with, the extra "Crash 2" input, AND the third one that's just marked "AUX") if you have it set to the correct cymbal type, so no mucking around needed.

our house darkroom new toys drums

Posted on 16 October 2024, 18:17

A photo of an electric guitar with a white body, black pick guard, and a maple fretboard and headstock. It's VERY handsome.

A photo of an electronic drum kit sitting in a corner, with a mesh snare and three mesh tom pads on it, and three black cymbals. Two of the cymbals are noticeably larger (and also cleaner) than the third one, and they're the new ones.

New gear day! 🎉 A Fender Player II Stratocaster, and upgraded cymbals for my drum kit (CY-16RT ride cymbal and CY-14CT crash cymbal, both Roland).

Mannys only had one of the crash cymbals in stock so I'm still waiting on the second to arrive, as well as a Boss ME-90B bass guitar multi-effects pedal. I haven't had a chance to play with the Strat yet, but MAN the new cymbals are nice, they have a far better feel to them than the stock ones, and the new ride cymbal has three trigger zones on it, so you get the bell sound in the very middle too.

I'm currently trying to see if I can fit another cymbal mount on there to use with the last input on my drum module so I can make use of one of the now-spare CY-8 cymbals as a third crash... 🤔

our house darkroom new toys guitar drums

Posted on 14 October 2024, 13:58

A wide-angle photo of six people sitting around a somewhat messy music area in our office. I'm on drums, we have someone on bass guitar, two guitarists, a keyboardist, and a vocalist.

Yessss, jam session was excellent! We had a group of other people who were using the space just before us and some of them stayed back and ended up playing with us as well.

I turned out to be the only drummer so only played that, but got some compliments on it which I was stoked about! Especially given that the other people were waaaay above my level in terms of guitar or bass skills, haha. They were actually playing some songs, none of which I had the remotest idea of how to play on drums and some of them which I hadn't even heard, but I was able to put down a good beat at the right speed and it worked out really well. We even ended up doing some bluesy-sounding thing at the end where I did a shuffle beat and it sounded fantastic!

music darkroom friends drums in the office jamming

Posted on 26 September 2024, 20:34

A photo of an older woman with grey hair sitting at an electronic drum kit in the middle of playing. There's an iPad in the middle with the app "Melodics" open, indicating with coloured squares which drum pad should be hit when.

Currently teaching @yayKM's mum how to play drums.

She's a lot better with the coordination than my mum is, but then I found out that she used to play the full church organ that involves using both your hands and feet!

our house darkroom family drums

Posted on 2 September 2024, 10:49

A photo of the corner of a room that has a whole bunch of musical equipment in it: there are three electric guitars and a bass guitar sitting in a stand at the left, two very large speakers, an electronic drum kit, a MIDI keyboard, and a full size piano at the right that is painted in extremely garish bright colours.

A photo of five smiling people looking at the camera. There's me, a man with short brown hair and a short red beard holding a bass guitar, a tall man with shoulder-length hair sitting down holding an electric guitar, two men sitting at the drum kit each holding one drum stick each, and a woman with long brown hair holding a bright pink ukulele.

The reason I was in the office today was because it turns out we have a whole set of musical instruments in the "wellness room", so a bunch of us decided to get together to play some music!

It was SO FUN! Only two of us could play guitar or bass so I mostly stuck to one of those, and we ended up with two people playing drums together (one person would do the hi-hat and the other would do the kick drum because nobody was coordinated enough to do both together, lol) and we absolutely got into a groove and were rocking out and it was so excellent. It's planned to be a regular thing and I'm so looking forward to the next one.

(There is a group of Very Talented people who get together and play most Wednesdays and Fridays but that was way too intimidating for us so we did our own little thing.)

selfie me work darkroom friends guitar drums bass guitar in the office jamming

Posted on 15 August 2024, 20:35

Metal Tones in A Minor Pentatonic

I made another short little song! This one is 100% me playing all the instruments (guitar, bass guitar, drums, keyboard) rather than doing it via loops, and I'm very pleased to report that I didn't need to quantise the drums at all, I smashed the timing (the same can't be said for the guitar and bass guitar, they both need a little bit of nudging, though I didn't realise they needed it until I had recorded the drums).

The guitar was a bit frustrating to get right, I had most of it but the little "solo"-esque bit in the middle required quite a few takes. I also subsequently realised that if you have the loop mode on and are recording something, it'll just keep looping over and recording the whole looped section as a different take, so I did that for the drums and ended up recording it like nine or ten times through then listened to them back and picked the best. The guitar and bass sounds come from Two Notes' "Genome" software, I had quite a bit of fun dialing in the sound, and I used my Epiphone SG Standard rather than the JIVA for a bit of change.

guitar drums audio epiphone sg standard bass guitar midi keyboard two notes genome

Posted on 5 May 2024, 15:05

Noodling in A Major

Both my guitar AND bass guitar course have simultaneously gotten into learning about chords and songs "in the key of" and it'd been a while since I'd tried to record anything, so I did some noodling! Pretty happy with it, I used my bass amp plugged into the audio interface along with Two Notes' "Wall of Sound" plugin, and for the guitar I plugged straight into the audio interface and gave Two Notes' new "Genome" plugin a bit of a go. Clean for the rhythm guitar and an edge-of-breakup one for the lead.

(My timing is definitely getting better, but I still used Logic Pro's quantisation function to pull everything FULLY into time instead of constantly recording it over and over until I got it right. 😛)

music guitar drums audio torpedo wall of sound bass guitar ibanez jiva10

Posted on 11 February 2024, 18:58