Auditioning the electronic drumkit...

John came with his gf on Friday night to audition the drum kit and also check out the recording space. A few thoughts came from this as we dug further into the limitations of electronic percussion in addition to further figuring out how we will proceed with our efforts together.

There are a few things that came up - most items can be remedied but a couple things cant. The double kick pedal (since it's a single kick drum kit) I have is a DW3000, which is a bit massive and exhibits issues related to Newton's Conservation of Momentum issues. John has a very nice set of kick pedals, so in that case we can work it out.

Other items - some notable, some remediable...

• levels and sensitivities of each drum trigger - remediable, just need to take the time
• tensions of drum heads affecting the pitch of the note produced - not sure... don't think it's remediable
• heights and angles of the toms, as well as how closely packed they are - remediable
• glitching of the module when more than one or two pads/notes played simultaneously - not sure
• drum skin action (a bit dead like overly dampened drums) - don't think this is remediable
• a few of my cymbals kinda suck (this is my own comment) - remediable
• being able to take a MIDI/Audio feed using the USB 2.0 cable from the module
• so this is interesting since I've just scratched the surface of the module. My thoughts below

The item mentioned above - USB signal conveyance - is an important item for me. John feels that we can use my kit for all the more experimental tracks or sounds, and that's fine for me. But from a studio kit importance, having the USB cable to convey the audio and MIDI to the workstation is very important. It's an important feature to minimize latency - potentially - since I'll be recording the cymbals/hihats using a pair of overhead condensers plus one close mic on the hihat. Latency needs to be at zero for this to work, and if its not, then the kit is not terribly functional for me. Need to work on this one...

Final thoughts - John is getting his 2nd Zoom portable 16 channel recorder shortly (in shipping) and we will get his studio set up for sound once it arrives. I've been setting up my Ultrabook as an ultra portable DAW, migrating projects with my USB2.0 external drive from the workstation DAW to the UB. I will then be able to sync up the UB with the two Zoom units and take audio right off the board so to speak. This will be the primary means to recording drums for all the material especially the past stuff.

New material - we'll collaborate with the Spacemuffins in the garage studio, building decent bed tracks to work with especially for the longer more involved songs/compositions. As mentioned much earlier and in other forums, I'm planning on writing at least one very long piece of music integrating many ideas into a single symphonic and progressive piece. The ideas though will also live on as separate standalone songs/compositions that will help to fully realize many of the particularly good ideas into digestible songs... not pop songs, but simply easier to process for the listener. There is so much temptation to take bits and expand on things in the context of the larger piece so that each bit becomes it's own feature, but the danger is the larger piece will then be far too busy and lack an overall focal point with so many themes jostling for attention. I've been jamming on ideas on my acoustic 12 string, as well as pulling stuff from out of  the more interesting stronger bits from the Onion and subsequent works, but nothing has stood out as a primary motivating melody yet. As time goes on and the musical portion of my brain shakes off lethargy/atrophy - really my fingers still need to do the same - once the atrophy is reversed ideas will happen all the time. Now that equipment is not a concern, just getting the time in the woodshed will make shit happen :)