Musical Instruments

I Need A New Drum Kit—In Praise Of Ringo & Art

02.22.2010

I Need A New Drum Kit—In Praise Of Ringo & Art My drum kit she is a gone. And she’s a no coming back. My loverly Ludwig Silver Sparkle set (aka ‘Old Ringo’ appears to have been ‘liberated’ from the storage space I had kept it at during my recent studio renovation. I am told that it is not insured for the current market value of $1,500 smackers. So it’s time to mourn. Not just for the dough-re-mi. And not just because it was my pal for several decades. But rather because it was a critical part of my education [...]

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What About The Gear/Equipment You Play?

01.2.2010

FAQs, Musical Instruments, Recording

A catalog of rants on the gear I use and make, including the studio are here. Specific Instruments Used On Albums Studio Details Jeez man, not another rant? But can we talk? Can we talk? I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: it really doesn’t make that much difference for what I do. Yeah, maybe it makes a difference for the true virtuosos, but frankly, I’ve always had to be a ‘ham and egger’ switching between so many instruments on so many gigs that I guess I just learned to make do with whatever was about. The funny [...]

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The House That Became A Studio

05.10.2009

Musical Instruments, Recording

STUDIO I: The Wiring When I bought my house, I realized that there was no way I could afford to put in a proper studio ‘room within a room’ of proper size for really good acoustics right away. On a different track, my house has a crawlspace. When I went under the house to run a network cable between two rooms I decided, since I had to be down there anyway, to create structured cabling throughout the entire house so that every house could have Ethernet (I’d had very bad performance issues with WiFi.) Now after living there for a [...]

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The Gear

05.10.2009

Musical Instruments, Recording

I get a number of questions re. what I play and how I do things. This article is basically a list of the instruments I play, the songs you’d hear them on and some links to more information on them. KEYBOARDS Kimball Upright Player Piano. I got this from a girlfriend who owed me money. When she walked out she left me a note saying I should take it in lieu of payment. Seriously. But a piano is a good thing to have. It’s a crappy piano. I had it tuned by a friend who remarked, “Well I’d say 62 [...]

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Bamboo Percussion

03.15.2009

Musical Instruments

My neighbour has a totally annoying and invasive bamboo forest which is constantly threatening my garden. As part of my strategy to fight this monster I began cutting this stuff back and turning the dead into musical instruments. I’ve made a range of things from Boobams to Kung Fu style transverse flutes to bigÂ clavÃ©s like the ones you see polynesians beating on at those touristy Luaus. Making musical instruments is fun and educational. As a starting point I would suggest checking out the action-packed little book ‘Vibrations’ by David Sawyer. It’s pretty much the Bible for DIY noise making [...]

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