Hi guys
Just inviting you to watch the video of out band Wyre in YouTube
Im just an intermediate drummer, but what i like to share with the group is
viability of electronic drums in drumming and gigging.
Ive yet to get dough and try out the Medeli electronic drums featured in the next thread or maybe they can sponsor me, hehehe. Id love to tinker with it and max out all the sampling capabilities and midi options to connect it to softwares such as Ableton live and Native Instruments' Battery.
Currently I use 2 Roland SPD11 ( this is the old 1990s generation drumpad, the new one is still way expensive ) for my set-up.
There are 3 basic challenges I face in electro percussions / drum pads
1) Linear playing and independence.
2) Playing to a track.
3) Audience impact.
Linear playing and independence. As opposed to using four limbs, but since i dont have a foot pedal trigger, im limited to maximize the sound / use of my drum pads to only two limbs. Its not flashy but its a good study on linear independence on playing hihat, bassdrums, snare, toms and cymbals on a flat linear surface using two limbs.
I learned this years ago in a book " ONE SURFACE DRUMMING" whos author escapes me. The concept is playing musical drum notes i one surface which can push your creativity in maximizing your rudimentary pallete of the RR LL RR / RL RL RR LL, etc... very applicable to drum pads, kajon, and other percussions
Playing to a track. Session drummers and drummers who's bands use sequenced music can relate to this. Its difficult to sync your own "human" time with that of a click track. What I do (as a seq programmer / keyboardist) is look ahead on who i will be playing this song to.. a live drummer, a guitar player... and make the song with them in mind. That is give musical space to these musicians. For the drummer, i would create a " for live drum track only" where the drum programming is minimal giving space for the live drummer to play along. Having a good click reference is key for the drummer so at times (but not always) I do not quantize my programming. Thats one of the key advantages of being a seq keyboardist and drummer at the same time, you know when the song would hype up and speed a little and you know when its gonna drag a little.
For this minimal setup gig, I used a Roland SPD-11 drum pads
for drums and fills. On the second song i just used the drum
pads for fills as i concentrated on playing synths on top of
the sequenced synth programming running Ableton live rewired to Reason 3.0. Songs were sequenced entirely on Reason 3.0.
Audience impact. Ive gigged with our minimal electronica setup since 2003. One of my major challenges is connecting with the audience. So many sounds would come from only 2 people. And we have always had our fairshare of critical musical purists criticizing our musical prowess in gigs.
We totally feel comfortable if its an all Electronica line up bands. This is specially evident when we play along full member bands (vox, bass, guitar, drums, and keys) I swear when we played at Club Dredd akala ko kukuyugin kami sa reaction ng crowd. No bottles were thrown but close to that. The thing is I had to make 2x the animation / theatrics and showmanship to compensate for the laptop performance. I had to make a connection with the audience that what i was doing eventually do trigger sounds.
Hope this article gave an insight in electronic drumming / sequencing in playing live.
I'll see how the thread goes. In future articles Ill discuss, click playing, humanizing drum programming, midi set-ups, syncing with available softwares such as Ableton live, Native Instruments Battery, etc
thanks
boyramos
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