New Year, New Gear
First post of the year is gonna be a good one! For an early birthday present for my 15th, we got and assembled this beast of a kit. Luckily its not new so we didn't just burn all of our money haha. This was $800 for the rack, the five big mesh headed drums, four drum pads, all the wiring and they even threw in some sticks and their pedals. This baby is a hybrid kit that has not one but two modules, one for the 'basic kit' (the snare, toms, hi hat, kick and two cymbal pads), and then one for the cowbell pad under the hi hat, the side snare, and the two drum pads hooked up for cymbals. In short, this monster will rock your face off with a single glance and wont even break a sweat doing it. Compared to my old kit:
it is superior in almost every aspect. The only downsides are attempting to squeeze behind the kit and all. Of. The. Stinking. Cables.
Aside from Cable City, population: me, it is extremely fun to jam out and interestingly hard to convert your original playing style since there's now a cowbell, a side snare, another tom and two more cymbals. The dynamics of this new kit are better, the rebound, feel, throne position, and size are now much more accurate. But this amazing kit makes it really hard NOT to jam, especially when your trying to get your doubles or paradiddle grooves down!
Speaking of which, I'm now learning the inverted paradiddle groove, so instead of the sticking pattern being R L R R L R L L, its now R R L R L L R L. R being right hand hits and L being left hand hits of course. Now factor in the accents (^) and the kick drum (K), both of which will be next to a letter if they're played together, and then it becomes KR R L R^ KL L R L^. If you maybe add a jazz swing, some poppy fills and up the tempo, you've got yourself some Travis Barker or even Carter Beauford level grooves!
Aside from confusing drum language, I've got even more new and better gear, and I promise this is the last picture:
This is the EL Cajon, or the 'Electronic Layered' Cajon. This thing is pretty nifty, its has a much tighter tone than my other custom cajon. My old one's bass tone had snare buzz and the edge was getting quiet, but with this one thats a thing of the past! It can be a completely acoustic cajon or if you fiddle with the settings and volume bars, you can have it make different sounds for the accents of the bass and snare areas. It's built in speaker is right where the regular audio hole is for other cajons there at the bottom right. The acoustic sounds can be amplified by that same hole there if you have a mic, and the layered sounds can be amplified through a cable port in the back. There's also a mix in port so you can have songs from your phone play through its speaker! Super neat!
It has a handle on the back so theres no more struggles with carrying AND you can either power it with batteries or the power chord, neither option is needed for just the acoustic sounds. To top it off I even got a cajon bag for even easier travel!
This is what big and new in music for me right now, I hope I've informed and entertained at least a little! But even though new toys to play with are super sweet, as we've discussed before, dedication, passion and persistence no matter how easy or hard things get is the key to practicing, and the key to the art of music.
~ Levi, the nutcase
