Drums and Keys

You'd think a guy who's been playing music his whole life would have owned at least one drum but, somehow, it just never came up. That all changed last night.

Paul and I are finally getting around to playing some tunes again and this time we're attempting something a bit more interesting than a pair of acoustic guitars. Our concept is to loop and layer music we record in the live setting. It'll be something between DJing and a regular band. Basically four hands, a pair of computers and as many instruments as we can get our hands on.

Prior to yesterday, the majority of our collection consisted of different types of guitars. That's been the story of my life for the past 3-4 years and it has really limited my ability to produce anything of value. Slowly, over the past few months, things have started to improve. First came the MacBook Pro I'm using to write this post. Obviously, this is the most integral piece of the puzzle but it's not really an "instrument" on its own. Next came an iPhone. Technically, i had this before the computer but I've only recently started to discover a couple of apps I think are going to be really interesting to try in the live setting like BeatMaker and miniSynth.

But yesterday, things really started to roll. Thanks to the incredible used music instrument market that is craigslist, I managed to find a deal on a 61 key Korg Triton LE workstation and a "cocktail" drum set. The former is an older keyboard from 2003 but its a Korg and its certainly going to do what we need it to do. The latter is basically a small set with a kick pedal attached to a 16" tom and a few attached drums and cymbals. I'd never heard of anything like it before but the size was just what Paul and I were looking for --- something we can play around with without spending an arm and a leg or having to worry about lugging around a full set.

So what's left? Not much really. Aside from a few extra mics and cables, really were just looking at a pair of audio interfaces for our computers. Eventually, I'd really like to add a pair of digital turntables to the mix but that's hardly necessary in the short term.

I'll be sure to post pictures once we set up the space. Maybe there's even some tune-age in the near future?