frozen octopus

I got a count working on the tags for the genres and labels happening this morning. As I add an album I listen to the genres and labels automatically sort themselves.

It isn't a contest to see which genre or label is winning. For me it's the opposite actually. When I see a genre or label in "last place", it makes me want to bump it up in the list. Kind of like music guide rails.

[example at bottom of the page]

Two weeks into my New Year's resolution to get my head around Jazz bop drumming. The hi-hat on the two and four is happening. I had to raise it up about 3-4 cm higher than usual to make it sound good.

A thing I noticed today is it is a lot easier practicing Jazz drumming alone than Punk, Shoegaze, or Psych drumming. It might be because it is new for me. It might be the swing thing is easier to play for a longer time.

Triplets are slowly starting to happen. I am rushing them but that is correctable for sure. When I do get a loop going, it's really satisfying. I've also been filling in a calendar I got at the ¥100 store with what I practiced. If I miss a day, it's no problem but having to write in "got nothing done" on a day is a kick to get something done tomorrow for sure.

I am on to Chapter 2 of The Art of Bop Drumming and I noticed there are micro patterns occurring in the comping exercizes. When I get hung up on a part of a beat in the book, I go to these micro comping examples to isolate the issue. After looping a micro pattern for a while, the comping exercise is a lot less daunting for me.

Downloads:

I got myself a book called The Art of Bop Drumming because I have heard it referenced by at least three drummers on Youtube in the last year.

Brought it to the rehearsal studio and after about an hour, I had a beat going that sounded like an amateur jazz drummer.

I was hanging on for dear life but got it to new born deer trying to walk level. Very fun!

Also fun was taking the jazz pattern and flattening it to punk. Stoked to next 1000s of cats rehearsal.

I was searching around to see if someone has already come up with a text file based way to do music notation before I start to mess around with a way to do it in Text Expander or Shortcuts.

While I was looking around I found Lilypond. It's an open source text based way to write sheet music. It's a little bit more than I need but I got it setup on my laptop for the future. It's going to be very cool if I need to make some drum tabs in the future.

It's very nerdy but very powerful. After ten minutes of playing around with it, I decided to put it away because I need to get drums practiced.