All hardcore silliness aside, I’m really enjoying this new kit.  It’s making previously simplistic-feeling songs like “Alive” (Pearl Jam) and “Mountain Song” (Jane’s Addiction) fun again by giving me more of the real feeling of movement between the toms and the cymbals.

I’m not the only one out there who’s having a good time pounding on these things, but I’ve been hearing a lot of “ow these things make me hurt” as opposed to “whee these things make the music more fun”.

A large part of that, as far as I can tell, has to do with the fact that many people get the ION drum set for the realistic rebound and therefore think that the drum kit will increase their stick speed and accuracy without any increase in skill or knowledge on their part.

What people don’t realize is that, by continuing to whack the same way they did on the Rock Band drums, they’re actually sabotaging their stick speed by hitting too hard and not thinking “up”.

Alright, what is THAT supposed to mean?

I started taking drum lessons from a little music shop near me about once a week as soon as I got back from Japan and realized that all I wanted to do was bang out rhythms, like, all the time.  Here’s my drum teacher’s Number One Tip to increase your stick speed, as well as some other good bonuses I’ll get into in a minute.

TIP NUMBER ONE FOR STICK SPEED:  “Play Off the Drum”

When making your stroke, think “up” and bring the stick away fro the head immediately after striking it.  Don’t “play down into the drum”, throwing all your intention into forcing a downward stroke.

Even professional drummers don’t seem to get this right a lot of the time, especially the heavy hitters, and those are the guys who end up with tendonitis and other functional disabilities.

Alex Gonzales, drummer for Mana, has this to say in an interview on ModernDrummer.com:

   One of the things I can recommend for drummers who like to hit hard is to be as relaxed as possible. [...] I don’t put pressure on the heads, I play off the drum heads—the cymbals, too.

What’s great about the ION kit, in comparison with the stock Rock Band 1 and Rock Band 2 kits, is that you have quite a bit of realistic drum rebound to play with.  Make use of it!

Yeah, if you’re planning to transition to a real set of skins someday, this tip will carry you there.  See, thinking “up” will help you “draw sound from the drum”, as it’s described.  The less time the stick spends on the drumhead, the more resonance can be gotten from the drum.

Results: increased stick speed AND less stress and strain on the body.

Take THAT, “Everlong”!  *whack*

A little knowledge can be a powerful thing — now make sure you practice it!

Go check out Alex Gonzales’ other suggestions in his interview.  Apparently he does Pilates regularly, and ices his hands after shows to prevent swelling that leads to joint pain.

Technorati Tags: drumming, drums, ion, ps3, rock band, technique, tips

• No laptop or desktop computer hardware can be trusted
• Hardware is only as good as the software you install on it
• Universal Serial Bus, while definitely the bus of the devil, is the only consistently, possibly even “universally”, supported peripheral interface
• all OSes are inherently sucky

Where do you put your big stuff?  Video, music, project files, plans for perpetual motion devices, and so on?

Well first off, external hard drives with USB interfaces is the obvious fulfiller of the hardware portion of those requirements.  But how about partition formatting?  NTFS and HFS+, the proprietary darlings of Microsoft and Apple respectively, are just about as compatible on a single system as an atheist and a Mormon in a coffee shop; support for these two in open source platforms can be rocky.

For a long while, FAT32 served as the lingua franca of formatting, with native support available in Windows and “good enough” support in Linux and OS X.  But it’s not without its problems.  In addition to its non-case-sensitivity (“SCREWYOU.TXT” is the same thing as “screwyou.txt”, which is lame), I find it slow and messy, and probaby the most fragile filesystem in terms of error and damage control, just a notch about FAT16.  It’s beyond the scope of this blog to bother explaining my opinion, lest I never post anything, ever, so let’s just leave it at “I hate FAT32″.

Enter ext3.  Long the standard of Linux drives everywhere, it suddenly gained greater relevance as the Mac OS became the UNIX-based OS X — you can use ext3 natively on this system just as you would on any BSD, Linux, or UNIX system.  Suddenly, Mac and Linux boxes have something in common.  Windows, however, remained just out of reach, unless you were willing to experiment with the safety of your data.

It wasn’t until last year around this time that I found a stable ext3 reading/writing experience for Windows in EXT3 IFS [located at fs-driver.org].  And wouldn’t you know it, it’s Free.

I experimented with all 3 OSes at my disposal: OS X on my G4 laptop, Win Xp and later Vista on my Dell laptops, and Linux on my other Dell laptop, and found basically nothing to be unhappy about.  It’s awesome to be able to format a USB thumb drive with ext3 and use it seamlessly across Windows, Mac, Linux, and even my Playstation 3.

A few months ago, I was retiring my G4 laptop and I needed to move my 180GB digital music collection (mp3s, mp4s, oggs, they all coexist peacefully for me) to a larger drive that didn’t make an ominous clicking sound.  Having acquired a lovely external Lacie 500GB drive for a keen $80 or so, my choice of hard drive formats switched from FAT32 to EXT3.  It’s been 8 months since I did so, and I haven’t looked back.

So, my solution for cross-platform hard drive storage: ext3.

That’s my story and I’m sticking to it.  Or at least until something better comes along.

Technorati Tags: i want my mp3, linux, osx, ps3, windows