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

I didn’t say so in my response, but I absolutely agree.  I dislike the way I myself sound, and I try to protect my housemates from it as best I can.  It begs the question of why I play it at all, which turns out to be perfectly apropos to this topic. 

Simply put, it’s a challenge!  Can I get a great score and sound cool?  Some songs work great for me, and some songs are horribly unforgiving, score-wise, when I attempt to inject some style and tone.  I’ve started recording myself when singing a wide variety of songs both in- and out-of-game, and in many cases I’m amazed at the dull flat drowning-cat noises that have won me perfect scores in certain songs.

But WHY is it a challenge to sound good AND score good?  From this point on I have pasted what I posted in the Rock Band forum.

This topic is essentially all about what makes a “good singer”. As intuitive creatures we have a sense of what’s attractive and beautiful (“good singing”) versus what is robotic and off-putting (“monotone singing”).

So, what makes someone a “good singer” as opposed to someone who simply sings the pitches required to get good scores in a karaoke game but somehow manages to sound like a dying cat? 

Here are my thoughts on this, in a somewhat-but-not-completely organized fashion.

I actually don’t think this is a hard problem. Obviously songs consist of logically arranged melodies (and that’s a huge topic, so I won’t get into it). But they also consist of “challenges” to what we expect to happen — twists in the plot, so to speak.

In terms of singing, those challenges come in the form of unexpected tiny delays, choosing thirds instead of fifths for the second time through a melody, using slides to get from one note to the next, and injecting spots of emotion into words that may affect the pitch slightly (even throw it “off”). Some of these things are captured in the Rock Band charting, but if they don’t “come from” the person singing them, they sound just as robotic as any other parts. (Sorry to be so imprecise, but we’re talking Aesthetics here.)

Good singing is pretty much characterized by flaws, because humans are flawed beings, and hearing someone perform “perfectly on-pitch” throughout an entire song feels alien to us. We call that singer robotic and monotone, whereas we call someone like Eddie Vedder an amazing vocalist even though he never sings his songs the same way twice (and arguably he cannot). And why should he? He should challenge our expectations and inject slightly different emotions to stay interesting (which he does) — not recite the melody like a playback machine.

My other main observation is that when you’re singing for the joy of singing and/or to produce something aesthetically pleasing, you are necessarily producing sounds that sound completely different from the vocalizations that occur when you are staring a screen with your thoughts bound up in the effort of getting that little arrow to match with that line. Just an attitudinal thing.
In other words, my opinion is that singing for the purposes of FCing songs in this game produces vocalization that is the antithesis of what our brains want to process as aesthetically pleasing.

Tangentially, I would love to see more original singers of songs in Rock Band playing their songs in the game.

Just to wrap up, clearly it’s possible to sound really good AND appease the game algorithms enough to get 100%. I’m just providing explanations as to why (it seems) these conditions only rarely coincide.

–Naomi

* platinum RB2 vocals
* trained choral singer
* real-life rock band vocalist

Technorati Tags: aesthetics, brain, rock band, singing, theory

It was an incredibly rainy and dark day that suggested I do nothing more than achieve a mostly-meaningless video game victory that proves I am the Awesomest Rock Singer in the World [on the PS3] for maybe 24 hours until someone else does the same thing.

Oh yeah shout-outs.  I’d like to thank my mom for being an amazing singer, my sisters for being such avid and lovely singers as well, and my step-dad for forcing us to listen to Steely Dan in the car every Sunday!  bleghh!!

And now I shall go around the ‘net blagging about it.  BWAHAHAHAhahaghehgaghgh cough cough excuse me, my voice is a bit… ahem.

On a side note…

I’m not doing too shabbily in the solo Leaderboards for Vocals right now.  On the Playstation network (PS3, Wii, and Xbox360 are all different user-spaces) I have a #1 with “New Way Home” by the Foo Fighters.  What does this mean?  That I sang it perfectly and I manipulated the mechanics of the game in such a way as to get the most points.  So it’s a combination of being able to hit all the correct pitches — not to sound good, mind you — and strategically use some special power-ups that temporarily raise your point-earning potential.  Hey, it’s a game.

I’m not really the obsessive type though (really!) and I didn’t “try” to get any high scores.  I sang a few songs that I enjoyed (ahem all the Foo Fighters, Blondie, and Rush), enjoyed it, and wound up with high scores.  w00t.

It’s effortless for me to sing most songs.  I owe it all to my mama!

Technorati Tags: endless setlist 2, rock band, singing

It started innocently enough, a few whacks on a snare when I was really young.  Joined a punk band and played bass with a drummer, boy he sure drummed.  But I didn’t see the harm in it.  He left his drums in my basement and I… experimented.  But it wasn’t a problem.

Years later, I had lots of opportunities to try drumming, sometimes for whole songs at a time.  Nothing tricky or fancy, just holding down a pattern while the usual drummer was singing.  Maybe that was the seed, I don’t know.  It didn’t seem like a problem.

Fast forward to last year.  I got this game, maybe you’ve heard of it… Rock Band.  It came with this mini set of plastic and aluminum drums, four pads and an imitation kick pedal.  I didn’t think much of it at first, preferring the plastic guitar which I was already pretty good at.

But the more it sat there, the more the temptation grew, until one day, I sat down and played the drums again.

I didn’t get obsessed right away — it took months to develop the habit.  Eventually I got hooked.

Hitting things in rhythm, the physical exertion, the feeling of one’s whole body being involved in the music… exquisite.  I couldn’t get enough.

My housemates had heard quite enough though.  It’s lucky that I had a big trip coming up, 2+ weeks away in Australia and Japan (which turned into 9 weeks), because it let them forget about how freaking noisy my little drum habit was.

When I was in Japan I met a few drummers who did other kinds of drums — taiko, kodo, stuff like that.  It’s great stuff but kinda hard to find.  Basically it just stoked the fire for me, thinking about the beats I’d hammer out when I got home.

And when I got home, a certain couple, “making up for lost time”, who will remain nameless but you know who you are, sent me a fantastic electronic drum kit with very realistic action from the pads and cymbals, but which is even more freaking noisy than the little Rock Band drums.

These days all I think about is when I can get another fix.  It’s so loud, I know it hurts the people around me… but I can’t stop.  I try to just do it when nobody’s home, so no one will notice or care… but with 3 housemates and only one with a day job, it’s just about impossible.  People come home in the middle of my “rocking out” and I just know they’re thinking what a junky I am and wishing I would just stop.

It rips my heart apart.  I want to drum, create music, be a part of the music in a way I’ve never fully engaged in before.  I’m getting really freaking good at it now, and I have the equipment to match.  But I can’t play… not here at home.

So the gig is up.  I’m a drum addict, everybody knows it, and everybody’s pretty annoyed with it.  I’m depressed and I need help.

(Ok, I’m not actually depressed.  But I am a little frustrated that I’ve gotten myself hooked on a fundamentally noisy hobby.  Headphones don’t help when you’re essentially whacking tupperware with wooden sticks.  Hrm….)

Technorati Tags: drums, rock band, satire