Rabbit & Pork

It’s time to post some photos of my practice studio (front bedroom, in reality) to the blog. The fact is, the practice studio will soon move to allow for a nursery. So, this entry will act as a reminder of how it looked. Whilst I’m at it, I’ll highlight (underline) items I believe should be in all practice rooms.

First, the most important part of the studio - the drum kit (in this case, an electronic Hart Dynamics imported from the US). After two years of hammering it’s still standing strong.

The brain… a Roland TD8 - includes metronome and plenty of drumkit samples.

Pedals… a realistic electonic hi-hat pedal and a real bass drum pedal (DW 5000).

The music stand positioned in line of sight to allow easy reading of exercises and tab.

You need music to play along to, so a CD player is essential. Here it’s connected to the electronic kit allowing a mix of both CD and your drums through headphones. The yellow box on top provides a MIDI connection to a PC for playing MIDI based exercises through the drum kit at any tempo. If you’re lucky enough you can also record your performances to the PC and have them analysed with appropriate software (I use Gigajam’s Drum Analyser).

A mirror to look at yourself This is a tool, not a form of self admiration. Viewing how you play is very revealing and can often tell you things that listening alone can’t such as how you sit (are you hunched?) and how relaxed you look when playing. Position it so you can see all parts of your body including legs and arms.

Obviously, you need a seat to perch on and you also need some decent headphones to listen through. I use a set of headphones specifically for DJ’s; these bring out the bass drum and lower toms very well.

Most important item now, the sticks. I have two different forms; Standard 5A’s (Pro-mark) and Anti-Vibe (Zildjian). The anti-vibe are sometimes useful when playing on an electonic kit, in particular, the cymbals I own, as they greatly reduce the wear on your limbs, however, they do have slightly different weight characteristics to standard sticks. They’re resting on a practice pad which is very useful for repetitive rudiment work as you can take it everywhere with you.

That’s it. Some of you may have noticed the bad decor in the room. It won’t last long, as the room will become the nursery. The studio will find a new place in the house, but whether I’ll actually have any time to practice with a new-born baby will be another thing. Only time will tell.

For a while, I’ve been intrigued by the growing popularity of the Spring Framework.

Like most, I had a surface understanding of its capabilities, but, recently I decided to delve deeper and actually write some code with it to learn a little more.

Spring comes with a mass of documentation and complete application samples, which is pretty good compared to some open source projects. However, it’s all a bit overwhelming for the novice who’s just walked in the door. Where do you start?

Well, I’ve persevered and cut through some of it. And, as a result I’ve compiled some very simple examples for the developer who’s never seen Spring before and wants to know where to start on day one.

I’ve bundled the code samples together with all their required dependencies into the following Spring Start - a getting started guide / tutorial for the Spring Framework. The whole thing has been tailored for use within the Eclipse IDE and takes almost no setup to get going. You should be able to step through code that uses Spring within minutes.

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Budding drummers can’t stop drumming. They’ll send people mad as they subconsciously tap at anything in sight, including their own body parts. But this is all part of practice and without practice we’re not capable drummers (unless you’re a natural of course).

I don’t own an acoustic drum kit - I would love to have a setup at home, but no-one within hearing distance is going to allow this. Drum kits are loud, very loud. Endless, repetitive practice will annoy anyone given time. Catch 22 then. You need to practice to get good, but you can’t practice because you sound bad and everyone tells you to stop. Even if you sound good, you’re going to be told to stop if it’s getting late, or someone wants to watch TV or just have some peace and quiet.

Unless you have very understanding family and neighbours, it’s really difficult to frequently practice at times that suit you. To be honest, I don’t know how this world has managed to create so many great drummers. How did they manage to practice?

Well, here are some solutions I can think of:

1) Find a studio and rent a room with a drum kit. Noise is no longer an issue. However, you have to travel and pay hourly rates.
2) Use a practice pad. Again this is quiet, but you’re limited to what you can practice.
3) Fit silencer pads to your acoustic kit. Now you can practice with the whole kit, but it doesn’t have the right feel.
4) Sound proof a room in your house. Expensive.
5) Practice on an electronic drum kit.

And number 5 is my primary solution, that’s right, the electronic drum kit, which has provided my freedom to practice.

Two years ago, I imported a Hart Kit from the states when I first decided to dedicate time to drumming. Note: I own the previous form of cymbals shown in the picture on the Hart site. Ok, it’s not an acoustic kit, but, that’s not the point. With this gadgetry setup in my home, I can practice when I want. I just have to walk to the front bedroom and start. This means I can spend an hour (or more) almost every day behind a drum kit. No-one complains and no-one will - it’s quiet except for a few taps of wood against machine. With headphones you can control the volume to suit your mood (remember, don’t ruin your ears). Plus, there’s a built-in metronome, multiple kits (which can help alleviate boredom) and the ability to play along to CD’s etc.

I’ve found short, frequent practice hours much more beneficial than less frequent marathon sessions. Of course, I don’t exclusively use the electronic kit. I mix it up with some pad practice for rudiments etc and I go to the studio every other week to get behind a real kit.

If you feel your practice is constrained and you’re not given the freedom to practice as much as you’d like, then try an electronic drum kit. It may surprise others more than it surprises you.

In the future, I’ll describe my practice setup in more detail…

What have you done to gain practice freedom? Please leave commments.