It’s Been A While, So This Is Going To Be A Long Post…

It’s been a while since I posted something here in my blog.  I’ve still been working on music projects at my normal pace, I also completed a pretty awesome kit upgrade, but aside from that, I just couldn’t find the desire to do anything on this site.  I wonder how many people actually visit to make this truly worth while.  Oh well. Today I found a little inspiration to update the content that and that should hold us over for a while…

Let’s start with the drum kit.  For probably the past year or so, I toyed with the idea of converting an acoustic drumset over to electronic.  Having that acoustic look and natural drum sizes has always been appealing.  I had all the parts & pieces I wanted to get in wishlists and I started my plan with selling my Roland TD-30 module.  With the sale of this one item, I would have enough money to purchase two eDRUMin 10 drum modules by AudioFront as well as purchase a new Gibraltar Curved Chrome Rack from Sweetwater.  I figured I would start with these items first to test how the triggering system would be with the new eDRUMin drum modules.  It took a little bit to get the settings dialed in but once I got it, everything was working great with my Roland pads!

Now the real fun part, assembling the Gibraltar rack.  Before I started assembling the rack, I knew I wanted to have a three rack tom and two floor tom configuration, so I purchased another Roland PD-125 pad to act as the second floor tom.  I then took a few days assembling the rack (actually longer because I had to order some other parts) and getting everything laid out just the way I wanted it.  I was stoked with the results BUT there was a problem.  My old drum rug was too small for the new rack and it was at this point I decided to change my whole idea of converting an acoustic kit to and electronic. 

I really like the compactness of my Roland kit before and even after the new rack.  Now moving up to traditional sized toms and kick drum would really take away from that and that’s space that I don’t really have.  Additionally, I really like how the Roland pads are triggering with the eDRUMin module and doing this a2e conversion would risk the playability with aftermarket triggers.  Coupled with the cost associated with buying a 7-Piece PDP Shell Pack and then buying all the individual triggers, the cost was just not feasible.  Yea, I know.  I did research on this all before and AT THAT TIME I was ok with the cost, but when it came down to actually doing it, I didn’t want to fork over the money.  LOL.

So this is where we sit with the drumkit now.  I am super happy with it and as I commented to another YouTuber, I don’t think there is anything else I would like to change with the kit at the moment.  Not to say something won’t come up down the road, but for now, I am done.  For Christmas, my wife bought me an amazing Neil Peart wall art collage that fit perfectly on the wall behind me.  So no more bare walls during drum covers!

Speaking of drum covers, there have been 3 videos of new tracks and 1 celebrating the release of The Black Album Project since the last post.  Since I can’t won’t list all the drum covers here in this post, I’ll just post one of the best ones from the bunch which is Tesla’s Modern Day Cowboy.

For this cover, I reused the kit I put together for the Bon Jovi track, because again, that song is just as powerful as this. I altered the reverb and compression, but aside from that, the kit was about the same. One thing I was missing was a gong! None of my Toontrack libraries had one, so I grabbed the biggest, fattest sounding ride I had (from the Fields of Rock SDX), tuned it way down, and tweaked the hold/delay. It came out fucking great!

As for my playing…well, Troy Luccketta has great technique with his rhythm hand that I simply cannot do. I went to the alternating hits for the verses on the hi-hat and straightened out the Chorus pattern because I just cannot play it the way Troy does originally. Small details but if you watch the original video of this track, you can see what I mean.

I’ve been hard at work for my April tribute cover, which just might be one of the best sounding covers I have ever done!  Even better than the Black Album covers!  Yes, that good! I’ve also worked hard on the visuals for this track on the video production side, so it could be pretty epic!  🙂

Speaking of the Black Album, I have made the Black Album Superior Drummer 3 Preset available as a stand alone purchase for $6 from Buy Me A Coffee.  I have modified the preset so that you now only need The Rock Foundry SDX for the full sound. So that’s a win!  You can check out the promo video here

I think that just about catches us all up.  But I lied, I am linking one more of the previous drum covers because this track just kicks ass.  It’s from Mick Mars (yes the former guitar player from Motley Crue) debut solo album that features Ray Luzier from Korn on drums.  It’s a killer track and so far to today, no one else has covered it on YouTube!  So check this one out.  I am done now….tired of typing.

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Buy Me A Coffee, A New Drum Cover, & Other News

I’ve been going back and forth with this decision for a while and I finally decided to make it happen.  All my file downloads are now subscription based through buymeacoffee.com.  I know many of you don’t want to pay a monthly subscription to get files, but you can cancel and rejoin at anytime. So grab what you want, then cancel. Unlike before, you will now have access to “drums only” .wav files for songs within select memberships.  Additionally, you can submit a request for individual “drums only” .wav files and upgrade that request for a few dollars more to a 7-track stem of the drums track!   So check out the Buy Me A Coffee page and see if something looks good for you.
 

Next, a new drum cover was released today.  I was challenged by a friend to not play the song perfectly but instead do my own thing.  It’s an interesting challenge and I settled on the song “Got You (Where I Want You)” by The Flys.  I know of this song but I didn’t know it by heart which would be a great fit for this challenge.

 

I start off playing the song as close to the original as possible because there was no need to go bananas on it early on.  However, when the 2nd half kicks in, I did my own thing.  I even left the little mistakes and timing issues in there.  And then the closing video at the end….yea.  Paying a little homage to the movie this song was featured in.  Can you guess the movie?

In other news, I have been revamping my recording space in our home and this cover will be the last one I do for the year.  I could probably squeeze another one in there but I am not going to try and rush it.  We’ll see what happens.  I also am working on reworking by drumkit which you will see on my next drum cover release, whenever that may be.  I’ve been posting a few pictures here & there on my Instagram.  So give that a follow if you get bored.  I have been working on another video project for the month of November, hopefully I can release it in time.  It’s a neat concept I got going but could be kind of dorky as well.  Hahahaha.  That’s it for now.

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Sony Music Entertainment Has No Clue!

If you are here, you’re maybe looking for my drum cover that was blocked worldwide on YouTube because of a copyright violation.  Well a good, probably 60% of stuff on YouTube, is copyrighted and uploaders like myself do not benefit one bit from people watching our videos.  Who does benefit?  The music companies & artists who claim the copyright on every video I upload.  Like the 40,000 views on my Ghost – Rats video…that record company got all the money.  I don’t see anything.  So why block videos?  It’s an additional revenue stream for you and you do nothing.  It angers me.  I just want to showcase what I can do. We’ll see how long I can keep this video online on my website before I am notified to remove it.

And here is my video description as posted on YouTube…

Let me start off by saying that this is not a difficult drum cover at all…almost boring in fact; the 2nd month in a row! I am a HUGE fan of Silverchair, have been since I first heard them in 1995. I love @BenGillies888 drumming on every song and he even said about this track, “Straight Lines is a complex song, with simple parts, executed well.” I love the song, love the band, and I wanted to cover it; even if it’s simple! So with that, I needed to make up for it in other ways. I focused on the video editing and creating a great sounding audio.

I grabbed another drumless backing track of this song from Marcos over at the @DrumLess Youtube channel and went to work on creating a similar sounding kit that Ben used. I think it turned out way better than I expected! Let me know what you think.

Oh did you notice I have a new china cymbal on the kit? Yup, I picked up a Lemon 15″ china, it’s pretty sweet! …and if you watched all the way to the end (and read down this far in the description) you saw I will be taking a few months off from making drum covers while I complete some other projects. Sorry.

This video was made on May 30, 2023 and by the time it is released in September, I should be well on my way with setting up and configuring the eDRUMin modules. My fingers are crossed that my long term project works out. Subscribe to my Instagram as I will be (or have been -thinking in the future here…) posting progress on how my acoustic to electronic drum conversion should be going. Link is further down…

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An Iconic 80’s Song Lives Again On RGM YouTube Channel

About 1 year ago, I was watching Pascal over at the The Art of Drumming YouTube channel do a drum cover of the Bon Jovi song You Give Love A Bad Name and I thought to myself, “If I could find a clean drumless backing track, I could make a killer drum kit for this song!” I added it to my to do list for later.  Time went by and I was scrolling through the list and I stopped on this one.  I searched for a drumless backing track and sure enough, I found a great drumless backing track and I went to work!


Obviously, I had to start with the snare sound first.  Coming off the Pantera drum cover, that snare cut right through the mix, and I knew that’s what I needed.  Ironically, this snare was also used on the Psychedelic Furs drum cover as well…so The Rock Foundry SDX was the library of choice.  Once I found the snare, I started playing with the toms, the reverb, and the kick was the last piece to fall into place.  The crash cymbals were easy, but, the ride was kind of tricky.  I couldn’t find the correct bell tone, so I tuned up the closest one in the Rock Foundry library and away we went.  

As I was working on the song, I found this drumless backing track was missing some of the orchestra FX samples.  I was able to create my own sample from another drumless version of the song that worked out perfectly.  NEAT!

Honestly, I think this is probably one of the closest & best sounding kits that I have ever created for a drum cover.  Originally, I was planning to schedule this one to come out in September but since my sister-in-law Jennifer is turning 50, and she is in love with Bon Jovi, I decided to release it today on her birthday.  Hope she enjoys it as much as I had creating/playing this cover!

In other news, you will also see I am using the eDRUMin module for my kit.  Everything is working really well but I still do have some more tweaking to make it perfect; but it certainly is playable!  At the end of the September drum cover, there is some news I talk about, so be sure to watch until the end.  Think that’s all I got for now.  Have a great 4th of July! (for those in the United States)

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Bringing Back Some Ghost To The Channel

It’s been a hot minute since I last posted a Ghost drum cover; June 2022 in fact!  I had no plans of doing a Ghost cover any time soon until I heard this song they did of a Genesis classic Jesus He Knows Me. I felt the song had some complexity to it with an upbeat tempo which I have not had to do since the release of the Black Album project.  So win win!  I jumped on the song immediately and first impressions, damn, this might be tougher than I thought.  I knew I wanted to get this song released in time for Ghost’s release of their 5 song cover album, Phantomime which was 4 weeks away!

It took me a almost 2 weeks to build up the stamina in my right foot because of the quick kick patterns through the verses.  Thank god for the Tama Speed Cobra pedals doing some good work!  I then worked on getting the correct sound for the kit.  I basically stole the Volbeat kick drum patch I made and the snare sound from an upcoming drum cover (which has been pushed back like 3 or 4 months now, LOL!).

All in all, great song to play and glad I was able to get this one under the belt in time to coincide with the release of Ghost’s album as well .  In other news, the new drum modules have arrived and my long term project will be starting soon.  I am working on a drum cover for August and that could be my last one for the year because of other projects going on that I previously posted about.

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