Red Gear Music

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.