Well it was a packed Royal festival hall on Sunday the 23rd of November. The last day of the London Jazz festival, where people where anticipating an amazing night of music.

Vinne Colaiuta is amazing on the drums, this man gets voted the “best around  drummer” every year by the readers of Modern Drummer magazine.  I’m not going to talk about his performance because I’d go on for ages about it.  If you’ve herd him play, I think you’ll agree, as most of the people around me marvelled at his playing,  I think a big majority of London’s drummer came out to see Vinnie, most of the people in-front of me were drummers!

I’m very happy that I had this opportunity to see and hear his playing, very often I hear about events’ that have just passed and would go to, but miss out on.

I’ve been waiting for two months since I saw that he was playing with John Mclaughlin and Chick Corea. To may delight he had Christian McBride playing the bass (I discovered this musician through a spectacular drummer called Terreon Gully) and Kenny Garrett (this man was making the Sax scream). I was seated just behind him and off to the left, so my view of him was perfect to observe his left side.  They played for two hours and I loved every minute of it.

The sound was impeccable, the music was stunning and the performance memorable.

That’s two great drummers that I’ve had the opportunity to see, when’s Gadd and Chambers coming over!

This offer is available to new students that sign up in those months.

You’ll get Five lessons for the price of four! Thats a saving of £20!

What are you wanting for, take advantage!

I saw these guys at a fund raising/ awareness rally, there apart of the East London University.  There based in the DockLands, they have a campus built next to the DLR station.I was invited to come down on there Thursday night rehearsal.  

I was welcomed by Fred (he was a guest teacher/leader for the night)I was started off with a shaker called a the Chocalho (pronounced shi-cal-lio) I shook the life out of this thing, it was fun but I must admit that I wanted a drum.  We learn what to play from Fred, he lead every rhythm for all the different instruments. 

After a short break (fags and chatting) we got back into the groove and I got offered to play the Caixa (snare drum).  For what felt like 20 mins I played double strokes, in the Mummy-Daddy rudiment or doubles.  My arms got a great work out from the playing.  It was a great feel playing on the drum, its been a while since I’ve played with other people!  

The energy that Fred was showing and giving was helping everyone keep together, it added a smile to my face!  After we’d finish the rehearsal, me and two other guys that were playing snares’ with, started a very impromptu jam, we had a few minutes before being told to stop because people could hear!! (typical, excited me!)  One guy was called Paul, I never got the other guys name.  

It was very enjoyable, getting involved is very welcome, it could be easier, not really given an idea where to go other than Cyprus DLR station and ask around, but I’m going back again next week!

Its back and

its earlier this year!

DrummerLive will be held at the Excel Centre in Royal docks (Docklands) A great opportunity to see some great drummers perform and meet get autographs, get up close to beautiful hardware, play on it, compete in the fastest drummer comp (to be confirmed).  A great event to visit the London drumming scene.

Names in the drumming world that have been mentioned our;

Jason Bonham, Chad Smith, Ray Luzier,

Roy Mayorga, Gavin Harrison, Pete Ray Biggin.

Along with these guys, the drumming brands big and small will be showing off some of their finest products, some of Englands best drum retailers will there to help you part with your cash on any of the days.

Dates;

12 (Thursday preview), 13th Friday, 14th Saturday, 15th Sunday of June

To add more icing to this massive cake, three other music instrument and technology shows are on at the same time,

The London Guitar Show,

Sound recording and Technology show and

Unplugged.

Do you still need more convincing? Get your tickets soon.

In a short time I’ll be making the option to book your lesson on-line, choosing a preferred time of the day.

 Got to talk to my tech By I’ll hope to get this sorted by the middle of this month,  I hope that it makes life easier for people. I sure it will trial quite nicely, but we’ll see when I finally get it going?

Keep them doubles tight!

This will be the next step for the site, I recently had my photo journalist friend come to the studio and shoot me.  The photos’ he took were all amazing, not so much the regular static shots, lots of long exposed stuff, afew cheesy head shots and some themed ‘I’m a teacher’, lets learn’ kind of pictures.

Most of the photos will be used as back-grounds for the site.  I’ll have them rotate randomly when moving around the site.  What I’d like to eventually achieve is a slow fading transition between photos’, that will be for another day.

 If you like to see other work that he has done follow this link.

 http://www.flickr.com/photos/vishv/collections/

Big shout going out to Vish and his beautiful sight into capturing image, people, time and moment.  Thank you!

As in a previous post I stated that I was purchasing a Midi controller, (Korg padkontrol) after some time of getting used to installing it on several machines, several times, I’d like to sad that its just like using it in the Youtube videos that I’ve seen… but it not as straight forward as that.

So, open the box to see that you get this light piece of kit, and the first thing I’ll state is that you need to have a computer or midi device to run it, its powered by a USB or by a separate power supply, it doesn’t come with a power supply!

The software installation isn’t tricky, it just that you have to do it in a number of stages, when you’ve hit setup on the software I like to think that your ready to rock and roll just out of the box! I started to set it up in the evening on the night I took delivery and after much frustration I got a step closer at getting it working by 1am. I needed to start another install of drivers.

Referring to earlier of not knowing that the software needs to be installed/setup again after the first time!!

 Moving on to the bundle software, the products that come with the padkontrol are some of the most widely used and respected programmes, but again can be a pain to use straight away.  ‘Reason’ is the name of the programme that I’ve been using with the pad and it worked in the middle than at the beginning, but after some Youtube and net help, got it to work with the pad – liked the auto-detect feature in Reason, which added to the setting up.

You have the option to connect it up to a midi device, I’ve got a Roland drum kit (TD8) and I tried setting it up to pad, this I could not get to communicate with one another, I couldn’t find the right setting for the TD8, so I cast that option into the bin, (I will try again soon, see a video that someone else as managed to do it)

I’m growing to enjoy the challenge that it is to try and learn play the drums in time with the focus on my fingers, I still feel a little clueless about what other things that I can achieve with this kit?  Maybe some partnering with a DJ friend on a gig. 

Easy of use 6/10

Easy of set up 3/10

Feature and application 8/10

Overall 5/10, if your wanting to use this equipment like a drum machine your going down the right track, but to use like David Haynes does, then I stick to a dedication machine, is my recommendation, as you’ll have to invest in a laptop to go with the pad.

For a short time I’ve been thinking about buying a Korg PadKontrol midi controller. This fantastic piece of kit can be used as an triggering, offering finger tip control of midi sound files.

The main application for this will be for the almighty drums! The people at Korg have included some amazing software packages with the Pad, a few are Propellerheads, Ableton live and Toontrack.

The all 16 pads are programmable, with the supplied software, more on the hardware the entire pad is touch and velocity sensitive; meaning, there’s no difference from playing on the corner or the middle and the amount of pressure is displayed for you to see how hard your playing.

Will up date when I make that step to purchase.

 I’m at a point today, where I’ve been learning a piece from the Trinity Guildhall and I’ve been fighting a up hill battle.  This piece is from the new syllabus, (the old one had some challenges but wasn’t as broad or varied) I’m graded at level 7 (old syllabus) and I’m fighting the pieces on Grade 4 WTH!!!

As a matter of ego, I know I’m pretty good as a drummer, but these pieces have me in pieces .  I’m a patient person, but these are something that I want to be able to play over night and not have to put the effort into!  I do realise, you can’t be excellent at something over night and the more time, effort, energy you put into something the better you’ll be at doing it!!

Back to the title, my goal is to work through all these pieces, (I did start at Grade 1 and work upwards) I’d recommend it to drummers whom have been playing for ages, theirs always something new or exercises that can be revisited. *gets old exercises out from when I first started*