Samba!
Having lots of fun at the moment - I joined the Edinburgh Samba School's beginners course, and I'm still drumming at Puff Uproar in Falkirk.
Puff Uproar tonight was great: we're covering a modified version of Nantes by Beirut. Normally we've got three surdo (bass) drummers, but this week we only had two, so I was covering two parts by using a beater to alter the pitch of my drum. Then the other surdo player left... I ended up strapping on her surdo and playing them like a set of (heavy!) toms. Awesome fun :)
The samba school is interesting. On the one hand, the songs are a lot simpler than what we play at P.U. - there's only one pattern and one fill per song, rather than multiple. On the other hand, with over thirty people playing, it's much more important to be precise, since a mistake that could pass as a syncopated improvisation in a small band sounds out of place when five other people beside you played the right note :)
Since half the people at my work play instruments, and some of them jam together (on headphones) at lunchtime, I'm very tempted to try building one of these homebrew drum controllers plus some piezo hand triggers, and adding some drums to the mix.
Puff Uproar tonight was great: we're covering a modified version of Nantes by Beirut. Normally we've got three surdo (bass) drummers, but this week we only had two, so I was covering two parts by using a beater to alter the pitch of my drum. Then the other surdo player left... I ended up strapping on her surdo and playing them like a set of (heavy!) toms. Awesome fun :)
The samba school is interesting. On the one hand, the songs are a lot simpler than what we play at P.U. - there's only one pattern and one fill per song, rather than multiple. On the other hand, with over thirty people playing, it's much more important to be precise, since a mistake that could pass as a syncopated improvisation in a small band sounds out of place when five other people beside you played the right note :)
Since half the people at my work play instruments, and some of them jam together (on headphones) at lunchtime, I'm very tempted to try building one of these homebrew drum controllers plus some piezo hand triggers, and adding some drums to the mix.