All this lovely summer free-time is allowing me to put together tons of material like this:
*Move your mouse to the side to make the overlays hide. Clicking on the bottom right will push the slideshow fullscreen.*
:D Thanks for reading. Thanks for watching. Thanks for caring.
Since I posted that video on YouTube,
I've been getting a few emails asking about the structure of my drum kit. For the non-drumming readers, check back tomorrow for a slightly less noisy post. For the percussionist readers, let's do this.
Building this kit required a few specific goals.
Two Toms
Two Crashes
Cased & Portable
Minimal Hardware for a nice, tight setup
My kit is based around a couple of brands. (all hyperlinked)
Gretsch Drums
Zildjian Cymbals
Evans Heads
dw Hardware
SKB Cases
cmSticks
I play a Gretsch Catalina Club Jazz kit. It's a four-piece kit in a Natural Satin finish. It's a relatively small kit being a jazz kit:
K - 18in x 14"
S - 14in x 5"
T1 - 12in x 8"
T2 - 14in x 14"
I went through a couple of steps to find this kit. I prioritized the important elements to me in a kit, which were:
Natural Finish
18in Kick
5" Snare Depth
14in Floor Tom
After mixing tons of drummers with big and small Kicks in big and small rooms, I realized that the 18 was the right size for me. The first time I heard Alan Thomas of The Running Back play an 18, I was sold. I basically sat down thinking of a list of every single drum kit made. Obviously this is an imaginary list. I knocked off everything that didn't have an 18in kick in a natural finish. That list got small. Small enough to count on two hands. Some had deep snares, OUT. The only thing left was the toms. I had it down to the Gretsch kit and a DDrum kit. After researching, I pushed on the Gretsch kit. The DDrum kit was a 5-piece (two floors) which would have been nice, but would have cut down on the portability. I would have ended up only using two toms, defeating the purpose.
I originally fell in love with the Gretsch natural look after seeing Travis Cottrell's drummer Kevin Jones play a 6-piece Gretsch kit. Obviously his kit is way more tricked out, but I love my Gretsch kit. I also have a theory that every drummer thinks their kit is the best. Maybe so, but my kit is the best. Seriously, there are more expensive kits on the market, but I will not be selling this kit five years down the road to "get serious". This is my kit. I'll be holding on to it for... well forever I guess.
In looking for cymbals I considered two brands. Zildjian and Sabian. Both brands sounded fine. I was comparing the Zildjian A Customs and the Sabian AA's. I had been warned to "spend the money on your cymbals, kid. not your shells" so I did. Just like my Gretsch kit, I have no intentions of buying mediocre gear to sell five years down the road. It was tough to be patient enough to wait, save up, and step up to the plate. In my setup, I looked for 4 cymbals, specifically:
12in Hats
16in Crash
18in Crash
20in Ride
This way, I have room to slip in a 14in crash, which I probably won't, down the road. The 12in hats were an important part of my originality for this set. I was being boring enough with the 16/18/20 setup, I had to go somewhere with the hats. I settled on:
12in Mastersound A Customs
16in Medium A Custom
18in Fast Crash A Custom
20in Medium Ride
Nothing too exciting, except for those hats. The fast 18 matches well with the 16, sounding closer to a 16 because of the faster attack, without just being two matching 16's. The A Customs have a magnificent brilliant finish, which will not be a low-maintenance relationship, but I bet Miss USA isn't low-maintenance, and I bet she looks almost as good as my cymbals on stage.
The cymbals came with a decent bag that will work, but I had to case these drums. Without any thought at all, I ran straight to SKB. I have used them for Pro Audio and respect their sleek designed, lightweight-but-strong case design. But those suckers aren't cheap, so I waited until a Memorial Day Sale to pick them up. Even on sale, they ran me about $100 a case. dang. Almost as much as the drums.
Now for the hardware. Like I said, I wanted this painful step to be as clean and basic as possible. I am no rock drummer, and don't think I could pull off the 37 cymbal stands look. Furthermore, I wanted to mount my T1 to a stand, not to my Kick. To get the cleanest look, I began with two dw 9700 boom stands. Instead of getting four small stands, I got two beast stands. Each stand held a crash. The left stand has my 20in ride clamped to it. The right supports my T1. My T2 just sits on the ground, nothing special. These booms easily hold the weight the additional clamped items. I chose the dw 9300 snare stand for it's booming arm. I am able to set the stand deep into the kit, and have the snare "float" to it's position. An unnecessary luxury by far, but a convenient feature.
The pedals were a debate. I originally chose a Pearl Powershifter kick pedal. However, after choosing dw for both booms, the ride clamp, and the snare stand, I was in pretty deep. I chose to continue the dw support into my pedals, giving dw a full monopoly. For the stands, I went 9000. For the pedals however, 5000.
I believe it is important to use quality gear. I refuse to buy something with the intentions of "five years from now I can upgrade". However, above all this is humility. I am not a professional drummer. I wouldn't call myself a "drummer" at all. I have no intentions of making a career out of this. I am not planning to take this anywhere to seriously. Everything should have a budget, and I have no business devoting $8,000 to a hobby. This is not a career. Let the guys making a living off of this stuff buy the fancy stuff. I am only a worshipper, not a professional.
Those 9000 pedals would have been over $300 a piece. That would make two pieces of hardware equal the cost of the drums themselves. That's too far.
From Left to Right:
Black Rug
dw9700 Boom - L-Crash & Ride Clamp
Ride Cymbal Boom Arm
dw5500TD - HiHat Stand
dw9300 Snare Legs
dw9700 Boom - R-Crash & T1
Old School CB Throne Legs
dw9300 Snare Basket
Floor Tom Legs
dw5000AD3 - Kick Pedal
CB Drum Throne Seat
Gretsch Kick Drum Lift Riser
All this fits on a 3x5ft black rug my mom found for me at Target. It all fits in my mid-sized SUV, and it call all be carried by one person, me.
For heads, I stuck with Evans. Gretsch and Evans are owned by the same company, so I figured they would have sort of designed the two using each other. I don't know. I've heard good heads from Remo, Attack and Aquarian too. I just went Evans. And here's why. Just like everything else, I prioritized and patiently took everything step by step. The Kick batter head was the first stop. I only liked what I saw from the Aquarian and Evans lines. That knocked it down to two. After seeing the dampening system used by Evans in their EMAD2 head, it was over for Aquarian. Like the rest of the kit, I wanted things to match.
Some guys are smart enough to buy the best items from the best companies and not worry about matching. I wish I was that smart. I'm too... anal retentive... or compulsive... whichever one it is where you're crazy about stuff matching. I left the resonate Kick head on with the Gretsch logo. For the toms, I went with EC2 coated batter heads, with EC clear's underneath. The coating on these things is more frosted than coated. I like it. Snare has an EC-Snare on top and a Hazy 300 below. I'll stick with Evans heads, and I'll probably stick with these same specs. I like them.
I may come across as a little particular, but I didn't want to go buy the model sitting on the Guitar Center showroom in Fayetteville. I ordered the kit from a warehouse. It came in two big boxes and my friend Phillip and I built it from the ground up. I would highly recommend this, by the way. I feel a lot more pride in the shells, and I'm glad I was patient enough to wait for UPS instead of Guitar Center. Don't get me wrong, I still use Guitar Center. I just didn't want anybody breathing on my drums.
I started making my own sticks a while back, and have gone and gotten myself addicted. I don't want to use anything else now. It took about 40 sticks to get them just right, but now that they are, OH MY GOSH I love 'em.
That pretty much walks you through the kit. No, that drags you. That was a LOOOONG post. I apologized to the non-drummers earlier but I'm sorry drummers too. dang. I hope you enjoyed it. You can be sure this will not be the last of me not shutting up about this thing, I just wanted to bring it all into one post. I would appreciate any comments that you could spare. thanks for reading!
After returning last night from our vacation to Washington DC, I would say the trip was "horrendously successful".
Monday and Friday were dedicated almost completely to travel, leaving us only three real days in the city. Plus, Wednesday was devoted completely to the Annapolis Naval Academy, cutting one more DC day, leaving us really only two days to see about a month of material.
Washington DC can come across as a boring educational field trip and not as a fun family vacation. Typically monuments, memorials and museums are three M's that I try to avoid. However, Washington DC has done a fantastic job of maintaining a wonderful environment for visitors.
The city is remarkably clean. It's almost strange how little garbage there is. After living in a smaller town, and visiting NYC, I would compare the cleanliness of DC to... a suburban neighborhood. No trash. Anywhere. Very strange for a city the size of DC, and a city that welcomes millions of visitors every single day.
The variety of the people was also astonishing. Most of the visitors were not Americans. I would place the numbers at maybe 35% American citizens, and 65% foreign visitors. It was amazing to see how many visiting tourists came from overseas to view our nation's frameworks.
This was my third trip to the city, but for some reason, nothing seemed old or dull. The monuments were larger than life. Everything had new life and somehow was still refreshing to see. I would even say that it was more fun this time. It was a good mix of being the group tour guide acting like I knew what I was talking about, and being excited at the changes inside the city.
We did not have a car, we relied on the Metro subway system and walking. The Metro never failed, and was just as clean as the streets above. When are city streets and subways EVER like this? It was weird. The Metro never felt dangerous, never took forever to work, and was always quick to get us to our destination. The maps were easy to follow, and we easily stayed together as a group. I would highly recommend the Metro instead of renting a car, because traffic was a little tight, and parking was difficult.
The first night we took the metro to the center of everything and just walked everywhere for three hours. Seeing the monuments lit up at night was beautiful, and navigating a foreign environment for the first time in the dark was interesting.
As a group, we relied just as much on our iPhones as we did the Metro. Caleb and I both have 3G iPhones, giving us GPS-like walking navigation. We also kept a Metro map loaded on our phones. Between our phones always displaying our current location, knowing where we wanted to go, and understanding the Metro system, we got around just fine.
We had four point-and-shoot cameras out and firing the entire trip. Before we boarded the plane to come home, I dumped everyone's memory cards to my mac. Now I'm burning "master" DVDs for everyone, so that each person has every photo. This was a big success, because at each location if I saw my mom take a photo of something, I didn't worry about it. As long as somebody pushed a button, we were all good. Sorting through them, there are still duplicates, but this isn't a problem, it's a bonus. Now I have the option to delete the worst of the two photos only keeping the best of the best from everything. I'm using iPhoto to process everything. The latest feature in the application is Faces and Places. Faces finds everyone in your photos and names them. Places finds the locations of where your photos were taken and maps them allowing you to see all the places you've been, and who was with you. Love it.
Thursday morning we went all out and hopped on a guided tour of the city. We had wondered around the first night, but we wanted to make sure we saw it all, which can be difficult on foot at night. The tour took us all over, doubling up on some stops and filling in holes of stops we had missed. This allowed us to see what we wanted at night, and everything else during the daytime. I don't exactly remember, I think it was about $10 and hour, per passenger. We rode for about three hours.
Eating was weird. The entire monument hotspot region district area of the city had NOTHING to eat. It was an interesting shock. We ate hotel breakfast, hunted lunch in random locations, and rode the Metro out to places for nice dinners. When I say hunted lunch, I mean somebody would see a Subway sign and an arrow, so we'd walk two blocks to find a narrow staircase to a second story apartment that had been shifted into a tiny subway with a few tables and a bathroom. Weird random places like that wherever we could find them. That worked for a few days, but I don't know how it be for a full week or two.
The Naval Academy at Annapolis was fantastic. We rented a minivan Wednesday and drove the 45mins out of the city to get there. Nick met us on the sidewalk and toured us around the campus. We grabbed some lunch and got seats for the Blue Angels F18 air-show that afternoon. After a mind-blowing display of our Navy's power, we said goodbye to Nick, got some shopping done nearby, and headed back to our Arlington hotel.
The trip was fantastic. Bringing Aubrey and Vickie along kept the group lively, and made each day a lot more fun. We were each other's photographers, making sure that everyone got in plenty of photos. We had two navigators, four photographers, one driver, two shoppers, and six goofball tourists. With three girls, three boys, three kids and three adults we made the finest group of clueless tourists you've ever seen, and it is going to be hard to travel anywhere now without this exact crew. I couldn't have asked for a finer group of people to travel with, and couldn't have built a more balanced group. What a trip.
If you didn't get completely overloaded with pictures, here are a few more:
www.Flickr.com/photos/cameronmagee/sets/72157618701694770/
We made it to DC just fine, arriving just after rush hour today. We're going ALL OUT by relying solely on the DC Metro for transportation. We flew, and have no personal transportation of our own. It'll be public or no-blic for us.
Tonight's post will be pulling away from the typical structure of this blog but contributing to the typical content mixture of this blog. I can't categorize this blog. It contains aspects of my mixed life. If you're a reader you understand the cross of material blogged about here.
I saw a lot today. Here is a collection of strange little paragraphs summing up information logged for today.
It is a good idea to place your alarm clock very far away from your bed. By using your phone as an alarm, and leaving it right next to your bed, you set yourself up to simply roll over onto it and successfully sleep in on important wake-up days.
No matter what size suitcase you begin to pack, you will fill it. Planning to leave parts of a large suitcase empty due to a medium amount of clothes sounds like a safe plan. However, viewing that empty space will remind you of the items that aren't necessary for travel, and will force you to place them into your travel luggage.
People in the service industry, such as airports, dining and transportation, work hard. They have servants attitudes and carry a wealth of knowledge to their under-paid workplaces. They are held to high demands, and rarely thanked for their work. Smiling and thanking these people is necessary. They are humbling themselves to serve you. They are not robots, and they deserve respect.
Traveling with family is funny.
Strangers don't like to talk on airplanes.
All bags look alike at baggage claim.
The DC Metro is a fantastic system.
Washington DC is an interesting place where it is impossible to not have something to look at. Strolling down any street you can find will show you historical sites and ornate buildings. Our country has done and continues to do a lot to honor it's national capital.
To have your point-and-shoot photographs turn out, pay attention to two things: ISO and Flash. Mixing these up will leave a card full of garbage photos, remembering the two in balance will maximize your cameras potential. When shooting at night, You will need to either use a high ISO, or flash. Not both. Flash only travels about 15ft. Anything inside 15ft, use your flash and leave your ISO alone. Farther than 15ft, raise your ISO and leave your flash off.
That's about it for the first day of DC family vacation. Sorry this is such a bare post. Normally this is a pretty jazzy place, but I really don't have much to show from a day of travel. Tomorrow though. Looks nice up here. Looking forward to more time with this bunch. Six is a great travel number. Caleb and I are a good brother team. Vickie is a nut who keeps things light. Aubrey seems to be putting up with my crazy family. Mom & Dad seem to be having a good time. Tomorrow will be filled with wonderful bunches of blog material. Blogging is for nighttime, Twitter is for daytime. The Twitter window is over on the right side of this page somewhere. Thanks for reading!
It's family vacation time! Yip Yip! The four of us, plus Aubrey and Aunt Vickie, will be loading up and flying to Washington DC for the first family vacation in 13 years!
I don't know why we never went on vacations, but who cares, I'm pumped about this one!
I've been to DC before, but am no expert. (that photo up there is from last time) What are the highlights? What's hot? What's a must?
We're not going to be there too terribly long, and from the little that I have heard, you could spend a month there and still miss stuff. For your veterans, seriously, do you have any recommendations?
I will be faithfully blogging throughout the trip, as well as posting as many Tweets as I can. It will be a family affair, so I will try to be courdious about my cell phone usage around them. I try to keep it pretty old school and act like I didn't hear that text message I just received, as well as ignore the hundreds of tweets pouring in every hour. Just like with blogs, I'm more of a reader than a writer, so I follow twice as many people on Twitter than people follow me. Thank goodness.
We've got a house sitter for the pugs, so don't get any funny ideas. We'll be back before long with photos and stories and whatever else comes from a vacation with the people you live with.