Live Ramones Karaoke tagged posts

I fell pretty lucky that I have not had any physical issues during my 35 years of drumming but last year saw my first worrisome injury
Of course, there was always the banged up knuckles from bashing but I developed problems with my left elbow when playing for the traditional Ramones Tribute band in 2017
The injury was a result of over practicing a technique that I had never really used before
For the un-initiated, playing Ramones music on the drums involves playing the hi hat very fast
The secret to this technique is to smooth out all the normal dynamics, replacing the punches and stabs with an even wash of 8th notes
I have been playing 90% punches and stabs for my entire drumming existence and my muscle memory was pretty much set in stone
Things would have been OK but I insisted on overd...

After finishing the audio/visual bass tracks and trying to sync them up to the drum parts, I have realized that they aren’t fitting together
I know what the problem is and how to fix it but that means I am going to have to redo all the bass parts again
I could “fix it in post” but it would take as much time if not more than just starting over
My original plan for bass parts was to shoot videos first but not to record the audio
I would go back and overdub the bass parts because I didn’t want the added pressure of getting the recordings right whilst on camera
There were lots of clunker notes and I just thought this would make things faster and less stressful
The cardinal mistake was that I used my laptop to record the audio for the drums but used my Boss digital 8 track for the bass audio
Th...

Thanks to my great friend Meatpie, I now have Ableton Live
For those of you who do not know that that is, just know that it is software that is going to enable me to put on a more professional performance because I can send my tracks individually instead of mixed together
My current video setup has all drums on one mono channel with bass guitar and backing vocals on another
Instead of handing the sound engineer the batter already mixed, you can hand them the individual ingredients
The sound person can now alter the recipe to fit their own room

At this moment, I have 50 drum parts and 45 bass parts ready to automate
The next step is keying out green screen and syncing the drums and bass videos together
I am not really happy with the quality and even-ness of lighting and I anticipate a lot o...

Well, 53 drum tracks for Live Ramones Karaoke but……
WHEW! That sure was an effort
About half of this set list or more was recorded by memory with only a click track
After that, I decided it would take too long to memorize the rest of them so I decided it was easier to play along with recorded tracks
My biggest issue is that most of the live stuff is too fast or too slow for my tastes so I adjusted the tempo of each song to the nearest BPM block setting
I prefer even numbers and tend to go by tens
I rarely even use a bpm ending in “5”, much less any number other than “0”
That might turn out to be a liability later on down the line but I am sure it will show itself to me eventually if it is a problem
After all, I can make mistakes in this series of recordings because I fully intend to re-re...