Let the summer tours begin!!

     Wednesday, April 20th 11:06 pm....
               The dogs are sleeping after being well fed. I'm relaxing watching justified after another long day of pre tour stress out week. I can't wait to actually get our tour started so I can relax..The last minute list of stuff I have to get done before I leave doesn't seem to be getting shorter. Action items keep getting added which is not a good thing. Last night while having a late dinner I chipped my front tooth which I had repaired about 4 months ago. I really didn't need that with 3 days to go before departure. Luckily my dentist Tom Baba will be able to see me Friday night. I broke a cymbal day before yesterday. That was a total bummer. The good folks at Sabian cymbals, Chris and Shirline, were super on top of their game and have gotten me all set up fast as possible. I will have to go without this cymbal until we get to Minneapolis on May 4th but I am very thankful that they can make that happen. They are great people at a great company. My Vater sticks arrived today so that is all good to go. Thanks to Chad Brandolini at Vater. They are another great company. I also picked up a two month supply of drum heads from Aquarian today as well. Thanks to Chris Brady and Roy Burns. I was not so lucky with drum companies ..Been working on a new drum deal since NAMM in January and both companies decided not just to say no, but to wait until the last minute to say no so I didn't have any time to look elsewhere. Nice...I will be adding two drum companies to my "will not play" back line rental list. Tomorrow morning I have to take one more of my dogs in to get there shots updated so they can stay at the kkennel. This is the one bad thing about leaving for tour, well there are two bad things. I miss training Jiu Jitsu and I miss my dogs terribly. What else is on the list? Regular packing of course. That includes all my bike clothes so I can ride a bunch with Mr Trever Keith. My vitamin's and supplements and all my electronic toys and very important, all of their respective chargers. I plan on doing a big house cleaning before driving the dogs up to be dropped off on Saturday. Saturday night is hair cut time at Halleywoods in Costa Mesa. I have a ton of projects that I am working on for The Music Factory school of Music.  I was hoping to get more done before I left but you can only do so much. I have this weird travel phobia that I'm going to run out of media. It's so weird. I bring tons of magazines and kindle books etc and I get to read very little of it. I just have to have it to feel good..Weird.......
     I'm so looking forward to Starbucks tomorrow morning. It's gonna be real good...
             

The Drum Tuning Guru has posted a new pod cast...

The Drum tuning guru has posted a new podcast. You can listen to it here....
http://drumtuningguru.libsyn.com/rss

In Today's music industry climate, it's all about getting creative

It's kind of funny, well sad but funny, when bands talk about getting signed or getting a "deal" these days. I'm always thinking "really? like what kind of a deal and have you been living under a rock for the past few years". Getting the old school record deal is pretty much a pipe dream these days and that may be a good thing. If you haven't read Steve Albini's breakdown of one bands record deal circa early 1990's,  read it now.      http://www.negativland.com/albini.html  

    Now before you put all of your gear on craigslist, let me try to move you in a different direction. There are great things happening out there that can really help you to build some type of income and career in music. You just have to think about it in different terms. Remember when everyone started to use myspace as a way to promote their band? That was a huge change in the industry and a huge change in how bands got things done. Those changes are happening faster than ever before and you need to be in the loop on these changes or you will be left in the dust. Social media is rapidly changing and advancing and so are the new portals for getting your music out there and for you to get paid. It's up to you to really figure out how to use these tools for your particular situation but it all starts with getting into this loop and staying in it. How do you stay abreast of these rapid changes and get one step ahead of the curve? Here are some places to start that you may find useful.
   First is the Mashable website. Mashable is the leading site for learning about social media and how it impacts everything from music to non-profits to marketing and more. Check it every day...It is rad!!
    Check out sites like kickstarter.com. This is an amazing concept site and can really help you fund your next project. Here is an example of a kickstarter project loaded up by Trever Keith from my band, Face to Face.http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/119348482/face-to-face-12-limited-edition-vinyl-and-corey-mi

     Now I know everyone has a facebook page and a twitter account etc but do you really know how to use it properly? Read this book to learn. "Six Pixels of Separation" By Mitch Joel.

    Another great promotion site is socialkik.com. This site can really help build your facebook fan page or to promote a video on you tube. The Music Factory is using this site right now to push a video about our new down loadable lesson project.

    The bottom line is that once I started to pay attention and develop a desire to learn these things, new web sites and tools started to fall into my lap. You won't find it if you are not looking....

Step #1 in good drum tone is to actually give a crap....

This is the first blog post regarding drum tuning and drum tone. Just a few things before we dig in to the meat and potatoes. I was lucky to learn drum tuning or at least my baseline starting point from two great people. Neither of these people are drummers which we will get into later. The first person was Larry Sturm. Larry  is a great recording engineer that I worked with on several projects over a few year period. He really turned my ears around when it came to what to listen for when tuning drums. The second was Steve Albini who I had the pleasure of doing a session with and he was great and getting good drum sounds. Over a several year period I was selling Steve drum heads back when I worked at Guitar Center and was able to pick his brain about tuning. From there I just kept applying and refining what I had learned. The tough thing with drum tuning is that it can be very subjective. There are no absolutes when it comes to how drums should sound, however there are some good rules to follow that will at least get you into the game. I have been working on this for years and I still get a bit of nervousness when I'm doing sound check or am recording and it's time to hit that snare or tom for the first time. I'm always somewhat waiting to hear the engineer make a negative comment or have a not so pleasant look on his face. But, the more I do this the more I get a thumbs up from the engineer. If the front of house engineer takes the time to tell you how good your kit sounded, you know you are on the right track. They do a different set of drums every day and I'm sure they are pretty over it by now so you must be doing something right when they take time out to tell you. So let's jump in and see how long it takes me to piss off all the drummers out there..
   Here I go. It is disrespectful to the art form to show up with your drums sounding like crap. Old heads, no clue and an attitude of not caring. WTF? Guitar players will spend 3 grand on a new guitar head just to get a minuscule tone improvement so why are drummers such slackers when it comes to their sound? I understand the difficulty in drum tuning but there is no excuse for not trying to learn and get better at it. Not to mention the fact that when your drum sound rules, you sound way better. Your basic AC/DC drum beat now sounds way better than the guy going on after you who may be a much better drummer. When I play at a festival I usually feel that most of the drummers are better than me so my edge is to have a great sound.
If you feel in the dark on drum tuning don't bury your head in the sand. Many great drummers who are playing in big bands suck at tuning. Tuning is part of the drum techs job but many of us don't have a tech so we need to become an expert at it ourselves. And I might ad that many of the pro drum techs are just faking it on the tuning side of things anyways....
Start taking it seriously today and you will probably sound better just by making an effort..
The next post will start with what to listen for to get good tone and what's the difference between drum tuning and drum tone. Feel free to email me your drum tuning questions to danny@themusicfactoryoc.com