Category: Rants

Shit that pisses me off.

Categories
Gigs Rants

$500 DW snare drum fails after 30 seconds

So at the last gig I was excited to try out my new copper DW snare drum. It wasn’t cheap but it was supposed to sound awesome. I chose it not only for it’s sound, but because the drum sales guy told me this would be a “durable drum which would last years of heavy gigging, even as hard as I play.”

I guess he was wrong because 30 seconds into the first song with this drum the f’ing throw off threw off. I thought I’d just whacked the throw off arm so I turned it back on. With each snare hit the throw off arm would go about 1/3 of the way off. So after 3 hits the damn thing would turn into a timbale, no snares…

dw snare tape

Nice. I replaced a 35 year old Ludwig that worked perfectly at my gigs for two decades for a 2006 DW that lasted 30 seconds before it failed. I had to find some damn masking tape to tape the frigging throw off arm in the up position to finish the gig.

I’ve since had last year’s model throw off put on this thing so we’ll see if that can break the record and last, oh say ONE song?

Categories
Boneheads Rants

Flaky musicians….

Nice phone call:

Client: Yes I’m wondering where my CD’s are.

Me: I have them ready to go right here.

Client: Why haven’t you sent them to me?

Me: Because you haven’t paid for the production of the CD’s which took place about 4 months ago. I’ve told you as soon as you pay your bill you can have your product!

Client: Oh, I’ll drop a check in the mail.

Me: Like the check you said you’d send three months ago, and the one you’d send two months ago and the one you said you’d send last month?

Categories
Boneheads Random Rants

Getting clients to pay their bills

Client: My company is about to go public. They figure the shares will be worth $6-$8 each and I have 300,000 shares.

Me: Awesome! That’s so great for you. By the way here’s your latest invoice for $600.

Client: Oh. Uh here’s a check. Can you hold it until next Friday?

Categories
Musicians Rants Recording

New Dream Theater album sounds like a “do it yourself” project

Ok I have listened to the entire new DT album. I must say I’m not impressed. Don’t get me wrong, the musicians are amazing. That’s not my beef.

The engineering and production on this album stinks. It sounds very mid-rangey (if that’s a word). In my one car stereo all I can hear clearly driving down the streen is snare drum and vocals. Can’t hear the bass, and the guitar & keyboards just blend into each other to form foggy sort of “audio soup.” And it seems like the whole thing is damn near panned center. Mix in some stereo will ya?

The lead guitar parts are way too low. The snare drum is too loud and in fact the whole kit sounds very mid-rangey and thin. The kick drum doesn’t kick. The toms are kind of whimpy. And the whole kit was obviously recorded in a tight space and it is totally lacking “life” or some kind of wideness or ambience.

The vocals sound pretty good.

Did these guys engineer/produce it themselves? That’s just what it sounds like.

Categories
Gigs Random Rants

One of the worst gigs ever

I was taking cortazone pills for tennis elbow and they just tear your stomach up. My stomach got so acidy (is that a word?) that I was ready to barf. I started hiccuping very badly while on stage playing the drums.

The brilliant bar tender told me he had a drink that would solve the hiccups. I chugged this miracle drink and it made the hiccups and stomach acid 10x worse. I was so sick on stage, violenty hiccuping and nearly barfing every hiccup. I ran to 7-11 on the next break and bought about 5 packs of tums. I ate them ALL during the last set and it didn’t do anything. I hiccuped every 6 seconds until about 6am.

I figured I had hiccuped over 6000 times that night. I’ve never taken cortazone pills again.