Drummer Louie Bellson died on Valentine’s Day. He was made famous drumming and composing for Duke Ellington. The reason it’s a sad day for metal is that Bellson pioneered the double-bass drum setup. He came up with it in high school at the age of 14. He grew up to play stuff like this:
That double bass idea gave way to stuff like this:
Thanks Louie. Rest In Peace.
I think Noah is smart. But I think Noah is smart the same way every parent thinks their kid is smart.
“My son looks at me when I call his name. He’s a genius.”
“He’s seven.”
But Noah does do some awesome stuff. Maybe it’s more cute than intelligent, but now, when you put pants on him, he’ll hold up his foot to help you get it in the pant leg. This goes for socks and shoes too. Not only adorable, but highly convenient. Which is nice, cause convenient actions and kids are a rare combination. Very rare.
But then, yesterday, he did something that struck me as a little less intelligent. As I was leaving for work, and Noah followed me out into the garage, he noticed the box for his drum set. He bangs away on his drum set all the time (seen climbing it in this video), so I was surprised to see him that excited about the box for it. Then he found a drumstick…
and proceeds to beat on it, like it’s the real thing.
So this means one of three things in my mind.
1) Noah thinks he now has two drum sets, and this one just sounds “boxier”.
2) Noah has little-to-no depth perception
3) Noah is actually intelligent and was doing a “Hey, heh, look! Heh, heh. I’m playing the drums!” joke.
Here’s hoping it’s the third one.
Note: Please forgive the quality of the cell phone picture.
Teresa tries to play it off, telling me that other moms say their kids like to drum too. Other moms are stupid. This kid, this one below, yeah, he freakin’ loves drumming.
My house has been especially musical lately. Today Noah finally started playing his xylophone correctly, with mallet in hand, rather than with flattened palms, which was never very effective. He’s been swinging drumsticks for a while now, something I’ve shown in previous videos, but his control has really improved, and I guess the xylophone progress indicates he’s managed to grasp the concept of a stick or mallet being used to play an instrument.
I recently set up my keyboard to play drum sounds, so Noah could bang away at that, but as mentioned earlier, he thinks it’s like the xylophone, and has started whacking at the keyboard with a drumstick. This makes a very loud “something is about to break” kind of sound, that makes me unhappy. My buddy Juan reminded me of my DD55 packed away in my garage, and I have to stay, I’m greatly in debt to him now. I’m not sure why I didn’t think about it. When I use to play it (back before I got my electronic set) I always said I’d pass it on to my kid when he/she wanted to learn. So at 5:15 I sat Noah down with it, and I finally had to pull him away at 5:45 to feed him dinner, and he wasn’t happy about it at all. I’ve never seen anything keep his attention for 30 minutes. He just whacked away at it, making all sorts of noise, favoring his left hand, and switching one stick between hands rather than holding two sticks at the same time. I must say, there’s little Noah could do to make me happier. I want him to be musical, never intended to force anything on him, but I never in my life expected him to be picking this stuff up so fast.
On the non-Noah side of things (for once) I’ve been making a lot more music lately than I use to. I haven’t posted anything here, as little of it for general listening audiences. I’ve taken up with minusdrums.com, a website devoted to metal and rock guitars tracks, left without drums so drummers can play along as practice. I’ve managed to sell 22 tracks thus far, which is about 21 more songs than I’ve sold in my whole life. Turns out people can actually make money from selling music they’ve made. What a novel idea.
Problem is, I keep swapping back and forth between drumming and playing/recording guitar, and my hands are taking quite a beating. Thursday night I had to soak my hands in ice water due to blisters and pains from drumming too much. Tonight, my fingers hurt from playing to much guitar. I’m glad to be playing, but man is it taking it’s toll on me.
The final note in this music-centric post is a new band. I’ve formed a duo with a fella from Israel. We’ve thus far completed one song, and are both excited to work on more. It’s a long, and arduous writing process, recording, uploading to the net, waiting for response, over and over again, but it’s working surprisingly well considering. I’m quite proud of the new song, and hope the next few will come out a little quicker.
Well, this has gotten entirely too long. I’ll talk some more later about the new band, and ideas I have for trying to gain some ground on the ever-expansive internet. My fingers now hurt from typing to much. I’m falling apart. Sigh.
