The Zendrum has landed

WEBLOG:
My Zendrum dream is finally fulfilled. Here she is:

I ordered the Honey Rock Maple finish, since I liked the deep cadmium yellow and black combination, but in reality the finish looks more like sienna/golden ochre, and only looks like that deep cadmium yellow when under extremely bright direct light:

I’ve wanted a Zendrum badly ever since I first learned of it many years ago, and it’s always been one of those drool-worthy gears that seem like more of a luxury than a necessity. That changed for me after years of programming drums on keyboard MIDI controllers, conventional rubber pad-based percussion controllers, or electronic drum kits. I just didn’t like doing fast rolls on the keyboard since it’s not very ergonomic or natural for that purpose (with the iMap layout it’s better, but you can only use your finger tips but not the other parts of your hands). I have a Clavia Ddrum 4 kit, but I don’t program drum tracks on it since I hate having to hit record and then run to the drum kit, sit down, and then play–it’s more like some weird physical game than making music. I could use a wireless keyboard to activate recording, but I’d still have go back to the desk to make any edits, and that’s still a lot of running back and forth. The Zendrum solves those problems by being small enough to have right on the desk, worn on your chest like a guitar, or on your lap, having extremely sensitive trigger pads that you can easily do fast finger rolls on, and laid out so you can use other parts of hands like the heel and the ball of the palms, joints of the fingers…etc. On the Zendrum, I can do double bass kicks, fast 16/32 note open and close hi-hats (including the bell), snare rolls/ghost notes (rimshot and open hits), ride, crash, splash, china…etc all at the same time, and can trade them off spontaneous without having to think too much about it because the layout I designed is so intuitive for me. Here’s what my current layout looks like for Addictive Drums:

How you’d play with that layout is to put the thumbs on the kicks, index fingers on the closed hi-hats (more like using the first joint of your finger tip instead of the tip itself), middle and ring fingers on the snares, and pinky on the open hi-hats and bells of the hi-hats. The cymbals on the bottom you can use the heel and ball of your palms. The rest on the top (rides, snare rim click, side stick, toms…etc) use your index, middle, and ring fingers.

I’ll be doing some more layouts after I get back to my studio (in a week or so), and I’ll post the layouts as I finish testing them. Off the top of my head I’ll probably be doing layouts for Ezdrummer, Artist Drums, Battery 3 (so many different kit, so I’ll only be doing some of the most used kits), and some of the drum synths I use.

While the Zendrum is a wonderful instrument–one that you can do things on that you could never do with a drum kit or keyboard or any rubber pad based devices, it does still have room for improvement. When I ran into some problems with my unit I talked to the Zendrum folks about them and it lead to them inviting me to play a part in the future development of Zendrum behind the scenes. High on my list would be a software editor, better user interface, more flexible crossfade note mapping, and more intuitive trigger calibration.

Eastwest Voices of Passion arrived, and once again I had problems with the Registration Wizard crashing immediately upon launch, and same with the iLok syncronization, so I had to use another computer to register the product again. After playing around with VoP for a couple of hours, my opinion of it hasn’t really changed–the voice of the Whales singer is what I bought it for, but to piece together a convincing performance would be quite difficult as the product has problems. There are sometimes timbre/texture jumps between some notes that makes it nearly impossible to connect those notes together in a natural sounding manner, and the PLAY engine seems to have glitches too–some notes will cut short before reaching the end, and it happens randomly. I plan on experimenting with Melodyne and see if it could make VoP more flexible than it is.

…

I watched the 12-minute clip of Ron Moore’s new pilot for the TV series Virtuality, and I have to say that I didn’t like it. The reality show element of the premise is completely idiotic, as it’s just ridiculous to think that such a serious and expensive deep space mission would jeopardize the psychological well-being of its crew by subjecting them to the kind of reality show mind-fuck we all know so well. It’s as if being on one of the most important missions the human race has ever embarked on wasn’t tense enough, they’d actually produce a reality show right there on the space station? What kind of an idiot would think that’s likely to ever happen? I can be skeptical and jaded when it comes to how asinine the human race can get, but even I think that’s extremely unlikely.

Or…maybe Ron Moore is just messing with us by faking that premise and something else entirely is happening? Hmm. . ..