Autumn Cannibals

Well, the Whitby Gothic Weekend was a blast. I was up there on the north-east coast providing cymbals and a gong for top L.A. drummer, Tom Coyne, and one of his bands, Autumn Cannibals - the new solo project of Jeff Diehm from The Last Dance.

They played an excellent set and it was nice to hear my cymbals in a concert setting over a huge P.A. for a change. The crowd was into it too, and was a sight to behold. Such amazing outfits! Everything from Steampunk and near-fetish wear down to "traditional" goth blackness.

I enjoyed staying with the band and a few of their friends in a huge house up on the clifftops. Slightly disappointed in the double-glazed windows though. It would have been nice to hear the waves crashing into the shore more easily while drifting off to sleep. The Cannibals had flown in just for this gig, so they arrived and departed more-or-less in synch with me - Friday night to Sunday morning.

I look forward to catching up with them again when I head out to their home ground in January for the NAMM show.

Meanwhile, here's a couple of songs from their set:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=traLzUq1mqY
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VLv7NhpEcwo

Clinics and Festivals

Last week, I had the pleasure of watching 3 great drummers at work. I went to the Benny Greb drum clinic in Manchester, UK. He was supported by Ash Soan (you may not have heard of him but I bet you've heard records he's played on) and Jake Brown. All 3 were amazing, entertaining and instructive.

Jake is 14 and has been playing drums for, I think, 4 years. Sheesh! I wish I was that good after I'd been playing for 4 years. I'm still not that good!

Jake had planned out a solo incorporating quite an array of my instruments but, as he had his set time cut short, he had to scale back, so just one gong was used. But it's a beauty. Check the video here of Jake's drum solo piece - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I7PDeBoDZxk



Next weekend, there's another outing for my creations - this time with top L.A. drummer, Tom Coyne. He's playing with Autumn Cannibals at the Whitby Gothic Festival over the Halloween weekend. Tom will use a full set of my cymbals on his kit, plus a Gothic gong or two. Hopefully, I'll be able to film some of that too. I'm looking forwards to watching Tom play.

Most illuminating

Each time I shoot a promo video for my work, I try to do it a litle better than last time; learning from mistakes and experience. Apart from the ones where I've had direct help from Andy Mac (which are of vastly superior quality!), hopefully you can notice a gradual improvement from video to video.

The latest one was a medium scale production for me. Not too long, elaborate or fancy, but not a short, thrown together with little care piece either. Here it is on youtube - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mUQOZ4_b_zQ

I wanted to get the lighting better than before. But without spending any money on fancy equipment. Before, I have used multiple small spot-lights (the ones from my exhibition booth rig), but these are actually pretty dim for photography / videography and they cast hard shadows and give you over-sparkly point reflections.

What I needed was flood-lights in "soft-boxes" - to create a larger, more diffuse light source to soften the shadows and make reflections of the lights less offensive.

I made 2 of them in very Heath-Robinson fashion. Both from cheap halogen flood lights that I already had. One with two microphone stands and a large sheet of tissue paper:



The second, I made with a cymbal boom arm stand, a microphone stand and an old coated drum head:



I had them either side of the scene so the drums were illuminated quite evenly from both sides (and also from the existing overhead lighting in the room):



Seemed to work pretty well. I had to add a "flag" to screen off the right hand soft-box later on, when I had a video camera with a wide-angle lens on it out in front of the kit. The light, even though out of shot, was still getting into the lens and creating a lens flare. So I hung a black sheet (like the ones I've used as the backdrop) from one of the microphone stands that was actually being used to hold a microphone to block the light to lens path, but not the light to drums path.

So, you don't necessarily need proper, expensive Gobos and soft-boxes to do a reasonable job...

Fair enough

The UK National Drum Fair was great fun last week. It was good to see lots of great British custom drum builders and their fine work - Highwood, Guru, Liberty, etc. Nice also to have a full-booth representation from UFIP. Mighty fine piatti from Italy.

My booth remained fairly busy and business was good. Several gongs and an InfiniTri triangle sold. Many thanks to the forum members of MikeDolbear.com for keeping me entertained!

This week, I've been busy with follow-up from the show, plus designing and pricing up a new lathe. I decided to abandon earlier plans trying to combine low speed cymbal lathe and high speed tool sharpening grinder in the same motor and belt system as it was getting impractical. Separate grinder methinks, but the lathe will still have 3 speeds.

There was an article about me from the London Drum Show in the Croatian Daily Newspaper "Jutarnji List" on Saturday 18th September. I've only seen a blurry photo of it so far - but it looked good. A paper copy is due to arrive here soon. Though I think I will stil struggle to read it! There may be something else forthcoming in a Jersey / Guernsey publication too. Watch this space...

Everybody wants hi-hats

An interesting week. Much of it I have spent buried in video editing and fighting with software and youtube. It is quite galling to spend hours, nay days, making something look and sound beautiful, only to have youtube mangle it. After lots of testing of different video formats and codecs, I managed to get the final uploaded result to come out of youtube almost the same as when it went in. The result is here - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OZ-6HEqGbfk - The InifniTri...

Meanwhile, I have received requests for hi-hats from all quarters. Bronze hi-hats, Stainless Steel hi-hats, micro-hats, giant hats and some too bizarre (and too secret) to mention. So, I think the week that remains before the UK National Drum Fair, will consist of mainly making hi-hats and ride cymbals. Hammer-tastic!

New Bronze

3 times my own weight in Bronze arrived the other week - quite a large order! It should keep me going for a while. Some of this is a high Tin content alloy. I have been having great fun working with it. It is quite a lot harder under the hammer but creates beautiful sounding cymbals.

The first of these will be for sale at the NDF in Birmingham the weekend after next.

Resolution

Right. I'm on a mission. Let's see how long it lasts...

Smaller blog entries. Much more frequently.

Did the London Drum Show at Olympia. Good show. Check. Next up - the UK National Drum Fair in Birmingham. 2 weeks to go. After that, one of the biggies - PASIC in Indianapolis. You have to wait until November for that one.

Last night, I had great fun with Andy Mac the photo / video genius. He shot some gorgeous looking HD footage of my new Symphonic Triangles. We had fun lighting the scene with a candelabra and a propane torch! Later on, I'm going to be breaking out the ribbon mics and the fancy pre-amps to do a soundtrack. I'm looking forward to editing together the most over-the-top promotional video for a small percussion instrument ever made...

Long time no blog...

The life of an independent cymbal maker is a busy one! Sourcing and buying metals, creating instruments, trying to promote and sell them, putting them carefully into shipping boxes, handing them over to shipping agents, playing music, doing the accounts, exhibiting at shows: Winter NAMM, Frankfurt Musikmesse, The UK Custom Drum Show, Chicago Drum Show. It’s nice to have a bit of a break now over the summer. Phew.

Time to catch up on orders. Time to develop new ideas. Time to investigate new materials. Time to make plans. Ohio Drum Show? Amsterdam Drum Show? Maybe. UK National Drum Fair? PASIC? Definitely.

The music festival and fringe has been on here in Bath. The Baghdaddies and Travis / Fripp were highlights of that for me. Ooh, and how could I forget – ANTA, Squeeze Me Macaroni and Team Brick. Last year it was Joanna McGregor playing John Cage. Spellbinding. In 3 weeks, I’ll be playing my gong rig at The Croft in Bristol with the wonderful Dan Bennett on guitar and processing.

Actually, I’ve sold some pretty sweet gongs lately. I need to make some more, if only for that performance. Back to the grindstone...