My Day

Drumeo's 30-Day Drummer II is underway, although I'm having a hard time keeping up.  I thought I did lesson 1 on 1/6, and expected lesson 2 on 1/7, but there was nothing available on the 7th.  I believe the problem was that I didn't want to mark lesson 1 as complete until I went through it one more time, and I learned that until you mark one lesson as complete, the following lesson won't be unlocked.

Anyway, I learned something and am caught up through lesson 4.  30-Day D II is listed as for beginners, and since I've had more than a year of lessons, I was expecting to have some of the lessons tell me about techniques already covered under Method.  That seems to be what I've seen so far, but it is nice to report that the 30-Day D II exercises are easier for me to execute than those in the 1st 30-Day.  So I guess I really have learned something.

Practice:  (1) lessons 3 and 4 of 30-Day D II  (2) twice through Low*  (3) once through the unreleased 1992 studio version of Down in the Bottom (aka The Dopest Cut)  (4) Method 3.5 (Styles, "Modern Country Beats) (5) here's where the asterisk* comes in:  I had already used Moises to download stems for several songs, but realized later that I wanted more than just a drum track for them.  More than a drum track, less than the entire song.  

Moises is an app for that -- adjust the sliders for each stem, than record it as "What You Hear" to the DAW (in my case, GoldWave).  Example:  I like the sound of Low, but not to the point where I'd want to hear the entire song each time.  So adjust the sliders in Moises to make it an instrumental, with the drum track in front and the bass and other instrumentation at lower levels, just enough so it's not simply an isolated drum track.  Did the same thing for Down in the Bottom, removing Becker's voice and turning the instrumentation into a whisper.  Turn the bass track down to about 1/2 the original volume and crank up the drum track so I can hear each open hi-hat.  

Current goal is to continue day by day with Method, plus the periodic challenges to develop fundamental skills.  But also choose five songs to learn from front to back, because I believe I have enough of the fundamentals to be able to understand what I'm doing.  For example, the Dopest Cut and the actual release of the song on 11 Tracks of Whack have several differences, and I'm going to try to split the difference with what I do for Drumeo evaluation.  The actual release has a Wendel successor handling a simple money beat throughout without a single fill.  The Dopest Cut has a pro drummer who does some things I get, such as open hi-hats, and some that are more advanced and out of my league for now.  Down in the Bottom (John's Version) will have more than the simple timekeeping of the release version, and less than the unreleased The Dopest Cut.  

Other housework:  had some FLAC and WAV files, and I made MP3 copies of them and deleted the extra-large originals.