I can now hold the basic rock beat. Which is good as it covers 90% of all modern music. I’ve found out several key aspects to drumming:
Limb separation: (no you don’t need a saw for that), just being able to have your limbs work separately. That is not having to ‘think’ about when to strike the snare, it just happens without you thinking about it. So your brain just becomes a metronome, making sure that the beat doesn’t slip.
Muscle memory: To be able to do this you need to practice and develop your muscle memory. Basically practice, practice, practice.
Holding the beat: You also need to be able to hold a beat. Practice with a metronome. Once you have the basic rock beat under control, practice along with some music. Remember the drummer is supposed to drive the beat — so it’s important. At the moment I’m practicing along to some early Cold Chisel songs. Pretty basic beats and fills.
Practice: Did I mention that? You need to practice, and when you’ve finished practicing, practice again. I’ve found that consistant practice, (and this doesn’t just apply to drums), every day is much better than the occasional 1 hour every week or couple of days.
Well, I’ve built the first prototype of the board, and coded up rev 1.0 of the keyboard software.
Rev 1.0 supports the usual keybounce routines, and braille decoder. It’ll take a bit of tweaking to find the optimum balance of keybounce vs proper operation. I’m thinking of supporting dynamic keystroke detection so that as someone gets better at typing, it’ll shorten the delay between the keybounce routine and a valid keystroke. This means as you get faster typing, it won’t slow you down.
I’ve set the theoretical maximum limit to double the speed of the current world record, (150wpm or 12 cps). Now that shouldn’t be an issue!
One thing that I’ve wanted to do for a long time is pick up another instrument.…..
I learnt the violin and piano for many years, so have good grounding in music. Sax is pretty good, and I’ve wanted to learn that for some time now. However, I came across a drum kit that was looking for a new home. So I started up learning drums.
I had the situation at work where I wanted to run Clearcase under a Solaris 10 zone. With a bit of coercing it’s possible to do, and doesn’t impact much of the global zone at all. If you don’t know what Clearcase is, then this still may be handy information to know. Undoubtedly, there are other applications that rely on loadable modules. Read more…
First up: This has been discussed to death on forums and mail groups for a long time. The winner is that there isn’t one. The basic truth is that either will do for you a good job. However, I found subtle differences between the two that made me end up going with Atmel. Here’s why: Read more…
First up. Why?
Well, the answer is that I’m getting tired of using the standard qwerty keyboard. Even though I can type fairly fast, I am not a touch typist, and only use 6 fingers anyway. With those 6 fingers I can get to 100wpm, but I have to look at the keyboard for finger placement.
What would be nice is to have a keyboard that I could take with me anywhere. Something I can put in my pocket, can connect to my Nokia phone via Bluetooth, or my iPAQ via bluetooth, IR or serial. Then there’s my 12 odd PCs at home, and not to mention work. Something with a small screen would be nice so as to easily learn the new finger placement. Something that can last at least a week on batteries. Mmmm. Read more…
I finally got my PIC chips, programmer, and dev board. Started to hack around with the PICs. It dawned on me very quickly, that the re-learning curve will be steep. Also, that the PICs turned out, (for me), to be the wrong choice. See here for a reason why I ditched them.
So, after a bit more digging, I went with the Atmels. These are pretty decent chips, and I certainly feel more at home with them.
