I wanted to show a bit of finger drumming I did playing the noise board instrument.
While making this project I was thinking that I really appreciate that @Robert_Mathijs taught me the rhythm basics in his courses.
About the instrument. This is a so-called noise box electric instrument with a piezo mic underneath for picking vibrations. It is usually used to play ambient sounds with a ton of reverb on top. I thought it would be fun to make it rhythmic instead.
Great performance too. I’m happy to read you’re happy with me teaching you the basics. I think it’s cool too see how you can play anything once you have control over your hands and you make them work together or interact (rudiments, alternating, sometimes hitting together). If you can do those things in time, you can take that everywhere, including this crazy little instrument, also playing with a little stick even.
First of all, the main excitement is that it is portable – very easy to jump in and practice. I use an Android app for splitting a song into tracks and playing via AUX in.
The main disappointment is pad sensitivity – it is average. Curves are applied to the whole kit which makes it hard to play dynamically.
For this performance, I prepared a drumless track mixed with metronome and copied it to a flash drive. Then I recorded drums only directly on the device playing along this track. Then I mixed the drum track with a drumless track without metronome in DAW. Not sure I aligned them perfectly.
Overall, it was fun to play on this instrument. It is better that I thought. I think I will learn more songs in near future.
I thought about getting the FGDP-50 for the ease of practicing, but decided on the Maschine Mikro Mk3 instead. It’s not as convenient, but had to pick something to start with.
Niviman shared the song with me a while back. I’m very happy to see and hear these results!
@iDuncan, if you spend a good amount of time in the “Master Moeller Technique” course, you will learn that entire song. But… if you’re just starting out that will probably be a year from now at the soonest. Probably more
Yes, it is possible to play hi-hat parts fast with a special hand technique. I followed the Master Moeller Technique course and was able to play this song in six weeks. I would never have learned something so complicated without proper instruction. First I made all movements very slowly and repeated them time after time.
I have been finger drumming for three years. However, there has been months with low activity.
I have very little playing experience with real drums. All added together, few hours.
This is a 9-minute song that consists of 6 parts. My goal was to evaluate how fun and how fast I can learn it with FGDP-50. TL;DR it took me 6 weeks and I missed only 3 days of training. I enjoyed it in every moment except training the last fill of the first part – this is where I was .
First of all, Tré Cool’s playing is very melodical. It is noticeable in alternating crashes and accents that match dynamics of a song. Grooves always align with riffs. I really enjoyed playing all the offbeat snares.
I did most of my practice sessions outdoors sitting on a bench in the morning. This is a great advantage of a portable device. Session length in average was 30+ mins, I would say.
I divided the song into 6 parts with 2-4 bar overlaps. Then I started learning parts in backward direction – in that way all the parts were strongly learned. In fact, I still feel more confident with last parts.
From technical standpoint, it took a lot of time to play single stroke drum rolls consistently. Fills from the first part are insane, so I simplified them several times – I tried to keep orchestration the same but omitted all the crazy triplets. Most of the grooves are played with alternating hands method, also I tried to divide a tempo between hands as much as I could.
I recorded the song “natively” on device. A drumless track was mixed with drums during recording.
Overall, despite of average pad sensitivity, I have a very good impression on how FGDP-50 can be used for finger drumming. I doubt that I would train every day in front of a computer.
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