A 70’s dinosaur falls into eDrums.

By Jeffrey the Barak

Before I ever had electronic drums, I spent a couple of decades carrying around large, heavy drum sets and cymbals, which could only ever be played in rented rehearsal rooms, because they naturally made very loud sounds that would never be appropriate in a normal domestic setting.

As loud as real drums are, they invariably require amplification in a loud setting, so not only are there many huge shells and large cymbals with a great deal of heavy, metal hardware to support them, there is a second set of hardware to support the microphones.

But once a decision has been made to replace the drums and microphones with electronic drums, a new option appears. This is the option of a compact format. With real drums, as they have evolved, the standard drum set includes a bass or kick drum, which is on it’s side, on the floor and a hi-hat, which has it’s pedal directly below the pair of cymbals, and is usually therefore placed before your left foot. Typically the snare drum is between the legs with the kick and hat to either side, and then an array of toms and cymbals surround the aforementioned triangle.

But of course, with a remote pedal for the hi hat, an electronic hi hat does not have to be in the usual position. For example, a right-handed drummer does not have to cross arms to get to the hi hat on his left with his right stick. It can be at 2 o’clock of the snare, and still be opened and closed with the left foot. And since we don’t need to have large toms and large cymbals to produce the sounds of large toms and large cymbals, then it starts to make sense to abandon the format and layout of acoustic drums in favor of a small compact array, permanently connected and easily amplified with one or two cables.

In some situations, a drummer will have to mimic the layout of an acoustic kit, either because he switches back and forth from one to the other and wants to avoid adapting back and forth, or because the standard image of a conventional set is assumed to be desired by his band, or his audience.

But for me, if I can have a large ride cymbal sound or a large floor tom sound without having to have those large objects present, then I will happily have a compact layout before me and also take advantage of the ability to play quietly and precisely, and yet still produce all the sound I want. So my electronic setups have started and remained compact throughout and I have little interest in the so called normal electronic kits with their racks and spread apart format.

A legacy of Flipping: How I bought, sold, returned and flipped my way through many eDrum setups.

Towards the end of my acoustic era, I had already eliminated tom-tom shells and had an array of Roto-Toms over two bass drums and a snare. If I could have found a decent double-kick pedal back then, I would not have had two bass drums either.

Shortly thereafter, I stopped playing altogether, but at one point I went to a toy store and got a Yamaha DD-50 with it’s two little foot switches and noisy, hollow pads. That little toy was a lot of fun for a while and I even McGuyvered together a base for the kick trigger that I could strike with a bass drum pedal.

But that was not real. It took eighteen years of being a non-drummer to prepare me for a return to serious playing, and when that time came I began an odyssey of buying, trying and either returning or re-selling various devices

First was an Alesis Performance Pad. Ironically, as you will see, I almost went full circle back to this, but my Performance Pad was returned to the store due to a crackly potentiometer (volume knob). I did not love the sounds that the included drum machine provided and I found the rubber hard and tiring to play on.

Then came a Roland SPD-20, complete with throne, Roland FD8 hat pedal and KD7 kick trigger with pedal. Then came a year of swimming against the current. I got rid of the pedals and sticks and adapted to hand and finger drumming using a Roland Handsonic 10.

I developed a technique whereby I could play bare handed and have the Handsonic sound like a real drum set. I even recorded an album of self-penned compositions using my Handsonic,  and at the same time, having been impressed by the YouTube videos of David Fingers Haynes, finger drumming on a $60 Korg NanoPAD, I got pretty good at doing that also.

But I felt that I was wasting my ability to control a pair of sticks. I wanted buzz rolls and all that comes with stick drumming. So I got a Yamaha DTX Multi 12 and it took me all of a day to realize that I could never get what I wanted from it, and so that led me to the DrumKAT dk10.

The DrumKAT has been around for a couple of decades, and yet unlike a slick mass-produced product from Roland or Yamaha, it remains a specialty product, encased in tough steel, finished with a hammered enamel paint, looking tough and roadworthy, and yet with an air of laboratory roughness. To use car euphemisms, while the Roland and Yamaha all in one drum pads have a refined quality, like a new Toyota Camry, the KAT products, from a little American firm have more the feel of a hand-built British Morgan sports car, or a military vehicle.

I found the DrumKAT to be one of the most playable surfaces I’ve ever taken a stick to. As per my comments on format, unlike a conventional electronic drum set, the DrumKAT puts everything on a tea-tray, right under your sticks. It is a format conducive to flying around the drum  kit, without having to move much above your elbows, perfect for quiet, fast, precise strokes and press rolls with lightweight 7A drumsticks, which with electronic drums, can sound as big and loud as a crazy hard swing on a rock kit with the butt end of a 2B drumming bat. So I bought a full playing setup from Alternate Mode, makers of the DrumKAT. The DrumKAT dk10, with a new Yamaha Kick trigger and a Pintech Hyperhat pedal.

During my DrumKAT period, I had a succession of little problems and issues that eventually led me to finding another way to play. These included an incompatibility with Garageband,which forced me to buy EZdrummer and a Jazz EFX pack, adding to the already high price tag. Then my first dk10 had a faulty pad and it’s replacement arrived with a loose mystery object inside, and then I was okay for a while, but due a faulty pedal issue that was not discovered until later, Alternate Mode assumed that their own product, the dk10, did not provide continuous CC data for the hat, and I wanted the proper hihat control for all that money, not just open and closed, so I invested even more money to upgrade the perfectly good dk10 to the DrumKAT 3.8.  Even though I am attracted to the small format of a pad controller, I have to point out that with the 3.8 instead of the dk10, this setup was now more expensive than most big electronic drum sets from Alesis, Yamaha, and even Roland! And that includes all the pads, cymbals, cables, racks and triggers, and the sound module! But then, that’s what I don’t like about the standard e-kits. Too much stuff, too big, and not logical.

But my problems only grew from here. The control interface of the 3.8 is too difficult for a humble jazz-drummer like me. Even the very comprehensive video help desk movies on Alternate Mode’s website are way beyond any engineering course I would ever sign up for. It transpired that I could not even set up the DrumKAT with Alternate Mode’s Mario on the phone, because my hat pedal was faulty. But then after many hours of attempting to familiarize myself with the interface operation procedures required for using the DrumKAT 3.8, I gave up, and decided to return all to Alternate Mode and make a fresh start. And then a week later, Mario from Alternate Mode called to explain that the dk10 did indeed have a fully controllable hi hat, not just open and closed, and it was only the Pintech Hyperhat pedal that triggered this entire mess.

And the imagined failure of the DrumKAT brought me almost full-circle to the Alesis Control Pad. Yes it is harder and louder like my original Performance Pad of two years prior, and it sure does not feel a quarter as nice as the KAT, and for some reason I cannot yet play a super closed buzz press roll on it, but I could buy a pile of Control Pads for the price of one KAT, so I will somehow adapt to it and make the best of it as the compact playing surface of choice… for now!

I would ideally have the simple interface of the Control Pad with the playability of the DrumKAT. Perhaps a new surface material will…surface.

Jeffrey the Barak is the publisher of the-vu and back in the Nineteen-Seventies, he used to be Jeffrey the Barak.

Living in the cloud

By Jeffrey the Barak

Slowly but surely, more and more of my computer time is moving off my computer and into the cloud. I have a fast business cable connection at home and work, so my cloud applications are usually as fast as my native apps, but today I passed a landmark so now is a good time to rant about it.

Today, Ladies and Gentlemen, I stopped using Microsoft Excel. Excel was the last and only Microsoft product that was in my daily life. I left the Windows world a few years ago to live on Planet Apple, a much more efficient place in my opinion, but hung onto Excel because it was the only product good enough to handle my databases and spreadsheets.

I tried several alternatives such as Numbers, Open Office Calc, Bento, and others, and I tried Google Spreadsheets, many times. As recently as November, Google Spreadsheets, part of Google Docs, failed to handle my requirements, but with the approaching launch of Google’s Chrome Operating System, the G Boys have been hard at it, and now I find it is up to pace with my needs.

So my email, my accounting, my complicated databases and my shopping cart system are all now in the cloud, as are the control panels for my various WordPress sites, including this one, and my shipping modules too. I can find the same daily working environment in any browser on any computer, anywhere there is a connection. With a wide screen and plenty of tabs, it’s all there on my desktop, wherever that might be. It’s quite a strange feeling actually, after two decades of Spreadsheet juggling, but hey, welcome to the future.

A Humane Goldfish Bowl

By Jeffrey the Barak

You can spend five-thousand dollars setting up and stocking a huge tropical reef aquarium, and the bastards won’t even look at you. But put a one dollar goldfish in a five dollar bowl, and that little fish will await your return twenty times a day, eager to play follow the finger and he or she will gaze at you and love you like a puppy dog.

Ethics.

If you ever play the game, or perform the exercise of, Word Association, then the the most common response to “Goldfish”, is “Bowl”.

The typical picture of a goldfish, in photographs, cartoons and on film, is a picture of a goldfish in a bowl. But if you let people know that you have a goldfish in a bowl, they will consider you cruel, and they will tell you that a goldfish needs to live in a long tank with an elaborate filter system, and then move to a pond when it matures.

The majority of goldfishes live out their lives without ever becoming mature pond dwellers. Most live, and die, in aquariums or in bowls.

So the question arises, how can a goldfish be humanely kept in a bowl? Is it automatically cruel, reprehensible and impossible, or is the noble rescue of a commercially bred goldfish from the pet store, and the keeping of such an animal in a bowl justifiable.

It’s all about the water.

Actually, it is humane to keep a goldfish in a bowl, as long as the water is good, and as long as the fish can be relocated to a pond or large habitat when it becomes mature, as in too big the live in the bowl. It is not automatically cruel to keep one in a bowl.

But a goldfish aquarium has features that are missing from a simple empty glass bowl full of water. There are many elements that remove or convert toxic chemicals from the water, and also elements that support living bacteria that help keep the water healthy for your fish.

These elements include gravel, biological media, cotton filters, carbon filters, air stones, bubble wands and more. Each has a duty as part of a system to remove harmful wastes from the water and to keep it clean, oxygenated and nourishing to the skin and gills of the fish. Even if you have a nice large aquarium with elaborate filters, gravel and air systems, it is quite easy to mismanage the systems and end up with cloudy, uncomfortable water that will make the fish sick or even cause them to die.

So then, if an aquarium system costing hundreds of dollars can be that bad, how could a bowl be better? The answer is simple, the bottom line is the state of the water. The fish only depends on the quality of the water and it does not matter if this perfect water is introduced as-is or if it relies on a system to make it so. In fact it is less cruel for a goldfish to be in a bowl of perfect water than it is to be in a less-than-perfect larger aquarium.

The way to have water in a fish bowl that is as good as or even better than the water in an aquarium system is to have a second vessel. Water can be obtained by buying bottled water, which is often called mountain spring water, or it can come from a tap water filter, as long as it is not the reverse-osmosis kind. It cannot be distilled water, de-ionized water, or water containing municipal chlorine or other chemicals designed to protect human consumers from food poisoning.

But this is easy. If you have drinking water at home for the human occupants, it can usually sit in a bucket for a day and become safe for a goldfish to live in. But to be extra sure, you can add a drop or two of aquarium water conditioner and a granule or two of aquarium salt before it sits, so that by the time your fish is living in it the next day, it will be nourishing and comfortable.

So one simple way to have a goldfish living in perfect water is to have two bowls. Each day the fish can be moved to the other bowl, while the first bowl can be emptied, wiped clean and refilled with water that will be ready for the fish to live in the next day. As long as your home never gets freezing cold inside and you do not feed the fish more than it can eat in a minute, or more than two to six times a week, the fish should remain in healthy condition and be quite content with it’s environment.

Better yet, to have a similar system that does not involve removing the animal with a net, and potentially causing stress from the move, you could empty most of the water, leaving the goldfish in the remaining water, and then introduce the clean water from the second vessel. Using this method, you can even have a small, lightweight rectangular tank, such as an affordable plastic “Lee’s Kritter Keeper” and a cheap plastic bucket as the second vessel. If you have a water filter on your kitchen faucet (not reverse-osmosis) then you can refill the bucket from that and use it the next day. For this system you don’t even need a net. Just one bowl/lightweight tank, and a second bucket.

As long as the goldfish has not reached a size where the bowl is too small for it to swim freely in one direction for a couple of seconds, and you are able to offer it some visual stimulation from outside the bowl a few times a day, then you will have a happy healthy fish in clean water at all times. Just be ready to bid farewell to your beloved friend when it’s time for it to move to a big pond for the rest of it’s, hopefully long, life. If there is no sign of such a pond within a hundred miles of your house, then most aquarium stores will be willing to take in a donated healthy-looking large goldfish in exchange for another one-dollar feeder to rescue from a certain date with death. Hopefully they’ll sell it to someone with a big pond or aquarium.

So we have to remember a few things to justify a goldfish bowl. Goldfish are not natural. They were bred by man to become attractive golden fish and were originally hardy river carp, scavengers that could survive in ponds, streams and rivers, eating anything and everything, and since they don’t have a stomach, but rather just a long intestine, they would excrete the waste quickly and make the water dirty. An expensive and complicated aquarium system intended to condition the water may fail to do so for many reasons, and it is very easy, or even highly likely, to have a goldfish in such an aquarium, suffering distress from a less than optimal water quality. A bowl can contain clean, healthy, comfortable water if you have the two bowl system, or a bowl and bucket system. The water in this bowl can be, at all times, better than the water in most people’s aquaria. And lastly, even if your goldfish dies after a few months, as they may do through no fault of the owner, it can be a few months of a good life that it would not have had as food for an aquarium carnivore.

Aside from the well-being of the fish, the advantages of a goldfish bowl over an aquarium are many. They don’t cost much, they don’t weigh as much as your sister riding a bike, they don’t require electricity or reinforced furniture, and you can move them from room to room in order to spend more time interacting with your pet.

While it is always nice to see healthy goldfish in a clean, healthy large aquarium, it is also not so good to see them suffering in a cloudy, dirty tank and exhibiting spots, sores and nervous behavior.  Your happy healthy bowl fish will be better off than most goldfish alive today.

What does the fish need in it’s bowl?

Goldfish are bred from carp, which are scavengers. This is why goldfish can be seen constantly sucking pieces of gravel into their mouths and spitting it out. You may assume they are playing or trying to keep busy or wishing they had something to eat, or extracting some nutrients from the bacteria on the gravel, but they just can’t help this natural behavior. In an aquarium system the gravel can be a medium for the growth and support of healthy bacteria, but it is also a hiding place for fish waste that breaks down and introduces harmful elements into the water. So if you can stand the inevitable sight of a few strands of fish poop in your bowl, don’t bother with the gravel, because let’s remember, it’s all about the water quality, not the objects.

And speaking of objects, goldfish are more intelligent than most people assume and they love to follow your finger and look at you and play with you, but they have no need for decorations or toys. In fact such objects can cause injury because part of the natural behavior of a fish is to be occasionally startled and move several inches at a remarkably high speed. Better if there is no castle or treasure chest to collide with.

The minimalism of a clear empty bowl and a healthy fish in clean water is ideal. If you want to landscape the habitat, then set up a large aquarium system.

So if you would like a little golden friend to interact with while you sit at your desk all day, don’t be put off by people telling you a goldfish bowl is a cruel habitat. Remember it’s all about the water, and if the water is always good and there is enough of it to permit a little swimming, your fish will be content.