1.22.2008:
A deal with my wife
1:59 AMSomehow, playing this Rock Band game has unleashed a bit of a demon in me.
Like all males, I occasionally tap my fingers or my feet on the steering wheel or table when listening to music, trying to pick out the drum parts and pretend my index finger and middle finger are doing this wailing, insane drum fill here and there. But since we got this Rock Band game, I've really been taking up interest in the drums.
Sure, it's just a game - but the drum parts of Rock Band aren't like the guitar parts of either Rock Band or Guitar Hero... With those games, you're playing a rhythm game with a guitar-shaped controller, learning close to nothing about how to play an actual guitar. But with the drums, you're actually learning drum parts... Paradiddles, kick pedal timing, split-time and mixed time signatures between various limbs... It's really quite cool.
So my wife and I have made a deal:
If I can beat the drums on Rock Band on Expert, she'll let me buy a real drum kit - digital or acoustic, my choice.
I'm leaning toward digital right now, mostly because I don't feel like paying almost triple the cost of the drums themselves to soundproof a room or the garage just to play the damn things. If I use a digital kit, I can get the mesh heads that feel real and plug headphones in and voila - I'm disturbing no one at 3 AM as I try to pick out the utterly disgusting drum parts that Danny Carey plays in Tool's "Pushit" (Yeah, I know... Good luck to me, right? That guy is INSANE. Still, I wanna learn it).
Wish me luck.
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6 Comments:
Dude. My daughter is taking singing lessons, and my son is taking guitar lessons. They're already planning a band in a few years. They need a drummer. You should totally join. You could be, like, the token old guy.
I hope that Rock Band inspires a lot of people to take up bass guitar. There aren't anywhere near enough bass players to go around, as evidenced by the fact that I'm in two different bands, neither of which has a bass player at present.
Ya know, you make a valid point about the drums in Rock Band(of course you know it, you're the one who made it!). I hadn't ever thought about how it actually is a teaching tool, much moreso than with the guitar parts. I haven't moved past easy yet, as my hand eye coordination isn't that great, but how difficult is it on expert? Is it as if you were really playing the drums on the song or are they still dumbed down (excluding the fact that you have 4 pads and a bass drum instead of a full sized kit)?
It's HARD if you're not already a practiced drummer. I've made it through some songs on expert, and I've been quite proud - but that's the thing, I've "made it through." I used Energy (star power) to keep the crowd from throwing me out. Every song I've beaten on expert, I've beaten due to the rules of the game, not because I nailed every note.
She didn't explicitly say it, but I think she's looking for me to get more than 85% / 90% on every song before she considers it "beaten".
As far as being a teaching tool - yes, it really is, for rhythm and technique (for the most part). You'll have to re-learn the position of whatever kit you end up on when you graduate to the real thing, and of course, it's using 5 pieces to simulate songs that have 8, 10, upwards of 20-piece kit drum pieces. So I sincerely doubt you could walk into Guitar Center and wow the employees with your rendition of Tom Sawyer after beating Rock Band, but at least you can keep most standard beats.
If you learn drums I'll get around to learning to play that Bass in the corner of my room and we can do some form of thing with the stuff.....
Because I wanted to save money, my first drum kit was electric. Despite the 'realistic' mesh skins, and the fact that I was able to play it at night (I never did), I felt an inhuman urge forcing me to buy a real kit in its place. After that, despite constantly disturbing the neighbours, I never touched the electric kit. So, in the end, buying the electric kit cost me more than the price of a real kit.
Jus' saying.
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