The Dog Days of Summer. A Don Henley favorite. Or something like that.
Damn, it's been hot lately. The Austin area has hit the over-100-degree days, and they don't show a sign of letting up. Not much breeze these days, either, making being outdoors pretty unbearable. Fair amount of humidity, too. It all adds up to staying indoors when at all possible.
On Thursday night, I finished installing the corn kernel wraps (received on Tuesday) on my Sonor kit. I had had a question concerning the depth of my bass drum when ordering the wraps, and the company never answered said question, not even after repeated emails and a Facebook message. The wrap turned out to be pretty close to the right size....I think if I would have ordered an inch more, I might've had to trim the wrap. There's a small gap between the edge of the wrap and the back head of the bass drum but not enough to be seen at any distance; you'd have to really be looking for it. It's about 3/8". If it really starts to bother me (the existing cover for the drums is a light tan color), I'll just pull the back head off and slap a little golden rod paint on that strip. For now, I'm leaving it.
The rest of the wraps fit perfectly, and the process was pretty simple but one of the most tedious things I've ever done. On the Friday before receiving the wraps (once I knew they were shipped), I removed all the hardware from the drums and placed it all in individual marked bags. The shells and bags sat in the living room a few days awaiting their dressing up. The wraps were received on the same day, a Tuesday, that the Hickoids had a video shoot planned (something I have to do most of the work for), so I couldn't really do much that day. The following day, in between video editing chunks, I began wrapping the drums. I started with the 12" tom, the drum I use least (I favor a four-piece kit, normally), figuring if I goofed the first wrapping job, it wouldn't be a huge deal. Turned out I wrapped it pretty well, following a really informative video on the wrap company's website. So, I did the snare drum Wednesday night as well. Thursday night, I wrapped the 13" and 16" toms and the bass drum.
Now, these wraps are designed as "no-glue." There is an adhesive strip at the end of each wrap. So what you do is wrap the drum as snugly to the shell as possible, using clamps to hold the wrap and then massaging the wrap upward around the shell to get any play out of the wrap. Once you've done that a few times, and you have the seam positioned where you want it on the drum, you pull back the end, strip off the protective paper, and press the adhesive side down. Then comes the fun. Leaving the clamps on in strategic places, you take a small X-acto knife and cut the holes where the hardware goes, matching the holes in the shells. You start by poking outward from the inside of the shell, and then looking at the cuts from the outside, you can start reaming the holes out (that didn't sound nice). The aforementioned video suggested doing the hardware a piece at a time, so as I would create the holes for a piece, I'd subsequently affix that piece. After a couple of nights of this process, I had plastic shavings all over the living room and a callous on my right forefinger in a place I've never had one from 40-odd years of drumming. Still, it was worth it. The drums look great.
So I debuted the "corn kit" last night at the Empire Control Room in Austin. I used the full kit, due to wanting to show off the work a bit. Of course, that meant switching the position of a couple of my cymbals, causing a couple of probably-unnoticeable-to-anyone-but-me gaffes in my performance. Fun show, too. Jeff introduced us as "Lance Farley's Drum Kit and The Hickoids." Mustn't upstage the singer!
It can't all be good news, right?
So, I mentioned a video shoot earlier. The video shoot itself went great. Jeff got Ruby (from the "Cool Arrow" video) to dress up in her dominatrix stuff and beat us a bit while we wore corn-on-the-cob gags. It's hilarious stuff, and I cannot wait to finish the video. Unfortunately....
I began editing the video on Wednesday, and a large portion of the video was shot using a green screen (actually, all of it, now that I think of it). My Mac has Adobe CS5 Creative Suite on it, and there was a special bug CS5 has concerning the eyedropper tool when running the software on OS X Lion. The eyedropper just doesn't work. In the past, I've reverted my machine to its other hard drive which has Snow Leopard on it, in order to do this work. Trying to remove a green screen without the eyedropper tool is like, well, it's just very difficult. Anyway, everything was going smoothly, and by late Friday night, I had maybe an hour and a half of work left. I went to bed intending to finish Saturday. When I woke up Saturday morning, my Mac monitor was heavily pixellated, and I couldn't select anything on the screen. Thinking everything froze for some reason (the Snow Leopard hard drive was not online), I rebooted but could immediately tell there was something else wrong. After some Googling and repeated reboots, I believe the logic board has an issue. Much work lost.
So, for now, I've moved the files to my Windows 10 PC, which I'd purchased the Vegas suite for last year but haven't really used yet. And I'm starting over. We'll see how it goes. Hopefully, when I write in this here blog next week, I'll have a finished version of the video to post. That's my intention, anyway. Since I had done one version, recreating the video won't be bad from a concept standpoint, it's just that I don't know this software very well. Hopefully ,everything will fall into place quickly.
And for now, I'm not sure what I'm going to do hardware-wise, but I believe I'm done with Macs. That was my only foray into the Mac world, hooked up by a friend in 2011. And it served fine...and to be honest, the reason I purchased the Vegas suite for my laptop PC had to do with knowing this day was coming, although I thought it would be because of obsolescence, rather than failure....but I'm headed back to Microsoft. I may buy a nice desktop, I may not. Maybe a souped-up laptop, I don't know. I do know I want a better external monitor. Ah...the joys of technology ownership. I also hold out a slight bit of hope that the machine will just boot up correctly eventually. I've seen more than one machine do that. Sometimes just a time-out will fix things. Very weird, but it does happen. Not that that fixes the "need the video done" situation.
Guess I'll go home and start work again....if you're in the South, friends, stay cool.
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