12.29.2020

Hello My Pickin' Brothers!

Hope this finds you all fat and sassy after the Christmas Holidays! As for me, it's mostly 'getting fat and older' .. :-) ... not so much 'sass in my ass' these days!

Since the Covid-19 pandemic for all of 2020, we've pretty much become bored 'home-bodies' and have spent most of our time since June, doing updates to our house. In doing so, I have also, shamefully, neglected picking up my guitars and playing them for about the past 6 months.

Around Thanksgiving, I picked up my Martin to do some finger-pickin' and discovered my fingertips have lost their calloses and strength, and realized I needed (2) things: Practice and motivation.

I pulled out my Roland R-26 recorder and laid down a couple of rythym guitar tracks of a couple of songs, I like to play, to practice to, and decided to look for a decent recording software to have the ability to add various instruments to the tracks. I have also over the course of the past few years or so, been attempting to coming up with my own lyrics and write something original.

I purchased Reaper, an inexpensive software (only about $60) and upgraded my interface from an old and out-of-date Tascam-U800, to the Behringer U-Phoria UMC204HD, which works well with the Reaper recording software.

As my first attempt to play around with Reaper, I imported the rythym tracks I had just redorded and as I played them back with a click-beat track, I discovered my rythym time time sucked; I tended to speed up from the beginning to the end of each song ... thus, I felt the need to create or find some decent drum tracks to practice to ... and I discovered Wikiloops Online Jam Sessions .. an awesome website for creative musicians.

I spent about 2 hours listening to the various drums and instrument tracks, and the 'interpretions' other musicians had uploaded with their guitar, bass, keyboard, and/or othere various instruments add to the original drum track, and saw an immense amount of diversity in the interpretions from one musician to another ... and went 'wow' .. this is a perfect tool for practicing to get my hands and music back on track.

I spent the next few hours going through and downloading some drum tracks and started my first practice session and realized just how great a tool this is, as a means of getting my musical juices flowing again.

I have been enjoying this approach to practicing, by coming up with a bass guitar track, melody, and/or something that may be fitting to some of the lyrics I was working on, so I began a collection of 'practice tracks' and decided to share with my other musician friends ... so here is Drum Tracks VOL I.

Hope you enjoy this! Let me know what you think! Look forward to hearing any of your addidtions to these tracks!

Have a Happy New Year!
Dave Roye