Trust Tommy

A friend of mine is off to America for a while, and because of the unportable nature of this musical instrument (yes John, I did just call it that), he gave them to me to mind for the time that he’s gone.

So, we (Dad and I) collected them today, where they were ready and waiting:

Once we got them home, we put them in the hall so I could get my photo taken with the plethora of awesomeness:

that photo was taken from the upstairs landing looking down onto the hall – the same angle my Sunday Business Post article picture was taken

That’s my room after I removed my old drums and moved all the boxes into my room.

I honestly felt like a kid on Christmas morning opening this up. A massively awesome jumble of cymbal stands and other gizmos that come together to form…

… a musical instrument! :)

Look me in the eye and tell me that’s not made of win! :D

In May 2007, when I was 5th class in primary school, the school turned 25 years old, and we had a concert. At that concert, they hired a pianist and a drummer to accompany the various musical/drama scenes that each class put on. I remember being enthralled by the drums.

People can make music like that? With two, thin pieces of wood and some tom-toms and cymbals?

Now, I know John (and Dad, to an unfortunate extent) have snorted derisively at the notion I’m putting forward – that drums can be considered musical. Of course they can!

Photo owned by The Rhumb Line (cc)

Anyway. I was infatuated with the thought of these drums, and spend a summer tapping away on whatever surface I found myself beside. My parents, worried about a relapse of my condition of taking-stuff-up-enthusiastically-and-then-not-sticking-to-it, were understandably (but annoyingly) wary about investing in my own kit. And so we compromised, by buying some sticks. I remember happily going home that day, clearing a space for myself at the kitchen table and raiding the shelves of an assortment of pots and pans, setting them up according to a picture of a kit I’d found on the net. I then proceeded to plug in my iPod and, if you’ll excuse the food pun, jam for a few hours.

By October, I was pretty sure I’d found eternal happiness in my jumble of kitchen utensils and was ready to move onto the real thing. My parents, being still wary, suggested I get lessons. I did, and for the next six weeks journeyed out to the other side of town and spent a happy hour learning how to play drums properly.

I got my first kit for Christmas, and continued to take lessons for a further 4 months. The kit itself is still the same, and this is 2 and a half years later. Well, the core of it is. I’ve replaced all the skins of the drums, and used all the birthdays and Christmases to get new cymbals when I needed them. I still have a stack of the two older cymbals at home actually. My dream is to one day have enough to hand them ornamentally from the back wall of my room.

Photo owned by kn0ttyn3rb (cc)

Taking up drums has by far and away been the best thing I’ve ever taken up. I try to spend at least 20 minutes a night playing them. I’m not yet in a band, preferring to stick on headphones and tap along (oh, who am I kidding, smash and crash and BOOM! along) to whoever shows up in my shuffle stream.

The only problem with drums (John and Dad will disagree with the word ‘only’ being there but sherfeckim) is they aren’t portable. If you’re at a family gathering and you get asked if you play any musical instruments, you can say ‘drums’ but it’s kind of rude to raid their pots-and-pans shelf to prove it.

For this reason, I learnt two songs on piano, so I could perform when asked.

I think that everyone, for whatever reason, should take up a musical instrument. It’s rather brilliant :D

In Music, we’re currently making notes on the set songs for our Junior Cert. So far, we’ve done Preab san Ól, an Irish Drinking Song preaching to us to spend all our money now on drink, cos we can’t take any of it to the grave. Marks for being technically true..

The second one that we’ve done is Muss i Denn, a German folk song made famous by none other than Elvis Presley, in the form of Wooden Heart. Funnily enough, the original song is a lament about a man leaving his lover. There’s not a mention of this in Elvis’ one. Just a bit of whining about not being Pinocchio.

Why is that funnily enough? I don’t know.

Our third one (and my current favourite) is Streets of London by Ralph McTell. It was also the first one I’d heard of before. Just as well.

The teacher played it for us on piano too. “Anyone wanna try singing it?” she asks. A girl volunteers. She performs it admirably. “Any guys?” One from the back does so, again quite good. “Any other boys?”

“Tommy!” pipes up my friend beside me. Thank you, Théo… “Errrrr, ok” I mumble. Yes, I’m outgoing, yes, I’ve no problem talking in front of large groups of people. Singing in front of 30 people is a first though. Yes, I used to perform Norwegian Wood with Dad whenever my folks had friends over, but who honestly is self-conscious when they’re 6?

But I got through it. The first verse flew by, and just as I was looking forward to everybody joining in for the chorus (as had happened with previous performers) when the teacher goes “stay going for the chorus!”. Eeeep.

Ah well. I got through it and nobody hated it. An interesting experience nonetheless.

Before anyone asks (looking at you, Patrick), no, there will be no repeat performances. Not without copious amounts of alcohol on one or both of our parts

My affair with MacBooks has been quite sordid, I must say. From spilling water over white Macbook #1 to starting using MacBook #2 for all my secondary school classes, bar maths and music.

After deciding to use a computer for classes in April 2009, I began to think of ways of making my life easier. It weighs 2.27 KGs, which isn’t exactly a featherweight, and is definitely heavier than the 3 A4 copies that it replaces. Now, I’m not saying that those copies weigh more than the 1.3 KGs like the Air, but it’s nicer.

Plus, the laptop is hyper organized. My first instinct was to add ‘so I don’t have to be’ to that sentence but that sounds a wee bit irresponsible, so we’ll go with: ‘which makes it easier for me to be similar’ ;)

As you can see from the picture, there’s also the backups of my schoolwork. Ideally these should be on a different computer, but for now I make do by just compressing the ‘school work’ file each evening, and sticking the .zip in a different folder. What I’ll probably end up doing whenever Patrick gets home -Christmas at the latest, but we hope well before then- is lock him in the office with no wifi access until he gets our Time Machine up and running, and then I can wirelessly back up from there.

Wow, that’s an evil torture. Forget a career in writing, I should be on Gitmo’s payroll.

In other news, I wandered into my local drum shop today with Dad, sadly though, indulging my drumming addiction wasn’t what we were there for. Our TV is become a big child, being heard but not seen. Well, an anti-child, if you will. There’s something wrong in that we’re getting sound, but no picture. A big, flatscreen, 20″ radio, in short.

That’s another torture actually – making me wander among all the cymbals and cowbells and stands not being able to buy anything. I decided not to ask if they’d anything new and/or wonderful in, because a green complexion really doesn’t suit me. I had to make do asking about how business was -a stock business question. Eww.

So, our 20″ inch radio is in TV hospital, under strict instructions not to go into the light. We’ve nothing to watch the match with. Not that that last fact bothers me, but one must empathize with Dad, who does care about hurling.. or is it GAA?

Quod erat demonstrandum

I need one.

It’s 07:36.. for some strange reason I woke up a square hour before my alarm (MMMBop by Hanson, naturally) is meant to wake me, and have spent the time transferring my iTunes from old Macbook to new Macbook Air (new in the newly-repaired sense).

The biggest thing to mention is it’s a whole lot easier when you have a stale iTunes folder (one with music from 2 months ago that you don’t hugely care for or music you have someplace else) that you can mess around with and delete stuff without losing important music, and a completely different iTunes folder that’s safely on another laptop and another iPhone.

Having said that, I probably should be worried. Somehow, in the course of my work last night, my stale iTunes folder on the Air grew to a scary magnitude of 27.3 GBs (in nontechnical terms, that’s a huge amount in comparison to my current iTunes account of 7.74 GBs -which includes audiobooks!)

I looked inside the gargantuan folder on the Air I found another ‘iTunes folder’, worth 12 GBs, which (as far as I could tell) only contained duplicates.

The point of this rambling, my conclusion, as it were, it that I desperately need to get a Hard Drive. One for Christmas, perhaps? It’s scarily not too far away!

There’s actually one in the office, but only Patrick knows how to speak to it. Anyone know PatrickSpeak and we’ll get it working?

Andrews Sisters’ – “Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy Of Company B”

Spotify is onto me! I’m not actually from the Netherlands!

Post title comes from watching too much Scooby-Doo when I was younger

The type of sleep or the band, whichever you want, like..

That’s this week’s music recommendation for you.

I heard of it through Anthony, and then heard it via Spotify.

Is it REM’s most popular song? Their most sought-after?

YouTube says yes, I think

Nah, this isn’t one of those silly Facebook quizzes, this is me pondering what my favourite one is.

It probably depends on my humour. Sometimes I’m feeling quiet (TrustTommy? Quiet? I must be dreaming!) so I might settle for something like Yo Yo Ma or the Vitamin String Quartet doing covers of famous rock song. (Their one of Clocks, by Coldplay is rather good)

But more often than not, I’d prefer something louder. Something with kickass drums and some fast-plucking electric guitars.

Because of that, I can never decide what my favourite instrument is when people ask me. Cellos sound lovely, but drums make me feel happy inside. Flutes make sweet music but electric guitars, well, rock!

Photo owned by Amanda M Hatfield (cc)

Am I a big fan of classical music?

Very select classical music. Ones that are just one instrument are okay, but I wouldn’t listen to it for a whole car journey up to Dublin because I’d get bored. Multiple instruments are okay too.

I think I like pretty much all classical music so long as it’s short. I don’t generally have a short attention span, even when it comes to music (I once listened to the same rock song on repeat for 6 hours. Overkill much?) but I still can’t stand one of those 8 minute pieces. Is a 4 minute song played *counts on fingers* 90 times any better than an 8 minute piece? Probably not, but the rock song was my favourite song ever. Like, ever ever ever

For that week, at least.

So, what’s your favourite musical instrument?

My Skullcandy earphones seem to be doing something funky, the sound sometimes only works in one headphones, fading out and about. Normally, that’s fine, but some of my songs feel the need to split the male and female vocals between earphones. For example, California Dreamin’ by the Mamas and the Papas,

Males: All the leaves are broooown
Females: All the leaves are broooown
Males: And the skyy is greyyyyy
Females: And the skyy is greyyyyy

But thanks to my banjaxed earphones, I get:

Males: All the leaves are broooown
(pause)
Males: And the skyy is greyyyyy

…Which doesn’t sound half as impressive, does it?

So, I’m asking you a favour, can you recommend a good pair of earphones to me? I’d like them to be in-ears, because outer ear ones don’t cancel enough music, therefore making them unsuitable to drumming. Price range? Let’s say 50 euro or less.

Thanking you in advance!