I have for a few years

Neither option was attractive.

Finally,  there’s another alternative: the Zoom Q3 HD, a pocket video camera that combines both HD video quality and high quality audio that follows in Zoom’s line of pocket audio recorders. It’s the next generation of the blue Zoom Q3, which did not offer HD video.

This device, so far, seems to provide the answer to doing the videos that I like to do: drum samples, lessons, etc.

Here are a few videos — click below for the next page — where I took all my (current) Ludwig snares, each with similar head combinations. Please let me know what you think. I’m posting them all at once, all under the same conditions (room, temperature, mood, lighting, etc.) so you can hear for yourself what each Ludwig snare sounds like.

Editing was a breeze. I literally shot the videos, plugged the Zoom directly into my computer, placed the files in my cheap video editing software, changed out the titles and then processed the files for Youtube. The worst part of the process was the time it took to upload the files to Youtube.

What do you think? Keep in mind, my drum room is very dry, with a lot of sound absorption, so what you are getting is the true, honest sound of the drums and cymbals with little to no room sound or reverb.

Your comments are welcome below!

Olympus LS-10 recorder enters the market geared for musicians

We know cretinous bootleggers will use it, but will drummers? We hope to give a look-see at NAMM this month.

From a press release

CENTER VALLEY, Pa.– Olympus, a market leader for portable digital voice recorders and professional dictation devices, now leverages its audio expertise with the LS-10 Linear PCM Audio Recording Device.

It is called “the ultimate portable professional recording tool for musicians and everyone who values high-quality recording. Straight out of the box, the intuitive and easy-to-use LS-10 delivers the high fidelity of a portable professional recording studio in an extremely light, go-anywhere body.

No extra gear is required to record audio in uncompressed 24 bit/96 kHz Linear PCM format for digital stereo recordings true to the original performance. In addition to WAV, the LS-10 records and plays back in the common WMA and MP3 formats.”

The LS-10 contains the following features:

• Uncompressed 24 bit/96 kHz Linear PCM recording capability
• WAV, MP3 and WMA recording and playback
• Elegant and durable aluminum body
• 2GB Built-in memory and a SD/SDHC removable media card slot that can accommodate SD cards
• Built-in stereo speakers for instant playback of recordings
• High sensitivity built-in stereo microphones
• Manual Recording Level Adjustment to obtain the optimum level
• Remote jack for optional wireless remote controller
• Recording battery life of 12 hours, and
• Large 1.8-inch LCD with backlight.

“The LS-10 will bring music to the masses by allowing musicians and audio enthusiasts to produce studio-quality recordings,” said Andrew Flagg, director, Sales and Marketing, Olympus Imaging America Inc. “As more and more people return to playing musical instruments themselves, the LS-10 will help them reach their true potential as performers and allow them to share their music with friends and family. Whether it is used by a band of amateur musicians or an orchestra, the LS-10 offers the best sound quality, ease of use, and feature set in the industry and produces recordings that are faithful to the original performance.”

High Quality Recording
The LS-10 features uncompressed 24 bit/96kHz Linear PCM recording capability, to capture the rich sound quality of music performances. It has the versatility to record and play back in the WAV, MP3 and WMA formats. The LS-10 can record with its internal microphone or by plugging in an external microphone. The LS-10’s value extends beyond the realm of music. Students will find it useful for recording lectures and journalists for recording high-quality interviews for broadcasts and podcasts.

Elegant and Intuitive Design
An enlarged, backlit LCD is easy to read and shows file information, recording time and events clearly. The device is outfitted with an ergonomic dial thumb pad allowing the user to play or stop a recording, adjust the volume level, fast-forward and rewind with the touch of one button. The Erase and Folder/Index buttons are positioned individually below the thumb dial for easy access.

Durability
The LS-10 has a lightweight and durable aluminum body. This keeps the weight of the LS-10 to a mere 5.8 ounces including batteries.

Memory Capacity and Expandability
The LS-10 has two gigabytes of internal flash memory to capture lengthy recordings. The LS-10 also features an SD/SDHC removable media card slot to further expand its capacity. During a busy day of recording, changing SD cards is an easy way for users to capture more audio without taking the time to download files to a computer.

Recording and Listening
The LS-10 can play back the high-quality audio it records and play it back on its built-in stereo speakers with vibrancy and clarity. These speakers allow more than one person to listen to a new recording simultaneously to help collaborating musicians evaluate recording progress on the fly.

Wireless Control
The optional exclusive wireless remote controller allows users to start and stop the recording of the LS-10 from a distance. This is ideal for live performances when the LS-10 can be placed near the stage and activated from several rows back.

Battery Life
The LS-10 can record 12 hours on two AA batteries, longer than many competing Linear PCM recorders and long enough for an all-day event.

Accessories
The LS-10 ships with Steinberg CUBASE LE 4 Sound editing software with 48 sound tracks and variety of effects, a carrying case, USB cable, audio cable, wind screen, two AA batteries, a strap, an instruction manual and Olympus warranty card.

Optional accessories for the LS-10 include an infrared remote control, AC adaptor, conference microphones (ME30W), Carrying Bag, Tripod, Rechargeable Battery (Ni-MH) and Charger, a zoom microphone, and a headset.

Pricing and Availability
The LS-10 provides excellent uncompressed audio recording at a fraction of the price of competing Linear PCM recorders. The LS-10 Digital Audio Device has an estimated street price of $399.99 (U.S.) and will be available in January 2008.

Durability is A#1 in my book.

I’ve played Iron Cobras, DWs and I’m now on Pearl Eliminators. Feel- and feature-wise, they are all comparable and very workable for my tastes.

But durability, especially if touring and playing hard, trumps feel and features in my book.

I spent about five years touring the U.S. and Europe and the only pedal that held up for that duration was an Axis A single pedal. It took a beating and traveled and held up well. And was very responsive.

But once I went to using a double pedal, I couldn’t stand the Axis double. it was way too light. I then moved to ICs, which are very nice but some felt flimsy after awhile. Now I’m using Pearl Eliminators and so far I’m lovin’ them. Their durability remains to be seen, though.

In any case, there’s a nice discussion over at Drumsmith about this topic. Check it out.

The concept of renting or leasing music also has benefits from the consumer side of things. First, I tend to devour music I’m interested in; then, after a period of time, the CD tends to sit on my shelf for years. Eventually, with the exception of my few all-time favorite bands over the years, the CDs go up on Half.com. So aside from my favorites, I tend to consume music temporarily anyway.

So a year ago, my wife and I got our first MP3 players and signed up for Yahoo Music Unlimited. We were attracted to the idea and found a generally good selection of music.

So why did I recently dump Yahoo Music’s unlimited subscription service?

In solving many problems, as mentioned above, Yahoo’s investment into a subscription-based service dealt with consumer demand at a very nice price—about $10/month for taking music to go on portable players. On the surface, they present the best deal in contrast with Rhapsody, Napster and Itunes.

In reality, though, Yahoo Music is a big piece of shit. Its interface is buggy as hell. During the last year I had to uninstall it and reinstall it at least three different times just to get it to function properly. Its subscription technology required updating licenses just about every time I opened the player to either download new music or transfer to my player. This meant that on a regular basis, I couldn’t play the music I had previously transferred to my player.

Just recently, for no apparent reason, I couldn’t even log in to my account to play, download or transfer music. This lasted for about a day. When I was able to login again, all my licenses required updating—for about 16 gigabytes worth of songs. From there, I still couldn’t transfer music to my player. Tech support is virtually non-existent. No readily found contact information is available for direct help. And Yahoo’s online help is superficial at best.

I had to uninstall and then reinstall the player again. This meant downloading all of my music to get things back to normal.

I gave up.

I began researching competitors. Napster does not have an easily found catalog of their music, so I couldn’t verify if they had the specific bands I was looking for. Itunes is out because it’s pay-per-song and I find Ipods overpriced compared with non-Mac-based mp3 players (although, Ipods have the advantage of being very slick and having a huge amount of readily available accessories). Rhapsody, fortunately has all the features, and bands, I was looking for, plus you can play songs for free before purchasing anything. It’s $5 more a month, but you subscribe monthly as opposed to Yahoo’s yearly subscription payable in advance.

I was hesitant about Rhapsody mainly because Real’s Real Player was tremendously annoying. Thankfully Rhapsody’s interface appears idiot proof. Perfect. I’ll follow up in a year to see how it works out.

Final thoughts—a buying tip for drummers

When buying something, it’s generally a bad idea to base decisions on anecdotes like mine above. If a friend buys a car that turns out to be a lemon, while 98 percent of car owners have the exact opposite experience with their vehicles, to judge the car by your friend’s experience likely translates to a loss for you.

It’s important to pay attention to a range of potential reviews, particularly the bad ones. Although, there’s a caveat: negative reviews of a product tend to hold more weight in our minds. To counter this, Amazon.com has a great system for product reviews. Anyone can review something, but others can challenge and rate the reviewers, which adds another layer of credibility and accuracy to the overall impression of the product.

In the drum world, we are somewhat less fortunate because many of the drum products on Amazon tend to be the most commercially available. However, sites like MusiciansFriend, GuitarCenter, Music123 and SameDayMusic each tend to have reviews of products. For more custom products, or reviews from more experienced players, try some of the sites linked in my blogroll.

Happy shopping.

I initially got excited when I got my birthday card from Guitar Center saying to enjoy $25 off my next purchase of $250 or more–by the end of Sept. Then I realized: That’s 10-percent, which I normally get off when I ask for it at my local GC (because I’m such a regular, I guess, and … I ask for it). In other words, it was a nice gesture, but somewhat hollow. Especially since, just days later, I got an email from GC advertising $20 off my next purchase of $200 or more. No birthday message was attached. It was a standard promotion.

Which, to give credit to GC, is what they are good at. I take advantage of these promotions when I can afford to, but I sense an extra step is needed, especially when targeting me directly for my birthday–or anyone.

A counter example: Mervyn’s sent me a $10 gift certificate for my birthday–no minimum purchase. Guess where I spent $70 the next day? It wasn’t GC. Mervyn’s represents an true market-based incentive; in other words, Mervyn’s makes the incentive more enticing with such a practice.

Finally, I had major glitches with a used Roland hihat pedal I got in a trade deal. It needed to be fixed but it was certainly out of warranty and I had no receipt for it. I sent it to Roland last Monday for repair. Today, Wednesday, guess what I received from UPS? A brand new Roland hihat pedeal.

Thank you Mervyn’s. Thank you Roland.

Lest I be accused of being a heartless capitalist trying to milk the system at every turn, I should be upfront about the other side of getting good deals–and that is giving them. Over a Drumsmith (my new favorite drum site, as of just days ago), a kid was asking for free gear. I have excess snare hoops lying around that I don’t need. If he pays for shipping, they’re his.

Also, recently on Ebay, I had drum bags I got in a deal that I didn’t need. So I listed them. The winner of 3 of the bags contacted me about the shipping price I had listed and my previous comment that I would combine shipping for the winning bidders. Turns out, my estimated shipping price was WAAAY too low. I still gave the promised combined shipping discount (which I offered as $20, even though it ended up costing me nearly $60 to send them). It ended up costing me more to ship them than I got in the auction total.

I wasn’t bummed. The reason why: I didn’t need the bags, they were taking up valuable space in my garage and they were worth more to me as a good deal to someone else than the possible monetary value. I was happy to essentially “lose” money on them. I had gotten the bags as part of a kit deal and they were a bonus to begin with. Long story short: Don’t hesitate to pass on good deals if you are in a position to do so. I think scoring a killer deal should go hand-in-hand with giving good deals when you can.

Craigslist is potentially one of the best sources of buying used drum gear. But it has its positives and negatives. The biggest negative is that Craiglist only breaks down to the level of musical instruments and no further. Searching for drum gear either means typing in a search term for something specific, which is a shot in the dark, or–what I do–monitoring the entire list of musical instruments regularly. Try both. It can also be risky buying used gear, especially from pseudo-anonymous sellers.

Here are, though, eight tips on what do when you find something to consider buying.

1. Read the item description carefully. Is information missing, like the kind of Tama drumset, or are the cymbals A Zildjians or Zs? Are they honest about the condition of the gear?
2. Cross-check what’s advertised with what you can by the drums for new. Surprisingly, many sellers overvalue their drums. Used drums should be priced noticeably under what their new value is. A good deal is often easy to spot in these first two steps.
3. Email first, even if the post says to call. A response by email indicates a true commitment to sell the drums. If it takes five days to return an email, you’re either too late, or the seller isn’t motivated.
4. Phone after email contact has been confirmed.
5. Buy in person, and be careful of those who will only meet in a neutral location (it could be an indication of the gear being hot, or stolen)
6. When meeting in person, ask why they are selling the gear. This question can also be asked over email first.
7. Finally, ask if the person selling is the original owner. This question will double check whether the gear is truly theirs or not.
8. If there are any inconsistencies in the seller’s story, walk away.

Lastly, as a buyer, you have a responsibility to also be honest and straight-forward. Play honest, play firm and play nice. Good luck.

1. Wait for sales at your local music store
2. Buy used
3. Save before using credit
4. Buy online

Each of these techniques has its plusses and minuses. For example, a music store in my area literally has everthing in the store marked as “On Sale” with bright colored tags. A few visits into the store reveal this as a too-obvious sale strategy. Certainly not everything is on sale all the time, right?

In the future I will discuss each of these four strategies in detail. For now, try a search on Ebay to see if you can find a good deal online. Here’s one I found (and no, I don’t gain anything from you clicking this link): A Tama Starclassic Bubinga wood kit for only $1650 Buy it Now.