I cannot tell you how much I love this little kit. I have a compact Tama set myself, but it’s from 2015, and is the Imperialstar Bop. I love it, but I would love to pick up one of these awesome new Tama Superstar Classic Neo-Mods as well.
I really love Tama’s size choices on this kit. Keeping the full size diameter, but just shortening the shells provides a deeper tone than deeper, but smaller in diameter shells. The kick on the Neo-Mod is a 20″, but is only 10″ deep. The rest of the drum sizes are a 7×12 tom and 9×14 floor tom. The shallow depth sizes make it so easy to move around.
Shells are 100% maple, which is very nice for a kit in this price range, and on top of that it looks insanely cool. The Neo-Mod comes in all kinds of cool looking finishes too.
The song MIDIPLUS was created using Rosegarden and Qsynth with my custom made Kawai K1 soundfont and the Hexter DX7 emulator for Linux. I sequenced the track music all in Rosegarden, then used the Jack sync feature to sync to Mixbus and recorded the drums. I then outputted the audio from Qsynth into Mixbus and mixed it all there. Unfortunately I only had 4 channels for drums to work with this time and since all 5 toms were bussed to a single channel they came out sounding a bit thin. Oh well, still had fun and think it came out decent. The song is in 7/4 and I wanted to do an odd time song with double kick, so this is the result!
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Drum setup:
2015 Tama Imperialstar custom Bop Kit Hairline Blue finish w/ 20″ kick
Mendini roto toms
Tama Iron Cobra hi hat stand (main hats)
Vintage Olympic hi hat stand (trash hats)
Ludwig flat base straight stands (crashes and ride)
Vintage Nuvader Nickel Silver 15″ Hi Hats
Meinl HCS 8″ Bell
Kasza 17″ Dirty Bell crash cymbal
Vintage NuVader 22″ ride cymbal (Nickel Silver)
Meinl HCS 16″ Trash Crash / Generic 16″ brass crash bottom (trash hats)
Vintage Camber 18″ Crash Cymbal (Brass)
Attack single ply medium coated on tom batters
Attack 2 ply medium thin skin coated on roto toms
Tama single ply clear tom resonants
Attack no overtone 1 ply coated on snare batter
Tama thin clear snare resonant
Attack No Overtone 1 ply Coated kick batter
Attack Medium Coated w/felt strip on kick resonant
PDP double kick pedal
Yamaha snare stand
Pork Pie throne
Mics:
Cad KBM412 Kick
Nady RSM5 Ribbon Overhead
Cheap CAD dynamic mic on roto toms
SHS OM-450 x 2 toms (sm57 copy)
Pyle Pro PDMIC78 snare (sm57 copy)
This is a type of track I’ve wanted to do for a while. I’ve had the idea of making a song on the Akai MPD24 and playing drums to it, but was stuck with how to use the MPD with Linux. I finally figured out how to create a soundfont from samples I cut up myself and using fluid synth as a means to play them. Using a soundfont gives me nearly as much control, and in some ways more than Ableton’s drum rack. I don’t have anything against Ableton, it’s great software. I just wanted to produce this whole track within Linux. I mixed it all in Mixbus, but still edited the video in Windows, Vegas Movie Studio. My cameras record in MTS which kdenlive in Linux has some problems with. I worked around this on the last few vids, but forgot this time, so rather than go convert everything again then re-edit in Kdenlive, I thought it would just be quicker and easier to do it in Vegas.
Sorry for the long-winded explanation. thanks for watching and commenting 🙂
Drum setup:
Custom Tama Imperialstar Hairline Blue finish 18×20 kick, 8×12 rack, 14×14 floor, 5×14 snare
Tama Iron Cobra hi hat stand (main hats)
Vintage Olympic hi hat stand (trash hats)
Ludwig flat base straight stands (crashes)
PDP boom stand (ride)
Vintage Nuvader Nickel Silver 15″ Hi Hats
Meinl HCS 8″ Bell
Kasza 17″ Dirty Bell crash cymbal
Vintage NuVader 22″ ride cymbal (Nickel Silver)
Meinl HCS 16″ Trash Crash / Generic 16″ brass crash bottom (trash hats)
Vintage Camber 18″ Crash Cymbal (Brass)
Aquarian Studio X on tom batters
Tama single ply clear tom resonants
Aquarian Studio X Dot on snare batter
Tama thin clear snare resonant
Aquarian Response 2 Coated kick batter
Remo Vintage Emperor w/ Kickport 2 on kick resonant
DW 6000 kick pedal (sucks, I want a new pedal)
Vintage flat base Slingerland snare stand
Vintage MIJ canister throne
Mics on this one I did something new. I used only a kick and overhead, then blended that with the camcorder mic from my Sony HDR-CX240. It made it a very raw and cool sound. There is also some slight decimator (bit crusher) effect on the kick and overhead mics.
A high energy track in 7/4. I started this one with no real idea of where it would go, but then it really took on a life of it’s own! Cyberpunk Math Chiptune? I have no idea, but I think it came out pretty nifty.
The entire song and video were produced, recorded and edited in Ubuntu Linux 16.04. I made the main sequences in LMMS, then exported the stems to Mixbus 3.6. I recorded the drums into Mixbus using my Alesis IO4 along with the built-in audio interface on my core2 duo macbook using the jack audio connection kit giving me a total of 6 inputs! Though I only used 5 because my micro mixer has a mono output. So I just put both toms on one channel then panned them in post. I edited the video in Kdenlive.
Drums used:
2015 Tama Imperialstar Bob Kit Hairline Blue finish
Gibraltar floating tom mount system
Tama Iron Cobra hi hat stand (main hats)
Vintage Olympic hi hat stand (trash hats)
Ludwig flat base straight stands (crashes)
PDP boom stand (ride)
Vintage Nuvader Nickel Silver 15″ Hi Hats
Meinl HCS 8″ Bell
Kasza 17″ Dirty Bell crash cymbal
Vintage NuVader 22″ ride cymbal (Nickel Silver)
Meinl HCS 16″ Trash Crash / Generic 16″ brass crash bottom (trash hats)
Vintage Camber 18″ Crash Cymbal (Brass)
Aquarian Studio X on tom batters
Tama single ply clear tom resonants
Aquarian Studio X Dot on snare batter
Tama thin clear snare resonant
Aquarian Response 2 Coated kick batter
Remo Vintage Emperor w/ Kickport 2 on kick resonant
DW 6000 kick pedal
Vintage flat base Slingerland snare stand
Vintage MIJ canister throne
For more stuff like this, click the YouTube link in the header above
