Steve Gadd Natural Finish Sticks!

It’s no secret to every clerk that has had the unfortunate luck of talking to me at any drum shop or drum department in NYC or Nashville that I think Steve Gadd sticks from Vic Firth are just perfect, the best sticks ever, well, except for the black paint. I’ve gotten used to the paint, especially the discontinued (why?) original finish, but it does flake all over your drum heads, not cool when you are sitting in or at a jam session. Also, black sticks just always felt like a too-cool gimmick which makes no sense but I think you know what I mean? 

A few months back, I called Vic Firth headquarters and sort of begged the rep on the phone to sell me some Steve Gadd sticks without the black paint. The rep stopped me in mid-rant to explain that they would be releasing them without paint at Winter NAMM 2018. I know I screamed a loud “YES” and probably more. They are finally making their way to stores and I couldn’t be happier. Finally the perfect stick with the traditional look

http://vicfirth.com/products/drum-sticks/signature-sticks/steve-gadd-2/

 

Press Rolls & Assassins

I’ve never played more press rolls in my life! And yes, it was fun playing drums for Street Theatre’s production of Assassins. An offbeat play with some really disturbing dialogue, music by Stephen Sondheim. The pit had three wind players, crazy! This was my first run with the Roland SPD-SX to trigger sounds; this show has a lot of sound effects so it really came in handy.

My setup for Assassins, added the Roland SPD-SX.

Broadway Brunch

Had the privilege of playing drums for the Broadway Brunch fundraiser for the Nashville Repertory Theatre. It was a packed house at the City Winery in Nashville, great venue. The performers were really having a good time and the crowd, including Nashville’s Mayor, really seemed to enjoy it.

My little Ludwig Breakbeat kit really did the job. Another drummer came up after the show and commented on how good the bass drum sounded. Who would have thought a Superkick II on a 16″ bass drum would sound good.

Ionic The Creator

I’ve been building apps with the Ionic Framework for a year now, and I really like it. A big improvement over jQuery Mobile, especially if you only need Android, iOS and Windows phone apps. And now with Ionic Creator, I can create a mobile app prototype in about 15 minutes, check it into Git and start using other Ionic tools to complete the development.

Ionic Creator is free for a single project and the signup is easy. I pretty much just use it to get started, flesh out a project. Then I check it into Git. I could see Agencies or teams wanting to manage multiple projects at once which would require a paid account.

It helps if you have your app goals, features and menu navigation at least in mind when you start. The tool is so easy to use that it does almost eliminate the wireframe step for simple apps — the Creator is all drag / drop and the end product is a functioning AngularJS mobile app.

 

I really like how Ionic is really just an AngularJS app, nothing special at the most basic level. The Ionic libraries take things to the next level. If you can hack AngularJS, you can create great mobile and web apps with the Ionic Framework and Ionic Creator.

From LAMP to MEAN

It has been about a year since I switched development stacks from LAMP to MEAN. Interfaces have become more asynchronous, more event based. Consumers of internet technology have become accustomed to interfaces that feel like Facebook and Twitter. Old page based approaches feel outdated, slow and not dynamic or interactive.

For a long time, I’ve disparaged the gulf between front and back-end developers. Why so many languages and tools? Can’t we all just get along, use Javascript? Yes, we can, and it’s a great thing to see developers really working together in a holistic way to solve problems and create new things.

And it seems that everybody’s getting on board. Most of the new APIs I use have Javascript implementations, especially third-party vendors. This makes it very easy to build MEAN and NodeJS solutions with tools like Stripe and Uber.

And there are so many framework apps for each piece of the MEAN stack to get you going. Building a mobile app? Use Ionic Framework which is really an Angular application with a set of mobile-friendly directives and styles. Need to build a CMS? Use KeystoneJS which is really just an ExpressJS app that provides a solid CMS implementation that’s easy to extend any way you see fit.

The power of MEAN is also in the depth of the tools. MongoDB, for example, is a real database for large data sets that need scaleability, integrity and durability. It kind of reminds me of Oracle for a new generation, it feels that solid and ready for mission critical applications. Just look at the docs on clustering and you’ll see what I mean.

It’s actually been fun to work on projects this year, mostly due to the MEAN stack. And yes, maybe it’s because everybody loves new toys, but maybe it has more to do with convergence. When I think of storing and exchanging data, I’m thinking in JSON. When I thinking of writing some code, I’m thinking Javscript. A simple, elegant approach that you should try if you haven’t already.

NOTE: Here’s a slide deck I created to help present the MEAN stack. Maybe it will help you convince your team to make the switch!

Drums for BatBoy

I always enjoy playing drums for the Street Theatre company in Nashville. I was asked to sub a few dates for JJ Street on drums for BatBoy — a really fun show!

I’ve played a few other shows for Street Theatre and am always impressed that they choose to do shows that other companies would shy away from. This show in particular was quite offbeat.

Also, I got to play chimes which is always a plus (Rush Zanadu flashbacks)!

Gag Me With A Stick

I always look forward to drumming for the Street Theatre company in Nashville. I never saw the movie Heathers when it came out in the 80s, but when I mentioned drumming for the play, people would always react something like “Oh, you mean like the movie?” with a touch of horror and surprise.

The music is really fun to play, and most of the beats are right out of the music of my youth. We get to go from disco to synth-pop and throw in a little reggae in the span of a few numbers!

I think that’s my favorite thing about drumming for musical theater — the challenge of playing and reading a wide range of musical styles in less than two hours all while following the musical director and flowing with the actors. Musically, the closest challenge is a Jazz trio gig where you always have to be on your toes.

Beanstalk and back to plain old EC2

I really do love AWS Elastic Beanstalk. It’s the perfect technology to help auto-scale and deploy modern applications. But this power and flexibility does not come easy; the doc is pretty awful and the configuration files leave a lot to be desired. It can be great, if you’re willing to work for it.

It doesn’t help that AWS does a terrible job keeping their documentation updated. Most of the instructions for the previous generation either don’t apply or break under the new v3 implementation. And there are never enough real-world examples to get you going — too many snippets out of context to be helpful. Why not a complete example of deploying a WordPress or NodeJS application?

A few things to consider:

• The configuration files also have too many ways to accomplish the same thing. Some of this is due to changing syntax between v2 and v3, but some is just poor execution on Amazon’s part. Completely move the v2 doc, make it archived! Too many links point to old or out of date doc.
• There is not true support for GIT branches in the v3 configuration files. For example, you can’t have multiple branched environments in a single configuration file. You really need to be able to set different variables and mount points for different environments (stage, prod). You are left making multiple copies of config files or using something like symbolic links. Not ideal.
• Switching environments with development teams is too complicated. The doc oversimplifies it, you know, just “use stage” or “use prod” … but it doesn’t work that easily in practice. How would this ever work with GIT? It seems like they are moving away from true GIT integration anyway with v3.
• The deploys take forever. There needs to be better checking for packages that haven’t changed so complete re-installs are avoided. You can do this, but it’s not trivial to implement and requires third party code. Why not deploy with package files with versions of packages as the default method for Beanstalk deploys? Grunt? Gulp?
• Instances just stop working all of a sudden. They just hang. Then you upgrade the version of Linux and things start working again! I’ve mostly used Amazon Linux on Beanstalk, maybe it’s isolated, but I don’t think so. And you don’t get notified if the instance is hanging, and it will not auto-restart. This condition is not considered unhealthy by the Beanstalk monitoring agents which is pretty bad.

If you have an application that really needed horizontal scaling, take the time to architect a Beanstalk solution, it works well for the most part. You’ll need to setup a lot of monitoring and thoroughly test your configurations and backups. But if you can get away with vertical scaling, I’d go that route because it is simpler to implement and maintain.

Drumfight for Dogfight!

Dogfight was my first production drumming for Street Theatre company in Nashville. The cast and band was great and we got to play on stage, high up in the rafters. The room was very live so the band had to be very conscious of volume, almost like a cocktail party gig.

I’m really digging my new Ludgwig Breakbeats for this show. It’s the perfect size and sound for this type of gig. It sounds great quiet and really punches when the band gets going. And I’m not afraid of leaving it at the venue between shows — not an expensive kit.

Drumming on a drum for Seussical

My daughter loved this production! It’s nice when she can come to one of my shows — most of the time I’m playing venues where she is not old enough to attend or it would be too loud. Though I don’t think she even noticed me — the story and sets are wonderful and colorful.

This was such a fun show to play for, a ton of percussion and a pretty challenging score overall. The numbers changed at a pretty fast pace so I didn’t really get a moment to relax. A very Zen experience for sure.