Halloween Special

Morning all. As you know today is Halloween, and to mark the occasion I thought id do a little Halloween themed drum cover. Now this was a toss up between Thriller and Ghostbusters, But as im in the process of making a Michael Jackson mini series which I will be incorporating Thriller into. Which means for my Halloween Special Ghostbusters was chosen.

With it been a Halloween Special I also decided to dress up my room and kit. In accordance with the day. I managed to recruit my good friend James Grice to help me with the themed project.

Right first off you cant have the Ghostbusters without Slimmer. This is where James comes in as he’s a awesome artist. I tasked him with making me a nice big slimer to help decorate the wall. If you would like to see a step by step of how he went about making this please check out his blog @ www.jaygrice.wordpress.com

I then thought what else is associated to Ghostbusters besides Ghosts and the Ghostbusters (unfortunately I couldn’t get Bill Murray to turn up) and obviously I thought of ECTO 1 the Ghostbusters car. So I sourced the flashing blue light in the video to simulate this. It was £4.99 I believe from www.maplin.co.uk

We then set about tarting the room up to make it look more Halloween like. We accomplished this with the use of some cheap Halloween decorations which included a hanging ghost and some fake spiders webs (with spiders) James supplied a smoke machine and a couple of stand alone desk lamps to add to the Halloween mystique.

Now to the recording.

(you can check out my equipment in previous blogs.)

We ended up doing 3 recording takes. The first was scrapped due to me not turning on the blue light.  And the second was also not used due to the fact my sticks got tied up in the web. (I can put this up if anyone would like to see it lol) The final take was ace and was the 1 we ended up using.

We also had various angles but due to my limiting software I wasn’t able to utilise these to good effect so they were scrapped in favour of the front camera shot. ( I now need some proper video editing software.)

I only played through the actual track 5 times before recording it. All of which I changed the drums for other than 2 fillings near the start of the track. As these had to be in to maintain the structure of the cover. Which I think came out really well. The only thing I was disappointed with was the snare part half way through. But that was down to a annoyingly good mic rather than playing.

Well I hope you enjoy the video. Please rate, Subscribe and comment if you do. That would be much appreciated.

Also please check out James Grices WordPress site as he has some good content on there.

O and before I forget I did a cymbal swap for this session I took out my heavy hitting A customs 17” 18” fast crash and 19”  for my smaller A customs inc my brand new 15” and a 16” crash with a 16” fast crash. I think this added clarity to the recording as the sound is more controllable (let me know what you think)

I also added my new Evans ec2 heads onto the toms. I didn’t get round to changing the snare head. Which I do have. I have done a couple of before and after sound checks so you can compare the difference,