"The decision to be a professional taiko player was deliberate; I considered all the options (computer programming, physics, writing) and decided that a life of playing taiko was hard to beat."
Kris' blog posts by category:
4538.69 hours and counting!
Short-term, personal goal:
For the next 10 days, I will average more than two hours of concentrated, taiko practice per day.
My shamisen teacher was in town last week (videos coming soon!) for 10 days of non-stop nagauta, the music of Kabuki. While I made huge strides in my shamisen playing, I’ve neglected my daily taiko practice. See the pitiful amount of purple (personal practice) toward the end of the graph below? How sad! Working toward my goal of 10,000 hours of practice, I’m trying to average at least an hour a day. So I’ve got a bit of catching up to do.
Due to the way I calculate my practice time, two hours is actually more like four hours at the drums. And because I have appointments over the next week, I’ll have to aim for more than four hours most days to keep my average up. I’m stating this publicly with the hopes it’ll help me stay on track.
If you see me between now and Feb 2, tell me to stop chatting/skateboarding/whatever and to get drumming. If anyone else wants to practice, let me know! Strength in numbers!
At the beginning of the month I participated in Pilgrim School’s “Golden Week”, an intense week of Japanese culture classes for students kindergarten through high school.
JATV visited my class and did a short segment on the whole program. More after the break…
I assembled a set of Five Fish preamps for Shoji and they turned out really well! The preamps sound fantastic and thanks to the high quality of the kit and the great support offered by Five Fish, the build process was very enjoyable. Here’s a time-lapse video of the construction! Photos and a review of the kit follows the break…
It’s been a little over a year since I committed myself to publishing things in blog format… and what a treat it’s been! Thank you to everyone for the encouraging comments and feedback!
Here are the five most popular posts thus far!
DIY apartment furniture (#1 google hit for these terms! Thanks everyone!)
30 Days to Better Shime
DIY Trailer Home – Schematic design progress
Taiko Games 2009 (with updated photos – thanks Leslie!)
Free Art License 1.3
As requested (thanks Jim!) I’ve also created an index of posts by category.
Looking forward to more fun in 2010!
Today marks six months of closely tracking my taiko practice time. Here’s a status report and some thank you’s!..
I recently installed a contact microphone in On Ensemble’s melodica. Here are some photos and a few things I learned along the way. You can hear the finished product in Gamelgong, at 1:30.
At last night’s concert, we debuted the first attempt at playing live tic-tac-toe on taiko! Shoji and Maz achieved the ultimate: a cat’s game! Here’s their celebratory pose!
On Ensemble members, thank you for helping to make my crazy song a reality!
If you were at the show, please let me know what you thought!
Whew! For the last few months I’ve been working on a new piece called Engine Room for debut at On Ensemble’s Works in Progress concert. I’m pleased to say, the rough draft is finally done! The last 30 seconds of the piece took me almost a month to figure out… but I think I like it. Please join us at the show and let me know what YOU think!
Here is the rough score for anyone interested. Here are the original Inkscape files for the score too.
Kelvin: here is the video explaining the ending. Thanks for all your work on the piece!
