DIY Drum cases

Here are suitable drumcases made from an old dry toilet (fortunately it's never been used) and a water barrel. I can fit my 14" tomtom and 14" snare to the bigger one and 10" snare and 12" tomtom to the smaller one.

Starting point 1

Starting point 2

Adding the padding 1

Adding the padding 2

Painting 1

Painting 2

Done!

A short teaser from the upcoming Karelian Warcry album

A short teaser from the studio behind this link: https://vimeo.com/61028483

Enjoy yourselves!

I'm in a hurry (once again), so I'm out now!

Recycling drumsticks (DIY Drum Stick Modifications)

Old drumsticks have many uses. Here's couple of them:

1. Stun the fish you catch with an old drumstick

This was made MacGyver style in the last minute when my friend was picking me up for an ice fishing trip. You need a duct tape, a piece of metal pipe and of course a drumstick, so go and smash one! I'll add a huge hook on the bottom of this stick later, so this will serve me later also as a lifting hook for even bigger catches.

2. Vacuum cleaner wheels made from old drumstick

My vacuum cleaner was broken pretty badly. I was going to throw the whole thing away, because finding the spare parts wasn't an easiest task. But as it is, the solution is always next to you. First I repaired its hose. I opened the hose adapter, shortened the hose a bit with scissors and glued them back together with Extreme Repair glue. Yesterday I replaced old broken plastic wheels with a pieces cut from old Vic Firth drumsticks. These 7A:s were the only models I've in my apartment at the moment. I think model 2A or 2B would be best size for this kind of mod. ;)

So my advice is to save your old drumsticks if possible. You never now when you need them and what for.

3. Warming up your sauna

(All pictures by me except 3. by J. Järvinen)

Snaretalk Pt. II: Postmortem and Remembrance (DIY Tom to Snare conversion)

Finally got a chance to assemble this snare. I'm going to change the drum heads as soon as possible. I know it's not perfect, but it will do. This snare project took me over a year, but it was definitely worth it. Feel free to ask anything and I'll try to answer. Long story short:

Making this kind of equipment by yourself teaches you a lot. Of course a lot about drumming and also a lot more about your life and yourself. It brings forth your memories, even the painful ones. And I wan't to share some of them with you.

It's been about 16 years from that when I first played or even stood next to a real drumkit. If I remember correctly it was year 1997 and we were just about to start a fifth grade. That meant our class had to go to bigger school which was located 3 kilometers away from my home. The biggest change for me was that there were more musical instruments, especially band instruments, such as drums, guitars and so on.

I remember we had this old drum kit on our class room and it was missing a bass drum resonant head. Other class room for music class students had a Tama Rockstar drumkit and everyone was hoping to get to it also outside the music lessons. During the playtime in school we used to sneak into the music class and play our asses off.  I always wanted to go to actual music class, like my sisters did, but I couldn't get through the entrance exam.

I had played violin in music school for a while and in the long run it was quite boring. By the way, this was totally disproved in last summer by Kronos Quartet when they played at Kuhmo Chamber Music Festival. Violin really is also a percussion! What a show they put up! But during my short career as a violin player, I was so frustrated that I used to hack'n'slash my notes with a violin bow, and "accidently" take a violins bridge away so I couldn't practice anymore.

Me and my friends started to play "air drums" after the school and I even build my first barrel drumkit with the help of my father. After a while I jumped from violin to tenor horn. My teacher was also playing drums and because a tenor horn wasn't my kind of instrument he agreed to teach me drumming privately.

At first he asked me if I would like to learn to play with a double bass drum (I had almost broken my single pedal for trying to use it as a double bass pedal). Of course I wanted, so he carried another bass drum to the room. It was a different size, but it didn't matter. Goddamit, now I had two of them and I could play machine gun patterns all evening! After the first lesson I knew this was the right instrument and path for me. After that he helped me to tune my drum kit and we had many good conversations about metal bands like Sepultura during the theory lessons he held.

After primary school we moved to Southeast of Finland and I gained my access to the music class without entrance exams. There the teacher always said I played too loud, so there was usually some other guy playing drums during the classes, while I was trying to sing my lungs off. But we had couple of school projects where I could play rock and metal style songs. I wasn't interested in other instruments at the time, maybe I've should've.

I never imagined to reach this point when my parents bought me this used drum kit about 15 years ago:

Snaretalk (DIY Tom to Snare Conversion)

Howdy!

Do you still remember that 10" tom I was going to convert to a snare? Well, now it's completely destroyed... Hahaa, just kidding! Last night I upgraded it to a whole new level by adding some Supi Saunavaha on it. It is a stainlike wax for wooden surfaces made from natural compounds. That stuff is usually used for sauna benches (propably best translation for 'saunanlaude'). The Instructions said it's not recommended for oiled surfaces, but I did it anyway. Because I can.

At first I tested wax on a piece of normal plywood, and it seemed to absorb well despite the oil. A bit of sandpaper and a steel brush did the job. So, firstly I used the steel brush to open a wood grain a bit, then roughened the surface with sandpaper, cleaned it with a brush and a vacuum cleaner. After that I finally added couple of layers of stain on it with a help of a piece of foam. Inside of the snare is then again opened a bit with the steel brush. It gives that special antique look I was looking for. After that I engraved those runes again, so they burst into the sight better. I'm sure there is no better time to do that, for gods sake it is full moon now!

I'm still thinking the right name for this piece of percussion. Something from the Finnish Mythology maybe...

I'm still in need of the appropriate snare heads before testing the sound itself.

Cut the bullshit, here's the situation for now:

Phases I, II and III

I'm in a hurry now, so pictures of full assembled snare coming later. Ride on!

-A. Heiskanen

Occurrence 2012

Almost a year has passed and our upcoming album remains still unfinished. I know it's common that recording process takes many many years from composing the songs to the finest little details on the booklet and the website. It has always been the way Karelian Warcry works. As a drummer it can be very frustrating to wait other players to finish their parts.

Meanwhile I can plan what booklets could look like, pick photographs from my own archives that represent our goals in visual part, draw sketches, even design a flash game for website visitors or whatever comes to my mind. And of course concentrate other important things in my life, like cuddling with my beautiful wife-candidate. Still the ongoing recording process haunts me once in a while. It can drive you nuts. Patience, my friend.

Today I was thinking about recording situation itself. It was icy cold, pitch black dark and my life was quite a chaos at the moment. I can't even recall the proper miking setup we used. A good friend of ours came by and set the things up, while I was still unsure what cymbals or what snare I would use, and also still a bit too confused about the new appearance of my drum kit. I couldn't do that all just by myself. Miking setup consisted of 15 mics overall: snare top, snare bottom, hi-hat, 2 x ride, 3 x tom, 2 x bd, 2 x overhead, 2 x room mic and one extra mic for china. Maybe I'll add the specs of them later, now I'm just too tired to do that.

One thing that buggers me off, is the china cymbal I used on record. It didn't sound the way I wanted, but hey, what can you except from a basic china like 18" Meinl Classics. I added one self-hammered splash underneath it and one cut splash on top to get more complex sound from it (by the way that Paiste Alpha Splash on top is formerly owned by Tonmi Lillman. He sold me that while he was still living in Kouvola. This way I honour fellow drummer who passed away in February, 2012). I didn't use that Sabian Leopard China shown on kit pics somewhere below on this blog.

What I've learned from previous recording session? A lot and hell of a lot more. More practise, more tuning, more timing, yadda yadda! You know what I'm talking about. For the next recording I prefer to have all the cymbals miced separately and hopefully I can use totally different symbal set. At the moment I don't have place to hammer my cymbals and I'm not sure if I'll have any in the near future. I've also decided that next time when I'm sitting behind my drum throne recording patterns, it totally happens in the middle of summer. That's it for now. Over and out!

Hiisi flying drumstick broom

DIY Drum kit modification

Hola!

We made a rawmix-sample from the upcoming and yet unnamed Karelian Warcry album. You'll hear how my drumkit sounds at the moment. Check it out from here!


I also stained my drumkit at last and I'm very happy with the results. See for yourself!

Stained floor tom and bassdrum on the back.

Stained floor tom and bassdrum.

Watching the scenery , while fishing near our recording location.

Otherness