Session Drummer | Studio Drummer | Touring and Worship Drummer for Hire | Dale Baker | Durham, Chapel Hill, Raleigh, NC

Running gadget

I'm always on the look out for cool new stuff.  And since I started running this year, I've been on the lookout for a good watch/ heart rate monitor or something along those lines.  On another note...I have yet to purchase an iPod (oh, the shame!).  Now I may have found my compelling reason to buy an iPod:

Nike and Apple team up.

Fair Use Comic

I just found out about this comic book ("Bound by Law") being made available by the kind folks over at Duke Law (via the Center for the Study of the Public Domain).  It's related to issues of Fair Use of copyrighted works: 

"A documentary is being filmed. A cell phone rings, playing the “Rocky” theme song. The filmmaker is told she must pay $10,000 to clear the rights to the song. Can this be true? “Eyes on the Prize,” the great civil rights documentary, was pulled from circulation because the filmmakers’ rights to music and footage had expired. What’s going on here? It’s the collision of documentary filmmaking and intellectual property law, and it’s the inspiration for this new comic book. Follow its heroine Akiko as she films her documentary, and navigates the twists and turns of intellectual property. Why do we have copyrights? What’s “fair use”? Bound By Law reaches beyond documentary film to provide a commentary on the most pressing issues facing law, art, property and an increasingly digital world of remixed culture."

Check it out here.

Thanks to Tape Op for the hot tip.

ByWord CD is out!

I'm so excited about this project I played on over a year ago.  It's finally been released and I've been pleased with the results I've heard so far.

The name of the band is ByWord and their music is heavier than I usually play.  So recording for them was a bit of a challenge...would I sound authentic enough for them?  Or am I just too "poppy" of a drummer.  Well...I tried to sound as solid as I could and I'm pleased with the results.   You won't hear any double bass drumming or lightning fast licks on this record...just some (hopefully) solid and gritty 2 and 4.  Hopefully you'll like it too.  You can listen to my playing on their album at their myspace site...

I had a great time hanging out with these guys and really enjoyed my time in Idaho.  I hope I get to go back there at some point.  Highlights from the sessions:

• watching Napoleon Dynamite for the nth time...
• Neil's Orange Julius'
• Neil's moms Chicken Enchiladas
• the amazing view from the drum room and the breaks on the deck...
• the awesome 24" A Zildjian ride that someone loaned us for the sessions...it was a vintage 70's cymbal and sounded perfect on a bunch of the songs.
• Brent's amazing story of how he got his pickup truck.
• Learning Photoshop tips from Elliot...

Oh, and those are all I can think of now...but I'm sure there are more...It's just amazing to think that these guys were bold enough to have heard my drumming and decide to track me down via the 'net.  I must admit, that's been one of my reasons for having a "web presence" so that those of you who would like to have me play on your music could find and contact me easily.  Here's hoping for more recording opportunities in the future.  And much thanks to the guys in ByWord for bringing me up to Idaho and letting me be a part of their creative journey.  You guys rock!

The Four Day Week.

I thought about a similar concept a few years ago when I worked at Duke and noticed my co-workers spending way too much time playing solitaire on their computers.  It seemed that most everyone worked productively for a few hours a day and spent the rest of their time chatting with co-workers or fiddling around shuffling papers or making labels.  Why not shorten the work day or better yet, shorten the work week. 

Though I think the Four Day week is a grand idea, I'm wondering if we'd do better with a shorter work day, let's say in at 10:00am out at 4:00.  That would give us all time to exercise in the morning, get our kids to school and  be around in the afternoon to make  dinner with our family.  Our society would become more productive because we would be more balanced and healthy as individuals.  (or so my dream goes...).

The Future of Music

I just finished reading this book by David Kusek and Gerd Leonhard, The Future of Music (Manifesto for the Digital Music Revolution). 

It was an interesting read and insightful at times (who knew that our present (mostly secure) state of e-commerce can be directly traced back to the companies providing online porn?).  The music business is definitely changing and who knows how it's going to all end up, but these guys have started a discussion and I think the most we can do is try and listen in on what they're talking about and pay attention to the folks out there who are figuring all of this out.  It's an exciting time in the world of music and entertainment - especially for those of us not contractually obligated to major labels.

Another cool thing is that you can take this as an online course through Berklee.  Check out the course description here. 

Yo, G.

I went to this thing on Saturday that our church was sponsoring. They were hosting a group from New York that has created a "hip-hop" mass. 

Yep.  And this is no DC Talk kind of thing.  These guys are "legit."  And though I felt a little too "white" being there, it was a pretty interesting idea.  And my wife commented, there was more theology in what they were doing than alot of what contemporary christian music (CCM) is putting out these days. 

To be fair, CCM is for the masses (not the "mass") and is marketed as entertainment (for the most part), this thing on Saturday was supposed to be an example of an Episcopal Church Service using the hip-hop vernacular.  In my mind, the service on Saturday came off a bit like performance art and was similar to attending a concert.  But still I'm not sure that is a bad thing. 

Originally I thought I was going to just dismiss the service as another attempt by well meaning Christians to make the gospel "relevant" and "hip," but I'm not so sure that I can do that.  There were elements of the service that I thought were pretty darn cool (some of the prayers were offered as free-form "raps" and the rhyming and rhythm was pretty awesome to hear) and other parts that I thought were questionable (should we really refer to the "house of the Lord" as "the Lord's crib?").

So these guys have created their own version of the Episcopal Prayer Book and will be releasing it soon.  They were handing out little cards with alternate versions of the "Lord's Prayer" on them and the following (which is an excerpt from the 23rd Psalm that Ryan Kearse re-phrased).

"The Lord is all that, I need for nothing.  He allows me to chill. He keeps me from being heated and allows me to breathe easy.  He guides my life so that I can represent and give shouts out in His Name.

And even though I walk through the 'hood of death, I don't back down for you have my back.  The fact that He has me covered allows me to chill.  He provides me with back-up in front of my player-haters and I know that I am a baller and life will be phat. 

I fall back in the Lord's crib for the rest of my life."

Word?  You can view an article about the hip hop emass on the Episcopal news service website (which is where I got the picture from above)...but you'll have to scroll down a bit to get to the article ('Go forth and tell it like it is': Roskam raps at Hip Hop Mass), I couldn't figure out a way to link directly to it.  Excerpt:

"...The initiative behind the Hip Hop Mass came from Trinity Church's rector, the Rev. Tim Holder, after listening to young people in his neighborhood. "This is the first time anything like this has happened on the East Coast," he said. "Hip hop is the culture; it's the people. When it began it was all about speaking to the oppressor. Hip hop is the new civil rights."