Let’s keep this one simple guys.  What do you think?  Can we?  My posts are usually long and drawn out so let’s try and get straight to the point on this one.  Below are two drum videos from the early 2010 series.  The first one is a cover of the Kings of Leon hit Sex on Fire from the album Only by the Night.  It’s actually the first video in the series but I somehow ended up posting it now.  It is doing great on YouTube at the moment and people are really liking it.  The kit is my Mapex Saturn Special Edition Birch.

The second video is a mellow and groovy halftime shuffle song provided by RHYTHM Magazine.  This one I finished mixing and editing last night.  Both vids were actually filmed and recorded the same day.  Actually, the same night.  It was late at night, sometime after Christmas.

All the details on the recording, filming and setup are in my previous post.  Click here if you want to see that one.

Again, many thanks go out to my buddy Justin and Go Pro for the use of their cameras.  Also, props to my friends Scott and Brenda for help with the audio equipment as well as advice on the filming and recording. Don’t forget to log into YouTube and give 5 stars to both of these! And… as usual, please retweet.

Kings of Leon, Sex on Fire – (Drum Cover)

Halftime Shuffle Groove – Track by RHYTHM Magazine

I’m as nomadic as anybody else I’ve ever met.  My musical side has moved back and forth between Puerto Rico, Hawaii and California numerous times.  For that reason, I’ve had many music studios.  My latest incarnation of a studio was a spacious 16 x 18″ room in a two story building in sunny North County, San Diego.  I know my time with musical real estate is usually short, therefore I try and make the most of it.  It came as no surprise that I decided to shut this place down temporarily in order to make way for a new baby coming.  I decided I wanted to create a new series of drum videos to seal off this studio with a grand finale.  Not only are the results amazing, but the fact that they were shot very late into the night during the Christmas holidays makes for an even greater allure.

The video below is a slightly upbeat and very fun jazz track provided by the great Rhythm Magazine from the UK.  It is video number 2 in a series of 8.  Keep in mind, I’m not a jazz drummer by any means.  I’ve been playing rock for over 14 years and only started playing jazz 2 years ago.  A Dave Weckl or Steve Gadd type drummer would completely smoke this track.  Given my limited experience playing jazz, I think it came out quite well.

About the drums:

The drum kit is my prized Mapex Saturn Special Edition Birch & Walnut in Supernova Red.  This kit is the Five Star Drum Shops Edition.  I bought this set from West Coast Drums in Orange County about a year before they closed their doors.  I kept the tuning the same as usual.  I didn’t tune them specifically for jazz.  I usually tune my drums with slightly tighter resonant heads, and leave the batter heads a bit lower.  This is not as important with this kit, due to it’s larger tuning range, but has proved specially important with other thick-shelled kits I’ve owned in the past.  The drums have Remo Emperor batter heads and Ambassador resonant heads.  Given the Saturn’s super thin shells, the sound is very boomy and resonant, even when playing with bundle sticks.  The sticks I used for this recording are Vic Firth Steve Smith signature Tala Wand with a foam core.  The choice of snare is likely not the best for jazz due to it’s shallow depth.  It’s a DW Collector’s Edition Copper 4 x 14″.  My choice of Zildjian K Custom Dark cymbals however, is excellent for jazz although I use them for rock all the time.  The hi-hat is a K Custom Hybrid 13 1/4″ and the splash is a good ol’ Zildjian K.

About the recording:

“I wanted to get enough room ambiance to emulate one of my favorite Art Blakey jazz drum recordings from the 1950’s but with an obvious contemporary end result.”

I used mainly a combination of Shure SM57 and Sennheiser E835 microphones.  The single overhead microphone you can see in some of the angles is an Audio Technica AT4041 condenser.  This mic proved to be key in tying all the other microphones together.  The 7 channel microphone layout was plugged into a Mackie Onyx 1620 soundboard which was plugged via firewire into an Apple iMac running Logic Pro 8.  I added quite a bit of ambiance to the drum track using a room reverb plug-in in Logic.  When I mixed the drums with the backing track, I actually added some of that “large room” reverb to it as well.  This would hopefully make both separate tracks sit better together like if they had both been recorded at the same time.  I wanted to get enough room ambiance to emulate one of my favorite Art Blakey jazz drum recordings from the 1950’s but with an obvious contemporary end result.

About the video:

The camera angles are achieved using 3 Go Pro HD Hero digital cameras.  Given that Go Pro offers a slew of different mounting attachments, I was able to mount these exactly where I wanted them.  My favorite angle is the one where the camera sits right over my two rack toms and looks straight at me.  If you look closely you can see the picture vibrate when I hit the cymbal that sits right over that camera.  All 3 angles were played at once, in one take.  The raw footage was then brought into Final Cut, were I edited the video and synchronized it with my Logic Pro recording.  The graphics at the beginning of the video I created in Photoshop a few weeks prior to shooting.

That’s basically it.  This video was a lot of fun to shoot.  Please rate with 5 stars on YouTube and subscribe to my channel.  This is the second in a series of 8 videos that I’m releasing once per week until completed.  To stay informed of future releases please subscribe to my blog via RSS or email.  You can find the links to both on my sidebar.  Until the next one… Danny.

You’ve been there before. You plan your day out a certain way and it doesn’t come out quite like planned. Here I am, sitting inside the truck in the parking lot at Snow Valley Ski Resort in Big Bear. After waking up at 4:30am to drive all the way up here, I realized I should’ve been here yesterday. Yeah, I missed a good foot or two of fresh snow by one day, and to make matters worse, it’s so windy they have closed most of the lifts. Guess it’s not a bad time to write. They say people get creative when in odd situations.

I’ve heard it before. In surfing, “You should have been here yesterday.” When kiteboarding, “Perfect wind and waves – yesterday!” Well, the old saying goes, “If life gives you lemons…” I certainly cannot complain about having to make lemonade all too often. The few times things do go wrong become an interesting change of pace. Which brings me to the point of this post.

I certainly cannot complain about having to make lemonade all too often.

Most certainly, one of the keys to success every day is staying motivated. This involves staying motivated even when things don’t go quite as planned. Face it, things don’t go quite as planned OFTEN. I’ve found it’s always good to have an alternate plan. In fact, I’ve gotten so good at having an alternate plan, that oftentimes I don’t even have to think about it. I just quickly move on to the next thing. Like right now for example. As I’m typing on my phone I’m looking over my shoulder at the mountain to see if things start clearing up. I came here to snowboard and I want to get on the snow already. If I had my laptop with me, I would likely be working artwork. Right here, sitting in my car.

Next time you are on a ski or surf trip, on a date or simply at work and things go to crap, think about it for a second. It really isn’t so bad. You’re alive. You’ve got a lot to be grateful for. You can’t control every situation. Things go wrong simply as a part of life and it’s merely a chance to become stronger.

What can I say? I’m actually grateful for this wind. Without it I would likely not be sitting here writing. My phone could crash any minute and cause me to lost everything I have typed so far. But sometimes things just turn out pretty good after all. Like right now. The fact that you are reading this is proof of that. God bless. Danny

I want to talk to  you about my favorite kiteboarding photo.  Go ahead!  Take a look.  It’s the photo at the very end of this post.  There’s a lot going on in that photo.  So much that it deserves an entire post.

There’s a lot going on in that photo. So much that it deserves an entire post.

First of all, the setting.  This photo was shot in Maui, Hawaii in late October 2005.  At the time, I was not living on Maui.  I had moved out about a year before that.  I had flown to Hawaii from Puerto Rico earlier that month to spend 5 weeks training before heading to Southern California on a scouting trip.  I was planning to move to SoCal the following year.

I rode almost every day for 3 or 4 weeks before the day this photo was shot.  Let me tell you, the best time to be on Maui for kiteboarding is the fall.  The waves are epic most of the time and the wind is relentless.  This fall was no exception.  I spent most of the time riding waves and was a bit less focused on freestyle tricks at this point.  I had already “retired” from kiteboarding and was out there just to have fun and not get hurt.

At Kitebeach there’s a shallow spot right in the middle.  When there are waves on the outside reefs, a whole array of awesome kickers form in the inside right over this shallow bar.  This provides excellent ramps that mirror a boat’s wake.  These ramps are ideal for doing powered up wakestyle tricks.  I don’t think there’s a better place in the world for this. On this particular session I had ridden out just before sunset.  The conditions were excellent and the wind was filling the inside quite nicely at about 20 mph.  The kickers on the shallows were rolling through nicely, and I was out with only 2 other kiters, non other than brothers Shawn and Jesse Richman.  Keep in mind, this was back in 2005 when the Richman brothers still looked up to me as a rider.  Given that now they are world renown kiteboarders and Jesse just so happened to win the world championship, now it definitely me looking up to them.

…conditions were excellent and the wind was filling the inside quite nicely at about 20 mph.

The 3 of us were hitting the kickers and pulling trick after trick. The evening was getting incredibly beautiful as the sun was setting behind the West Maui Mountains.  Usually, the clouds over the mountains are much thicker.  This renders the sunset a bit dark and somber rather than an impressive array of color.  But today, the clouds were not as thick and the sunset was showing a nice deep purple color.  The visibility was great.

Photographer Ethan Janson from Seattle took advantage of the perfect situation.  He was out at the shallows with a 16 megapixel camera and a powerful strobe light.  He shot photo after photo of us doing our thing over the kickers.  I still remember the second this photo was taken.  The trick is called an Indy Glide and it involves jumping off a small wave while fully powered and extending your body horizontally while keeping your knees bent in order to reach and grab the center rail of the board with your trailing hand.  To do the trick properly the kite must be very low in the sky and fully powered to simulate the pull of a boat.  Ideally, you must also he unhooked from the kite and holding the bar near the center with only one hand.  At the point this shot was taken, I had reached the apex of my jump and my trailing hand had just released the board.  A second later, I pulled the board back under me, landed hot and rode away.  Perfect!  This was one trick I was very good at.

This impromptu photo shoot yielded a bunch of great photos.  One of  the pics made the cover of AAA Westways Magazine in Southern California.  This particular shot however is my favorite by far.  It shows so much and the form is just perfect.  I have hundreds of kiteboarding photos from my pro-riding days.  This one is still my favorite.  -D

Be sure to click the the image to see the full photo.

I just created this cool set of glossy vector port-hole bubble buttons.  These would be great for your website or as a gimmie in a flyer or sale campaign.  They are high-quality, original and perfectly done.  I’m posting them up for free.  The only thing I ask is that you respect the license and if you use them please link to this site.  The buttons were created in Adobe Illustrator CS3 and you can download them as .ai CS3.    Please don’t resell them.  If you do, I can give you my address so you can mail me a big fat check.  Oh! And please retweet. Enjoy!

Searching the web for specific information is way easier than pulling out a giant encyclopedia book out off the shelf.  For that, we have to be thankful.  These days, having the internet is a blessing in more ways than one.  But every once in a while a web search can become quite daunting.  This was the case when I decided to look for a free service to back up my Twitter tweets.  I found many services available, but many of them are only good if you use the paid version.  There may be more out there, but I want to share with you one that I found to be particularly useful and original.

It’s called Twistory, and you can find it at twistory.net.  Essentially, it’s a service that connects to your Twitter account and downloads your tweets so that you can keep them on your computer.  Keep in mind that most services out there will backup your tweets to an online server.  Oftentimes, if you want to download them to your computer it involves a fee.  Not only will twistory.net download your tweets to your computer for free, but it will do it automatically, everyday, and to a calendar application.  What does this mean? Well, it means your tweets will be backed up automatically and perfectly organized by the date and time they were posted on Twitter.

I work on MAC and I use iCal, but twistory also supports Google Calendar, Thunderbird, and other calendar applications that support webcal or iCalendar.  See the photo on this post to see an example of how my iCal calendar looks this week.  Each of those blue bubbles represents a tweet.  Clicking on any of the tweets brings it up in the application.  Not only that, but it shows you the date and time it was posted on Twitter. (See photo 2).

The service is not brand new.  I believe it has been out since April 2008.  Please keep in mind, I’m not affiliated to twistory.net.  I don’t endorse them, nor am I on their payroll.  Having said that, who knows if 2 months from now the service goes to crap?  As of this writing I can happily say I’m very impressed with the service.  Knowing that my tweets are safe and nicely organized makes me feel all fuzzy inside.

Yet another year has blown by! Faster than we can even understand.  It seems like only a few months ago we were buying Christmas gifts for what is now last year’s holidays! Here I am at almost 10PM on Christmas night writing my second post on what is going to be the new incarnation of dannycruz.com.

At the moment of this writing, the website is as white and plain as snow itself.  But it won’t be like that for long.  So if you are reading this post at a much later date, or simply want to reminisce on how the site looked at it’s early stage, I’m attaching a photo.  This photo represents the site at the moment of this writing.

I’m keeping this short… I hope you all had a great holiday.  I hope your Christmas made you feel like a kid again.  I certainly saw myself as a kid all over again when I took my son to the beach today to try out his new skimboard.  First steps in surfing on a beautiful day in SoCal.

Merry Christmas and good night! -Danny

Dear esteemed reader,

After 8 years of kiteboarding on dannycruz.com, I decided it’s time for a change. Life has gotten more complex.  It’s time to make this site reflect what is really going on today.  You can expect: Art, creative design, musician-talk, surfing, and a number of other related topics I’m involved in these days.

I will be working “live” on developing this site.  Which means you can see the changes as time progresses.  As I’m writing this quick post, there is not much to the site yet.  The color, theme and content is at its absolute simplest form.  If you are reading this post 2 months from now, what you are seeing around you might be quite different.  I decided this is the way I wanted this site to progress.  Not behind-the-scenes, but live and public.

If you wish to view the old kiteboarding site, fear not, it’s here: http://www.dannycruz.com/kiteboarding/home.html

Thanks! Looking forward to a long and interesting future.

Sincerely, Danny Cruz