Music

2025 has been a great music year. I'm playing in two bands, doing some home recording, and seeing more shows. The Vibronauts continue to play gigs, we have Halloween and New Years Eve booked at the Barrel House in Red Wing.

Thank You Georgetown has been a lot of fun this year, we just played an acoustic set at the open mic at Parkway Pizza in St. Louis Park.

In the ongoing vintage drum saga, I found an unloved Rogers 13" drum shell in Silver Sparkle with no hardware from 1959. It's a three-ply Jasper shell and needed some work to become an instrument again. This drum (above the bass drum was made before manufacturers changed bearing edges (the part of the wood that contacts the drum head) to a sharper angle. It's said that the more flat angle of mid-century drums has a smaller tuning range and may not project like a modern drum. However, these vintage drums with a flatter bearing edge produce a deeper, warmer tone. If you're looking for a mid-60's Levon Helm - Charlie Watts - Ringo kind of thwack combined with boom, this is it.

Rogers "bread and butter" lugs had a tendency to crack, and finding vintage lugs in good condition is not a likely thing to happen. The rest of my set is made with Beavertail lugs so I did the unthinkable, fill in 24 holes with maple dowels, and drill new holes to accommodate a full set of vintage Beavertail lugs that I was able to source. Someone had already filled in other hardware holes in the tom, so I felt okay about creating a sort of "Franken-tom", especially now that it gets played instead of sitting on someone's storage shelf.

The most recent project was a re-animation of some wind chimes that had been stored for a long time and were missing a few chimes. I cut and fashioned three new chimes from matching brass tubing and used AI to plot the lengths and frequencies to match the pattern of the chimes. Fun stuff!

See the blog page for more music updates.