12.23.20

Christmas Medley 2020

Posted in Christmas Medley, Instrumental at 8:15 pm by Martin

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Length: 05:53, Size: 13.4 MB

It’s 2020 and this is the 20th xmas medley I recorded. What a crazy year 2020 has been. Hope this little medley provides a tiny bit of joy in trying times. Clocking in at just under 6 minutes this is also the longest medley I’ve ever recorded. My two boys, Kai (6 years old) and Kieran (2 years old), also have a little chat with their comments about their papa’s medley at the end if you stick around long enough 😛

This year’s medley features “O Little Town of Bethlehem” followed by “We Three Kings”. In honor of tapping master Eddie Van Halen’s passing just a few weeks ago, the ‘widdly widdly’ guitar solo in “We Three Kings” has 8 bars of tapping-only frenzy at around the 4:51 mark in the song. I only occasionally use tapping, and rarely ever for a longer section of a solo like this. So this is dedicated to Eddie’s impact on electric rock guitar, both on the gear and the way we play today.

Also new this year is my extended e-drum kit. I added two toms, upgraded the snare from 10″ to 12″, upgraded the base drum to a proper mesh-head pad, got a nice Roland VH-10 hi-hat, and added several cymbals. I also swapped out the brains of the operation, the drum trigger module, for the Audiofront eDRUMin10 (see https://www.audiofront.net/eDRUMin.php), which is quite excellent and has an easy-to-use but very powerful control software that allows for configuring the trigger response extremely well.
It was a lot of fun coming up with and recording the drum parts this year. Here’s a picture of the new setup:

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