The Lemke Special

(Also used without permission. Sorry Dave)

Dave Lemke

Sometime back in November my buddy Dave (also shown in the photo with Kathryn below) and I got together for a little jam session at BYU. Dave had just bought a new synthesizer that he was anxious to test out and I had been itching to get my hands working again. So, this was the result. A lot of what you'll see was one continuous jam, where we would morph from one groove into another and just try to read each other's minds, (at one point Dave's mind said "let's play a funky rendition of 'Choose the Right'"). The playing isn't the most meticulous on either of our parts, but I think we each got some good licks in.

This time I had figured out how to condense the microphone to avoid clipping, but had forgotten to do it when we started playing. As a result, the audio is really bad, but not so bad that you can't hear what we're playing so I've decided to post it anyways.

There's two parts, I'm only going to post the first one for now. Again, this blogger video thing isn't allowing me to upload videos that are over a couple of minutes. Is that a rule or do I need to do something special to get it to work? Any suggestions would be appreciated.

Jed and Dave 1

Comments: For some strange reason I had a really hard time getting into a groove on this occasion. I think I had not played in a while and was worried how I would sound. Not to mention I was again on a drumset that I wasn't comfortable with and I'm sure my hands were cold. By the time we got to the end I things were sounding better. Lucky for you, I cut out most of the stuff that I didn't like.

Some of the things that I'm happy with are: 1) Dave is getting much better at following hemiola's and such, so I was able to take some more liberties with the all the time shifting mumbo jumbo that I'm so fond of. 2) There actually some pretty sick licks in there. I'm sometimes impressed with my own ability to incorporate the diddle rudiments (paradiddles, etc.) and roll right off the snare and toms. 3) I can tell that I was starting to think more about creating a melody with my fills and solos (some of the time) and things are flowing better. You'll see in upcoming videos that this skill has really improved and has transformed my playing in a lot of ways.