Before any drum can be used as a kick, it needs to have a wide hoop that you can clamp a pedal onto. Bass drums come with wide hoops already, often wooden ones, while all other stick-hit drums have much lower-profile metal hoops so you can hit the drum easily. I looked around for someone who could make me an 18" wooden hoop for my rototom, and I found Eddie Ryan, veteran drum craftsman and refurbisher, who made one that fits very well. With the rototom clamped to the base of a regular tough boom cymbal stand, everything is sturdy. The sound is quite pointy and shrill, with plenty of attack but none of the depth of a real bass drum. This might be OK for an Improvizone evening, when I don't really want a lot of noise, and provided I close-mic it there should be enough bottom end for recording.

Besides my new roto-kick idea, I had another reason for going to Eddie. I wanted to sell my Ludwig acoustic drum kit. I was getting tired of it, I didn't really like the sound and it was all too big. My thinking was, I've basically given up bands and am not using it any more, and even if I did want an acoustic kit, I would prefer something more modern-looking and modern sounding. If ever I decide I want acoustic drums for Improvizone, I would prefer smaller gear. Hence the roto-kick. Plus, old Ludwig kits can fetch a couple of thousand. Trouble was, the front hoop was missing from the bass drum. I took the hoop off in about 1990, quickly shed any intention of putting it back on again, and even unscrewed all the lugs. I kept it, but when my parents moved house last year, the hoop went missing, presumed taken to the local dump by accident. So as well as the roto-kick hoop, I wanted Eddie to make me a 22" replacement hoop for my Ludwig bass drum.

Wooden bass drum hoops usually have a strip of lacquer in the middle to match the drum. Bring in your bass drum, Eddie suggested, so he could match the lacquer on the hoop he was making. Yuck, he basically said when he finally saw the drum, that's not the original lacquer. I restore these drums. That lacquer is all wrong. I can re-lacquer it for if you like, clean up the metalwork, change a few of the lugs maybe... And so I got Eddie to recondition my 1967 Ludwig Gold Badge drums, replacing all the lacquer with a new grey glitter finish, polishing up the metalwork, levelling off the shell rims so that the heads sat properly, changing a few heads here and there. The the better condition they were in I thought, the more they would be worth.

A couple of weeks ago I drove back over to Eddie's to pick up the kit. I didn't recognise it. Stunning restoration. I actually didn't mind the old lacquer, but the new finish looks terrific. As far as how the drums now sound, I'm not sure yet, as I predict it will be incompatible with a sleeping one-year-old boy. What I really need is some kind of live music event to try them out at, ideally some kind of improvised evening where I can play what I want... Sorry if you've been looking out for one of these kits, I'm keeping mine for a while yet.

The picture shows the original Ludwig 13", 16" and 22" pieces without any of my newer cymbals or hardware, nor my Ludwig 400 aluminium snare which Eddie also reconditioned. The rack tom is suspended on its bass drum mount, a piece of hardware I always thought rather crap and flimsy and never liked to use. But now Eddie has found me a more recent version that requires a spanner for tightening, and therefore seems fairly sturdy, so I might give it another go.

Not only would I like to use the acoustic drums again for the next Improvizone, in fact I have a mind to use just drums. Maybe a couple of cymbals for occasional texture, perhaps a hi-hat but with the cymbals at knee-height underneath other drums so I don't hit them. I have two motivations for this. One, I do most of my practising without cymbals. Two, I notice the best atmospheres in Improvizone recordings appear to coincide with me dropping out the cymbal sounds and sticking with percussion.

Besides the 18" roto-kick, I have four other rototoms sized 6", 8", 10" and 12". I confess I originally lusted after the look of these when I first got them, more than having any idea how they sounded. Since then I've known that with thin heads and a mic a little distance away they record an excellent tuneless clatter. Just what I like. Also the smaller ones are great for encouraging me to do more interesting paradiddle-type beats around the snare rather than just ts-ts-ts on the hi-hat.

The trouble with rototoms is mounting them. When you buy them they come three to a mounting rail, which means there are all facing up on the same plane. This might be OK for a standing percussionist who can move about, but isn't great for a drummer sitting still on a stool, who needs drums arranged in an arc. So far the only proper kit-drummer-friendly way of mounting I have seen them involves cannibalise valuable boom cymbal stands using some dodgy piece of metal that you could only be sure would not shift if you welded it on. So this is my next spend-money-here project for acoustic drums. Get all the rototoms mounted properly and consistently. Somehow.

I already had a framework for making our background projection videos, so I made some progress fairly quickly on this. But I got bogged down in the technicalities of pasting one image onto another in an arbitrary position and to an arbitrary scale. Surely Windows would have this feature in their image library? Yes, but only to the nearest pixel. It was surprising how jerky and crap this looked. Therefore, like so few other programmers in the world, I decided to roll my own. I made slow progress intermittently, and stopped working on it altogether for several months.

Recently, after a long period of lethargy, apathy and general other stuff, I resumed the project and started getting all the little pieces of it working by coding up tests for them. If I paste this pixel onto the corner of that pixel I expect to see... and so on. Having figured out the geometry of what to paste where, such that things started to work, the next problem was making it run in a reasonable time. Taking all night to paste one image on top of another is totally useless. Photoshop can do it in a fraction of a second. Happily I rewrote some nonsense code and sped things up. And then sped them up again. A couple of weeks ago my process took 16 hours 20 mins to generate 30 seconds of video. Yeah. I got that down to 37 minutes one Saturday evening, and learned two lessons there. One. Don't allocate memory if you don't need to. Two, don't bother trying to paste one image onto another if it's disappeared off the edge of frame.

You can see from the image that while I've got the geometry of the pasting working, I could do with a few improvements on the overlaps. The original image is my eye on a black background and so, very simply, I treat black as transparent. If a pixel is black, I don't paste it onto anything. This crude all-or-nothing approach results in the black border around the eye when there's another image underneath. I should be able to improve it by fading up the lower image at the edge of the upper one. Whether I do this or not, my approach does mean that any black in the middle of the image becomes transparent.

Although I was originally planning on using my eye photos as source images, I've happened upon some very nice wikipedia of roundish things like planets, or this superb picture of a krill eye. So I've been gathering a few of those. The next thing to do is code up some different animations, and I have a few already. In one, the eye pulsates at a fixed point on the screen, growing from nothing to maximum scale and then shrinking back down to nothing. In another, appears at one edge of the screen and moves slowly over to the opposite edge, growing or shrinking slightly as it goes.

Right now, I can build up a video by picking one of these animations, triggering it ten times with random position and scale parameters and layering these on top of each other. Once the image from one layer has gone, I throw out that layer and replace it with a new one with its own set of random parameters. I carry on with this until a specified number of seconds, after which no more layers are added. The video ends when the last layer has expired. Given that both these animations start and end with nothing on the screen, videos like this are perfect for looping.

One thing I want to support is swapping between animations mid-cycle, a new one starting where the previous one left off. For example, eyes moving across the screen would stop and begin pulsating. To do this, I have to be a bit clever describing the locus or scale of the image. It's easy to pulsate the eye just by assigning the scale to a cosine wave as a function of the frame number. But to swap into that animation, each new set of scale and coordinates has to be a function of the last. That means I need to take the current scale, use an inverse function to figure out where in the cosine cycle I could be, increment that value and then re-apply the formula to get the next value. OK, I doubt any of that made sense. It's just nice to be able to use some secondary school mathematics here and there, like it was worth turning up after all.

Next time I'll talk about drums.

The players will be the same as last time, namely...

• Michael Bearpark (guitar)
• Os (keyboard/EWI/laptop)
• Steve Bingham (electric violin)
• Nick Cottam (bass)
• Andrew Booker (electronic drums)

I, yes I, the last named above, that is I, who have committed practically zero effort in advance of most of our outings this year, have been preparing for this gig. So has Os. Os has been slimming down his gear, and one item for the chop was his headphone amp, which was consuming an entire U of rack space just so I could listen to his click. He offered to buy me a small headphone amp if I could accommodate one. In fact I bought a Behringer Xenyx 802 mini-mixer instead. I already have a mixer in my live setup, either the Yamaha MG10/2 I'm using at the moment, or the larger Spirit Folio F1 14-2 if I have my laptop, for merging the two drum modules and other midi note sources and effects returns. Behringer call their Xenyx 802 an 8-input desk, but excluding stereo and aux returns it's really only a 4-input unit in practice. However that's easily enough to take a line-level click signal from Os and be a useful monitor of other stuff too.

For over a year now I have been taking my Boss RC-2 looping pedal out of its box at some gigs and processing midi notes, AM radio or my own vocals. I rarely do any singing these days, thus my vocal muscles have regressed almost to nostalgia, to something I used to have. In other words, I don't have much control over my voice, so if I want to do any live singing, I have to be able to concentrate on it, and I have to be able to hear it. My vocal looping is all textural - if I wanted rhythmic looping I would either have to sync up with Os or get him to loop me - so my approach is to fade a sung note in and out within the loop. That means I don't want the note to be heard until I've faded it in, but so far my only monitor has been my drum amp. You can see the problem... how do I make sure I'm singing a good note before I fade it up? So far, even in the relatively quiet ambience of Improvizone, it's been nearly impossible, which is why I've hardly ever tried vocal looping. When I did, with one or two exceptions, it was generally an embarrassing mess.

With a second mixer, I can now wire things up like this...

Notice my output is mono, going from my main Yamaha mixer to Os from the left channnel only. That frees up the right channel, and here I'm sending it to the looper, so I can select what to include or exclude just by panning. For my mic I use a Sure SM10 headset mic, going into the Behringer desk for me to monitor it through earphones. The Behringer aux send goes a right-only channel on the Yamaha desk, meaning it won't be heard until it has been through the looper. Additionally, my little Boss DB-12 metronome can also provide a reference note, which I can monitor while I'm singing. I've been trying this at home and it all seems fairly comfortable. I could even loop the reference note too, but it's kind of a boring squarewave.

I was thinking I could monitor the drums before playing them, to make sure I had chosen appropriate sounds. A lot of the time, after I've changed to a new patch at the beginning of a piece, you can hear me tapping discretely around the kit checking what's there. It would be much more convincing if I knew already, or at least made any adjustments to the sound before I started playing. That would only have been possible before by unplugging stuff. Now, I can send the spare aux output back to the Behringer monitor mixer. Slight problem with that is that Aux 2 on the Yamaha desk is post-fade, so I would need to pan hard right if I wanted to silence the drums but still have a loop going at the same time.

For my effects unit I'm currently using a Zoom 505 II unit that Nick gave me after he repaired it himself. Apparently it had been retrieved from a rubbish dump. I can see why it found its way there in the first place. No way would I use a crummy unit like this for any hi-fi application, nor any purpose for which I required any control whatsoever over the effects parameters. This is factory preset purgatory. However, even though this gig may be its last, it has contributed some filthy corruptions to my drum sounds over the last four gigs, especially the distortions.

As the local Roding Valley teenagers might say, what is it, like, one Godzillion years since I last posted a download from a gig? What is it, like, well long ago... And the like. Nor have I written anything about the last four. So here's a quick round-up of the last four.

Plough 31 Mar 2010
For this one we invited back Simon Taylor on trumpet. Simon is the only trumpet player we've had. Improvizone try Simon. Improvizone have no need to look anywhere else. He da man, yo. Plus we tried out bassplayer Ken Whaley this time. Nothing wrong with Nick, quite the opposite indeed, I just like to ring the changes, expand the gene pool, chop and change, pick and mix, generally make shuffly with the personnel every so often. Or at least I like the idea of being able to do that. Besides encouraging variety in our music, it means I can book gigs whenever it suits me, and bring in anyone who's available. The more people on the trusted list, the better. True, you'll notice mostly the same people have been doing the Improvizones for the last couple of years, because I like settling into a comfort zone as much as the next person that sits on a chair all day. But it can make the gigs harder to book. Anyway, Ken definitely chiselled himself and his semi-acoustic onto my not very long list of trusted bassplayers. Yes, you could tell he was having to get his head around my quirky random drumming for the first time, but his sound was great and in the second half we were cruising. Next time he plays with us it will be even better. For much of these gigs I'm trying to concentrate on my playing, knowing I have the luxury of listening properly to what everyone else was doing later. That's sounds rubbish of me, I know. Anyway, by now my left foot practice was starting to pay off. I could use it for alternate doubles, playing different sounds to the right foot, freeing up the hands for as much semi random stuff as my limited coordination allowed. Videotelephonically, for this gig I brought the same video as I'd used at the beginning of the month, in case the Plough had replaced the lamp like their projector was telling us all to do. They had not. In case you're wondering where I got that word videotelephonically, it's because I use my old Nokia N95 with its composite video output to play our visuals. See, I made it up.

CB2 07 Apr 2010
I'd been meaning to try a Cambridge gig ever since violinist Steve Bingham joined us on 06 Aug 2008. He lived near Ely at the time and I felt bad about dragging him all the way down to London to play a quiet gig for free. A gig in Cambridge would be much better, I figured. A good 18 months later I called CB2 and they seemed keen to try us. I was very slightly apprehensive about playing out of sight in the basement, but thanks to Steve twice over, I needn't have been. For one thing he brought along most of our audience. For another, he directed his wife to bring us an Improvizone! Tonight! Downstairs! Free! poster to stick on the door. People saw it and came down, and when they got there they a healthy audience watching us. While Steve filled up our audience, we total filled up the stage. Setting up was plenty kerfuffles. We all seemed to descend on the room with our carloads of gear at the same time. I put the drums in the middle at the back and, shocks and stuns, had to move forward to the front. Before the arrival of the Steve Bingham appreciation collective (some musicians he'd been working with that afternoon), we soundchecked to an empty room with something rather nice. And then we cruised along for the rest of the gig with some lovely interspersions here and there. And great to have a mixed audience... dare I even quantify them to the extent of a mainly female audience. Blimey.

Plough 21 Apr 2010
Back to the Plough with the regular quartet for a relaxing evening this time introducing Os's modular synth he had put together himself, including his own custom control interfaces. He was triggering sequences from his laptop, nicely bang-on in sync with his click in my earphones. Meanwhile I was mucking about with the timing as I notice I've been doing a few times lately, ie placing the pulse every three-quarters of the beat, and then playing a pattern in five over the top. Nick is unfazed, because he's been playing bass with me for nearly 15 years, and locks in with random cycles. Mike doesn't care either, and fits ambience or interjections over the top. Back with the same video for the third time, hoping they'd changed the bulb, hoping we could watch it properly. Nupe.

Upstairs At The Ritzy 25 May 2010
For our most recent gig, we tried a new venue. I saw them listed in the Evening Standard and got them interested in trying us out. I then repeatedly checked out the London A-Z for possible routes to Brixton. My geography of North London is pretty good. My geography of South London is feeble. Shite, actually. On arriving in Brixton I needed at least 10 minutes to negotiate the residential roads to get to the back entrance of the Ritzy. Luckily for me Os had got the first and could provide telephone guidance. We unloaded outside the fire exit. The fire escape route went on for ever. And then turned a corner and carried on a bit further. The stage was tiny, but we all fat on. Alright, we all fitted on. I think fat was funnier. Os had left his keyboard at home to save space, yet he seemed to be just as interesting for the entire evening without it, his modular synth sequences providing both rhythmic boost and tonal hypnotism. To my delight, though I guess not surprising for a cinema, the Ritzy had not one but two projectors. The entire back wall was our projection screen. However the stage lights were shining on it the whole evening, so once again I didn't get to see the video I had taken to the fourth consecutive gig. Nicely, we hit sweet spots several times during the evening, and as I handed out CDs I found many people who were enjoying us. However, I fear this is another venue who need their music to make money for them directly. Plus Brixton is a looooong way away for most of us. It was a nice try though, and they gave us free drinks and complimentary cinema tickets.

The full location address is Upstairs at the Ritzy, Ritzy Cinema, Brixton Oval, Coldharbour Lane, Brixton SW2 1JG. Very close to Brixton tube, provided the Victoria Line hasn't been closed for its series of nightly maintenance works scheduled for completion some time after the sun has exploded into a red giant.

The players will be the regular quartet of

• Michael Bearpark (guitar)
• Os (keyboard/EWI/laptop)
• Nick Cottam (bass)
• Andrew Booker (electronic drums)

On the six-strung device often bearing no audible resemblance to electrical guitaring, Michael Bearpark will assume his usual position seated behind his array of many and several pedals. From behind a carload of synthesizer devices, possibly including modular ones he has soldered together himself, Os will be sampling and resampling and generally making indescribable, except to say very nice, noises. For the fourth time, and now fully comfortable with the unit, Nick will be negotiating around his fretless bass, and not worrying in the least about intonation. Last and least, I will fit into a slot on the side somewhere and flap my sticks up and down all evening, having programmed no new drum patches, uploaded no new samples to the SPD-S, bought no new effects units, and worked for about three minutes on phase two of my drum software, still nowhere near ready for live deployment.

Why me so useless? Last month I moved house, temporarily upping sticks from our South Woodford habitat to a location on the very edge of Essex. It's like I'm inching back homeward. We're only here until October, yet boxes are still awaiting unpacking, work areas are still awaiting organising, nine-month-old Baby Boy is much more fun than any of that... plus there's the garden. If you're a similar weed-whacking, rubbish-clearing, earth-digging type to me, you can appreciate whither the odd half an hour here and there will be disappearing these days.

One other reason for my lack of off-stage graft is the realisation that I don't really have to. It would be better if I did knuckle down to some drum work eventually, of course, but even playing on all the same patches with all the same sounds, no gig has yet turned out much like any another. I say all the same sounds, the fact is I seem to have a lot more naturally at my disposal these days, and I think the reason is that I have stopped using the SPD-S to play midi notes. I am using its plentiful effects library, and the bunch of cruddy sounds I loaded onto it at the end of last year, as a proper half of the drum kit, instead of just an add-on. Also, regular practising has freed up my left foot enough so I can make a bit more rhythmic use of it. My timing seems to have gone to hell instead, but hey. A few times in the last couple of gigs I've woken up and realised the click in my ears is somewhere else entirely. But then, this is always a danger when I'm enjoying the music enough. I'm looking forward to having plenty more music to enjoy next week, even if it means concentrating a bit harder.

Meanwhile between now and next Tuesday, I'm mowing the lawn and trying to come up with new ways to make the baby laugh.