I've always thought there might be a drummer somewhere in me. I mean I have tremor. Popping some sticks into that situation just makes sense.
With Michelle, Daniel and Julian
These 3 are on the Zinc program with me. After a busy week we all needed to hit things with sticks for a bit.
My only drumming experience to date was back when I had my own company. I rented an office space in Pink Floyd's recording studio in Angel which I shared with a school of sound engineering and would sometimes go and bash the drums on my lunch hour. By the end of week one I had a fairly passable Meg White nailed. I've always fancied learning properly though and this project felt like a great taster opportunity to do so. So when I saw BeatOrbit advertised I got excited.
It's the first of it's kind, essentially a professional feeling drum version of Guitar Hero in a group setting. As we sat down at our drum kits arranged in a circle I could feel the competitiveness rising up inside me.
The screens that wrapped around the whole room took us through some basics and got us used to the visual cues we needed to look for to know when to hit the drums. It was really easy to understand and we started to get into the rhythm.
And then it started to get harder and harder and quicker and quicker. Our concentration faces got sterner and sterner. Our arms were whizzing around like Gene Krupa. On Berocca. It was SO MUCH FUN.
The guys at BeatOrbit are pretty smart. By ramping up the speed and difficulty gradually and then throwing in a few slower tracks at the end we improved and then were shown how much better we had got at it, all in the space of an hour.
Michelle trounced us all and apparently got almost the highest score she possibly could. I didn't do too badly for someone whose tremor was moving at a different rhythm to the one expected of me most of the time.
And the coolest thing (other than this photo obviously) .... it made my tremor vanish for a few hours after! Magic!
You can book a fun filled hour at BeatOrbit (they even do kids sessions) here.
Do it.