E. Doctor Smith's Blog

  It's been 40 years, but I can still vividly recall that fateful night, riding my bicycle up Broadway, past the commotion on 72nd Street on my way home to Harlem, greeted by Jacki and our visiting friend Anne Jabine, “Did you hear the news?! John Lennon was shot dead tonight!” We gathered around the radio, listening to WNEW, watching the scene on TV outside the Dakota in disbelief. I was reminded of the only time I saw Lennon in person, sitting a few rows behind me at an Elton John concert at the Capital Center in Maryland; Embarrassed by the sudden spotlight Elton shone on him, he and Yoko quickly fled as the concert continued. Such was the price of genius and fame. R.I.P. John Lennon. John Lennon had been shot four times in the back, by the deranged Mark Chapman, who had asked the former Beatle for his autograph only hours before he laid in wait and killed him. Chapman had actually met Lennon earlier as he left for a recording studio and got his copy of Lennon’s Double Fantasy a...

Well, after being on lockdown during this Covid-19 pandemic, I decided to finish up some long overdue projects. The one that has been gnawing at me the longest is putting together my "Phil Collins" Gretsch Kit. In " Building the Phil Collins Gretsch - Part One ", I described how I assembled the shells, the badges, wraps and lugs to build a replica of the iconic black drum set made famous by the legendary drummer of Genesis.  I had a few recording projects that required an acoustic kit without all those unwanted overtones one gets from a double-headed tom. The single-headed concert toms, first made famous by the late, great Hal Blaine seemed the perfect choice. The drums were outfitted with Evans Blue Hydraulic 360 heads; They looked great, sounded warm and wet enough for recording and deadened the toms enough without much tweaking. I installed Remo Muffl' Rings on the larger concert toms; 18", 16" 15" and 12", leaving the 10" and 8"...

I'd been challenged to post my 10 most influential albums exactly 1 year ago, so when I recently got challenged to come up with 20, I was pretty sure I could come up with 10 more! My previous 10 most influential albums can be found here... So without further ado, here are the next 10... Post #11 of 20... Bill Bruford's "One Of A Kind"... After the demise of "U.K.", I was crestfallen after seeing them open for Al DiMeola at Painter's Mill, MD. My disappointment was short lived however, as Bruford returned with Dave Stewart, Jeff Berlin and the "unknown" John Clarke, (replacing Allan Holdsworth), arriving at Louie's Rock City in VA for this tour, and again for the Gradually Going Tornado tour at the Bayou in DC. I can still hear the clanging of Bruford's rototoms, and all of those killer compositions have stood the test of time. Bruford considered this one of his favorite albums and I can't disagree! Post #12 of 20... Frank Z...

In two of my previous blogs, I wrote about successfully restoring a Tama "Bill Bruford Signature Series Palette" snare drum , and then building a duplicate version wrapped in chrome . Although they looked and sounded great, I thought about completing this project by adding a kit to go with it. Now I suppose I could always could buy a Tama Starclassic kit, and use the snares I built, but where is the fun in that? Bruford's Signature snare drum had all black Tama lugs, just like his Tama kit with King Crimson. That particular kit was a Canary Yellow Tama with deep power toms. Bruford would reappear with a another version of that yellow kit at the 1999 Modern Drummer Festival alongside his all acoustic Earthworks band. That kit also had black lugs, and featured an 18" kick drum, 16", 13", 12" and 10" toms. That kit appeared to be a rarity, perhaps even custom-made for Bruford. I've never seen another Tama kit that matched it. If I could gather...

Back in 2011, I embarked on building an " Indian Subsonic Bass Sound " Kit. This kit was inspired by the drum sets played by most notably, Trilok Gurtu and the likes of Pete Lockett and Selvaganesh Vinayakram. Although I was able to successfully build this kit, I hadn't been able to put it to good use in a live musical situation or recording session. Now, nearly ten years later I found myself performing the kind of world music that could lend itself to unique properties of this drum kit. A few years ago, I'd been invited to record with 7 string bassist Jason Everett for his "Moksha" project. For this recording, I used my Zendrum EXP, MIDI percussion controller. Jason had assembled an impressive array of world class musicians for this project as well; Guitarist Fareed Haque, Vishal Nagar, Suhail Yusef Khan, and the kanjira master from John McLaughlin's "Shakti", Selvaganesh Vinayakram.  E."Doc" Smith and Selvaganesh Vinayakram ...

In my last blog, I was preparing to build a replica of the Tama "Bill Bruford Signature Palette Series" snare drum from scratch, with all-chrome, authentic Tama parts. Most of the parts I was able to find quite easily, however the vintage Tama MCS50A Throw Off and MCS50B Butt proved to a real challenge to obtain. Eventually, I found them; (I even had to search as far as Athens, Greece and Lindau, Germany; Thank you Trimis and Thomann Music!). As I had mentioned before, Bruford's Tama snare was unique; A 14" x 6", 6 ply shell consisting of 2 ply Maple, 2 ply Birch and 2 ply Maple. My version would use a 6 ply Keller VSS Maple 14" x 6" shell. Not exactly the same, but as close as I could get. In fact, all of my Gretsch, Mapex and Yamaha snares were 100% Maple, each warm and wonderful sounding. As fate would have it, I happened to come across an unusual find; A 14" x 6" Bill Bruford Signature Series snare drum that was missing all of its o...