Welcome to the drum history podcast. I'm your host Bart van der Zee and today I am joined by Justin Greenewalt who is the king of electronic drums on YouTube from 65 drums Justin. Welcome. Hey, thanks for having me on Yeah, man. I mean you have just built this like unbelievable YouTube channel since 2014 ish as you were telling me I Have a feeling that if anyone out there has ever looked up You know e-drums or electronic drums on YouTube They have come across a video of yours because you have just covered so many different brands and topics and Everything to do with electronic drums. It's like brute force. Just chug away for enough years and you'll eventually touch on everything Yeah, tell me about it. That's that's very true Man, I mean you've got 80 2,000 subscribers on YouTube So I mean really you're doing a great job and and not to you know, just go on about it too much but the level of quality and Like attention to detail that you put into things is so clear that like I mean you you're good with video Editing and it looks like you do almost some like after effects stuff I mean man, you've got quite the breadth of skills there Thanks, man. I would used to be really bad at it But you you sort of just watch a ton of YouTube tutorials and you eventually sort of figure out color grading and sound design and stuff It just it just takes a long time I was surprised the channel even grew this far because I remember when people were telling me that my cap would be 20,000 subscribers because that's the top number of people that would care about this topic and Eventually you just grow a little a little bit at a time And yeah, I'm I'm excited that the channel is growing like this and I appreciate the kind words I just again brute force my way through getting better at editing and stuff You don't instantly make nice videos. You just get slowly better at it over time exactly and you know I just think everyone knows it's not to get too like Philosophical but if it's better to put out some stuff that's not so great at first and build your way up and just keep releasing videos as opposed to getting Hung up on things and not putting anything out. We're all guilty of that in some way of just like like music or whatever Like it's not perfect. I can't put it out yet. Put it out and move on to the next one Well, yeah, it's like it's like the people that spend five years eqing their snare You know, you know, I mean and people don't notice in the actual song always So I think it's worth putting it out if you can if you can force yourself Exactly just get more out. So anyway, one of your amazing amazing video Series that that led me to you is I wanted to do an episode on the history of electronic drums and I was doing some research and Pretty much instantly I came across your videos the history of electronic drums. So I went wow, okay That's probably a good good move and then I saw it was you and I was just like, okay This is just too cool. I hope I can get him on the show and you have just been great and responded, you know Very fast and and here we are so um, I Should say too. I am pretty sure multiple people have suggested this as an episode in the past I really and I think it was a while back and I don't have their names written down So if you have sent me I try to like document it because it's really easy to lose these suggestions But if you suggested this then thank you and it's happening. So All right Justin on that note, man, why don't we jump into the beginning of Electronic drums which as I learned in your video is in the 60s, correct? Yeah. Yeah, so not much happened in the 60s all that happened was we saw the first like Experimentations with electronic drums and there's no internet obviously Yeah, and everyone knows that in the back their heads But what you realize when you start looking is that not having the internet is a big deal Like people weren't blogging about everything that happened every five seconds. Oh This is especially a problem in the 90s when people stopped writing books and the internet wasn't out So there's this dead period in the 90s where all you have to rely on is like modern driver magazine ads that sort of thing Yeah, but in the 1960s electronic drums as far as we can tell we're invented by a guy named Felix Visser He modified an ace tone rhythm box And that was like a box like a drum machine back then that a row buttons on it with pre programs beat loops That's my understanding of it and you'd press a button and you and you'd hear a beat loop coming out through the speaker You could choose what kind of beat loop you wanted Well, I guess his idea and I haven't actually even really seen that many photos of this But his idea was what if I ran some wires or some sensors to it so I could actually trigger individual sounds Not just hear an entire beat loop be able to play the sounds, you know in real time Wow so that was the first stuff and that was like 64 and that's pretty much it for that decade and then and then in the 70s that's when all the really cool stuff started happening and then moving into the 80s too Can can I ask you though because I know I know you talked about it in the video Which is I'm gonna link to it again It's the history of electronic drums and it's this is 1960 to 1983 is your first video And I feel like I always screwed up because it's Italian but the Hollywood the miazzi miazzi miazzi Yeah, that's a there's some argument on whether or not that's electronic or not But there were these Hollywood chronic drums that came out sometime in the 60s as well We don't have an exact date, but they were acoustic drums They had some sort of like, you know microphones or sensors inside of them running to a drum brain Which then you could apply effects and stuff to the sound it kind of reminds me of like the Yamaha EAD Miking system that you can clip on your bass drum and you can change the sound It's kind of sort of like that. There's also some video I included in that first episode and it's really really weird They're pretty rare. They don't come across eBay that often, but when they do it's it's worth checking them out Yeah, and there's cool There is Photos and I believe video. I don't know if you actually hear the effects but Kenny Clark and then Max Roach played that brand and I believe Kenny Clark there's a video of him. I think in Italy using the you know, Hollywood the electronics System so they're super rare. I mean that's like one of those like almost like the Ludwig top hat and cane kind of like Mythical drums where if you come across some it's it's yeah rare Yeah, I was watching some Drumeo episode where they were touring some sort of you know drum factory I can't remember the brand But they were like panning through the factory and there was just a random Hollywood chronic drum sitting right there And I was like how and they didn't even really mention it. I was like, oh my gosh But yeah, it's some of these old brands. It's not like it's not even like you could search for them Obviously, no kind of had to know someone who knew someone and if you didn't live next to the store There may not even be distribution to where you live where you could actually buy one Yeah, especially if it's coming from you know from Italy, which is neat one more question about the 60s So with that first What was the name of the first that the actual the first one you were talking about the ace tone rhythm box Yes, the rhythm box. All right ace tone rhythm box.  I mean because that's kind of I know you're not playing it but that's kind of a you know Programmed drums in a way, right? No, it is and it's weird because they kind of I think they obviously as you can see here They came before electronic drums and were modified into electronic drums But there's like this parallel thing developing, you know rhythm boxes and drum machines Because let's be honest a lot of keyboard players and guitar players Secretly in the back of their minds kind of wish drummers didn't exist and that they could create the beats themselves And so with the 808 stuff and the 909 and this rhythm box by the way was actually Made by a guy named Kuturo Kakahashi if i'm saying that right and he went on to found Roland So even when you go back that far, there's everyone's tie to each other the industries back then They weren't as expansive as they are now So yeah, I unfortunately my knowledge of the history of rhythm boxes like this isn't that extensive But I believe an author named Alex Graham made a really good history of that He also made a good history book on the history of electronic drums called electronic drum facts. You can check out cool Awesome. All right. Well, that makes perfect sense because I mean really the um I know with like Simmons and stuff like that a lot of the advent of this is not A drummer saying let me create something that can play a drum beat so that i'm out of work It's usually obviously from what I've seen is it's a non-drummer making something that so that they can then You know Play to a beat that doesn't require a human being so um Yeah, it's just a it's basically a tool that you can use however you want From electronic drums are really the cousins of keyboards Keyboards have a better keyboards and synthesizers have a better reputation out in the world, you know But electronic drums are seen in a different light for some reason Even though they're essentially the same sort of concept you're hitting some sort of sensor and you're triggering a sound coming from a computer somewhere Gotcha, that's exactly right early technology kind of reminds me of and we'll move on here and I'll quit just Saying random things, but it reminds me of like how they're like, you know Oh the you know this apollo space missions They went to the moon on things that fit in like like that are like an unaccalculated nowadays the technology It's like it's interesting to think of these Pieces of machinery and computing that would be in these old drums Oh, yeah, even if you go into the 80s There was a Simmons add-on like a couple of megabytes of ram Or memory and there's just a couple of megabytes was like thousands of dollars in today's money Yeah, it's and that wouldn't even make a dent on your smartphone that would that would hardly hold the video You know what I mean? Oh boy, we take it for granted the internet and all this stuff, but um All right, so carry on there. So 60s obviously very very early on people aren't really, you know I'm sure it's being experimented with but it's not in the pop culture quite yet, right? So Right take it from there. So moving ahead into the 70s. This is when I'll break it into two sections We had the first bands using electronic drums in live or in albums and we had the first companies Now the first bands they weren't actually even buying these from companies This is like 71 through 73 maybe 75 Moody blues as far as we can tell is the first recording of electronic drums Graham edge use them in a every good every good boy deserves favor It's a really weird trippy song, but you know, it kind of works um, it's interesting to hear the very first recordings and then Around that same time 71 73 something like that emerson like in palmer They used electronic drums the the the drummer carl palmer He actually got a guy from elp to make him some electronic drum gear Really really experimental. He used it in a drum solo and unfortunately I don't think I could include the audio of that in my video because of copyright reasons.  Unfortunately. Oh, yeah, you know, especially the ones from the 80s In early on But that was that was really really early on and then a band that I didn't have any any inkling of again was craft work You can see them using electronic drums in bbc tomorrow's world So there's a video on youtube you can just type it in that's 73 and 75 They basically modified a rhythm box just like philips visser in the 60s But what they did was it was interesting They they had wires running from these drum machines going into metal drumsticks So the drumsticks had a leash and then they would play and hit these metal sheets And every time I guess a circuit was completed by them You know using a metal drumstick hitting these metal sheets that would trigger a sound from inside of the rhythm box It was really really experimental weird music, but I guess they have a big cult following Oh, yeah, a lot of people commented about them in my video. Yeah craft work is awesome And I'm I'm kind of as you're talking I'm sort of scrubbing through the the your video history of electronic drums episode one and I'm looking at that point now in the box that the drummer for craft work is playing is It's not pretty to say. Oh, no, it kind of looks duct taped together I mean obviously it's put together and it's working But and the drumsticks quote-unquote that are have the leash which is a good way to look metal, don't they they look metal But they're they're thin. Oh, yeah, it's almost like uh, it's almost like they're drumming with styluses You know like drawing. Yeah, it's really weird and then finally I got to mention a band called divo Because they're based in Ohio. I didn't know about them But I I I left them out of episode one and someone commented my video and was yelling at me like Justin, aren't you from Ohio like divos from Ohio? Why didn't you mention them? And so I looked them up and I had to add them into episode two Jim mother's bought was a drummer for a brief time in divo and His brother is explaining this and he doesn't have a firm date. He's thinking like 72 or 73 He took like these guitar pickups and glued them to the head of the drums and then ran that through some guitar pedals And made some really crazy Percussive sounds with this again. It looks like it could probably it would probably be able to be broken really quickly Yeah, but it was experimental and people liked exciting new sounds Especially when they were just used to only hearing acoustic instruments. It's kind of spice things up for a little bit Yeah, god. I mean mark mother's bow. His brother obviously is a legend. I mean divo is great. Where do you live in Ohio? Um, so I I live I live around the canton area. Okay, man I live in Cincinnati. We're nice. We're not very far. I think I mean I kind of forget I think it's a couple hours away, but really not that bad No, most people I talk to live in another country or states and states away or they live in california Everyone seems to live in california or New York for some reason No, we're we're ohio. We're ohio boys. We can afford to live here Exactly if I can move ahead to the companies. Uh, yeah this so these companies It it wasn't like you could go to sweetwater.com and just buy these so just because these companies existed These bands that I just mentioned didn't necessarily have access to them. So that's why they were making their own stuff Maybe but around 73 that was the first commercial electronic drum Uh, it was the impact percussion synthesizer. It was like this It was like a pad with knobs going all around the pad in a circle and you could Basically take this synthesizer and shape a tone that you wanted to use And it was like it was a really uh, I wouldn't say crude But it was very very simple and created very very arcade video game type sounds I'm gonna talk about that more in a second Then you had star instruments making multi pads So you had a synthesizer like you know those old synthesizers where there was a board with knobs You know just covering it right in front of you Yeah, and then instead of keys where your hands would go There were just long pads that you could trigger by hitting them with sticks So they made like a snare percussion synthesizer the snare two and then later the snare three which was their most popular Pad, which was kind of like the impact Pullered industries, but also was around that time as well Um, another company that I have to mention obviously is musiccade. They would eventually become Simmons in the 1980s Um, but this is like an early iteration of the company Simmons a lot of people don't realize this But Simmons they kept going out of business and then recreating themselves with like a Similar name and over and over and over again Uh, the 80s were a very volatile time, but a lot of people made some money in the 70s though This is again not full drum sets at all. This is important to mention These were just individual pads or multi padding. They were all very synthesizer based So musicade made the sds one three and four and these were usually like Like very small like I don't know eight or ten inch pads And they had like acoustic heads on them that maybe had some dampening and they weren't using the modern triggers either Uh, so they were very rough, but they're very much collector's items now they go for a lot on ebay Yeah, and um, and I'm not I feel like you would know way better than me But it seemed like in some of your in your video They would you would talk about uh one of those examples or a few of them would be like Like uh, I know there's one where they took the um the shell of like a premiere drum And then would just add electronics on the inside or one of them was the body of um a tambourine Yeah, because it's shorter. So that's really innovative. Well, if you think about it These aren't massive global companies. This is some guy in a tiny little in a tiny little shop Maybe has a couple of assistants helping him But it's it's they don't necessarily want to go through the trouble of trying to get the machinery to create entire drum pads They're modifying pre-existing stuff. Um, like even moog. They made an electronic drum pad Which was an acoustic drum of some kind that plugged into a synthesizer Um pearl pia and even tama has some stuff in the very late 70s as well And something really important to mention is that 70s drums 70s electronic drums and 80s electronic drums Sound miles different from each other. They are not in the same universe as far as overall sound palette Because the synthesizers in the 70s and these electronic drums were synths just for drummers They were very limited. They didn't have a very wide palette And they were kind of interesting and fun to play around with But eventually you got kind of kind of tired of the sound because you know When something's that crazy it's fun to mess around with but you can't necessarily use it musically Over and over and over again in every single album that you put out So there was an initial spike of interest in like the plurid industries and star instrument stuff And then like interest kind of uh, you know tapered off at the end of the 70s So Just to expand on that a little bit So for example, it wouldn't be you know, your pads in front of you are a snare with reverb A kick a bass, you know a big giant bass drop. It would be more like Like like sine waves that are that are modulated like it would be more like tones Yes, it's definitely a tone and the 80s level stuff was tones too But uh, it's really important to mention that the more things you combine to these simple tones The more drum like or the more, you know 80s iconic sound that you're gonna get Yeah, so adjusting the gate the the decay of the sound adding noise to the snare to give it like a bite Click um the bend of the sound, you know, the 80s do sound like shakes your soul If you're listening through big speakers that wasn't really a sound that everyone was achieving yet in the 70s And so the 80s were just more complex in their synthesizer design Yeah, that's neat to think of that like taking like uh, like I'm sure it could start with like white noise that you gate and then like you said have like a shorter decay and then it's like It sort of sounds like a snare, you know what I mean? It's like when it does and they weren't even necessarily trying to emulate acoustic drums right now Yeah, they're trying to create a percussive sound kind of like an 808 kick isn't supposed to sound like a kick It's supposed to be percussive like a kick. It's doing the same job But it's a separate thing. Yeah the best the best way to describe these sounds I wish I could you know show you some of the sounds here, but they're basically atari sounds If you've ever played asteroids, yeah, or any of those games, you know the pew pew type of sounds Yeah, it's that very very rough arcadey type sound you would hear that's basically what it was and there weren't many companies either I listed off like most of them and there was probably a few I didn't mention But like, you know a dozen companies maybe in the 70s There were some bands that were using it, but it wouldn't really gain in popularity really big popularity until the 1980s Yeah, when Let's be honest. I mean like you said it gained popularity. It became like the sound of the 80s almost Oh, it was a fad 100% Yeah Because it was new and let's be honest today Well, here are new sounds, but it's not like new compared to going from 60s music to 80s music That's a humongous change. It's jarring almost Yeah, it is Very very very very different. So um as technology has gotten better things than are It's sort of working its way more and more Into the popular music Famous songs bring this into the pop culture. So that's like the cars and stuff in the 70s Tons and tons of um electronic drums. It probably played itself out. You know what I mean? Yeah, yeah, like I said, there was an initial spike Kind of like if you go to guitar center and you play an electronic drum set that was made today What I see a lot because I watch people that play these drums and what they're interested in I see them switch to the back of the module, you know kit number 50 Where it has all the weird sounds, you know trash can lids and you know, electronicy sounds And they're so interested in it because they've never been able to get that sound out of an acoustic drum set And it's fun But what you notice when you actually buy the electronic drum set and take it home Is that you're only going to be able to you know mess around with that for another week You eventually end up going to more emulation type sounds. Yeah But it's but it's again It's it sticks in your mind and it's an iconic type of sound that is used even today Like the weekend still uses electronicy Sounds even in top charting hits now Yeah, exactly Now where do um, so obviously Don't let me get ahead of us here. Are we we're not at the point where there is a or maybe we are Or maybe that's where we are right now a point where like octopads where there is literally a bass drum where it resembles the Shape the build of a drum set. Have we arrived there yet? No, that was that was a product of the 80s in the 70s. It was more like Adding these pads to your your acoustic drums And that's uh, that's a a little riff that you'll see throughout history People going with a full acoustic drum set and then switching back to just using a pad here and there in their acoustic set And then triggers, you know, it just depends on the individual drummer But that wasn't even really a thing yet that wouldn't happen till the 80s. Okay Cool, which is common now, you know a little pad over here to throw some hand claps or something Oh, yeah, if you watch a super bowl show, I actually did a whole video on electronic drums that I've seen in the super bowl Um, I I go through how just they're so so common now Because you need to achieve certain sounds for certain kinds of artists And people are used to hearing the album sound in a live show And if they don't hear the album sound, they're a little weirded out And so you need to have that rolling pad to the side or that yamaha pad to the side Yeah So it's interesting. It lets you create the things that you've done in the studio that don't have any You know semblance of like reality like you it's kind of a put it on We'll figure it out later and then you load it up as a trigger and um And boom. So yeah, all right cool. We'll carry on from there So jumping ahead into into the 80s What I'm seeing is that you know, these 70s era electronic drums had some cool things about them But they had a couple of key problems to overcome So the first would be like the overall sound design. They were limited They need to get to a place where people will like point to that sound and say I need that sound You know what I mean? Otherwise drummers aren't going to pick it up Um, and the next thing is branding. I know branding sounds stupid But it's what builds a company like apple or a company like Simmons You need to have something recognizable where people even someone on the street that doesn't even play drums They'll say that's an electronic drum set And uh, if it's cool and it's recognizable, that's like a win-win for the company And then finally accuracy A lot of these early electronic drums you saw the video Some of them looked like they were going to fall apart and then other ones. Yeah, they just weren't very sophisticated yet They they weren't necessarily accurate having isolation so that when things are moving around inside of the drum You get a good signal those those problems needed to be overcome in the 80s And because you're hitting it. Yeah, you're literally hitting it Yeah, people complain when an electronic drum breaks and I'm like you've been hitting it with a stick for five years Like it was going to happen Yeah, that's so true Cool. So the the guy that would fix all these problems would be a guy named Dave Simmons Now he was the guy running music aid in the in the 70s But it was when it was in the 80s when he became like a literal rock star in the industry And there wasn't even really an industry in the 70s like there was but there wasn't because it wasn't that many companies there So in the 80s a guy named Dave Simmons. He comes out with a drum set called the sds 5 um, and then later the sds 7 and the 9 and the sdx These drums were revolutionary because they were more accurate. They're using piezos now, which is a kind of drum sensor They had better isolations so the pads were built better They had that hexagon look so now they had an iconic design And after every other company saw this was working literally everyone ripped Simmons off they literally made clone pads of the Simmons drum sets and he was like threatening people with lawsuits um And then finally the sound design Now Dave Simmons apparently he worked on the sds 5 for like two years working on Getting getting the sound right with the help of another drummer, you know experimenting with the synthesizer settings And eventually they achieved the 80s electronic drum sound that you hear in pop albums And that was that was really big because sound is everything Yeah, I mean that's the most important thing and let me ask so the the hexagon shape Is that is there any purpose to it except that it looks cool? Well, um, every time I've seen Dave Simmons asked about this in an interview of some kind He always says I've been asked about this six times and the answer is all we had was a straight saw But really Yeah, that that was his joke when people asked about it because he got it over and over again But really he said that it was it was pure branding It wanted something recognizable and that that wasn't the the initial shape They had all kinds of weird shapes that he took to like I think it was the NAM events in like 1980 or something He had like heart shaped pads. He had human head pads. He had all kinds of stuff And uh, he did a lot of experimentation But it was that that hexagonal pad that just made sense It was also easier to mass produce They would eventually make them out of plastic that was clear So they could paint the underside of it and make gradients and whatever kind of color that you wanted cool Yeah, because I mean let's be honest here. I mean part of it is This visual like bill bruford playing these drums and music videos and stuff like it it looks cool Like oh, yeah a big part of it. He literally just sold all this stuff on ebay or something Wow, like it went for a ton of money He was unloading all kinds of very very recognizable drums that you saw in music videos, you know the yellow and all that Yeah, so yeah, he was he was a big a big artist that was really pushing it forward with, you know, earthworks and yes Yeah, but other other other drummers were using electronic drums like, you know, steward copeland um, you know rush a genesis duran duran Um, we had all these all these famous bands using electronic drums in some way shape or form Um in in the cool thing about it or the interesting thing about it was that at one point Bands were buying these not for the sound sometimes sometimes they're buying it just to show people that went to their concert We are playing this kind of music. We are using an electronic drum set. It was like a branding thing to some bands And other bands would use acoustic drums live But then in the studio they would overdub it with a rented Simmons drum set that they got some from somewhere else Because they needed that sound for the vinyl, you know what I mean? Wow. Yeah It's interesting too because like electronic drums, which I'm sure is true then and now obviously if you use a trigger or whatever anything in the studio It is easier to record it cuts right away. It's like eq'd correctly right off the bat for the most part So, you know for studio purposes, I'm sure it's easy. I don't know if midi was really Working and I'm sure we'll talk about that. Oh, yeah midi midi was a big thing That was about to happen in the 80s too and there were other companies I can't just mention Simmons even though they were like the goliath every time you'd read in a music magazine a review of The the clone kit or the pearl kit or the mpc kit or the clavia kit You would always see at the very end of the article. Yeah, I guess it's it's pretty nice I mean, it's like a cheaper version of a Simmons. It's a nice value for your money And you know every time someone does that it's because they're mentioning the other company as the standard Yeah, like even today when I'm when I'm reviewing a drum set. I would mention how it's like a cheaper version of a rolling drum set It's kind of that sort of thing. Yeah Simmons just had a monopoly at the time as far as as far as being recognizable Because when you when you turn on tv and you literally see a sim's drum set on tv You know, that's that really goes a long way for sales But dyna cord was also a really big company. They just make speakers now, but they made some stuff They were actually Messing around with samples and one of the one of the early companies to do that The problem with samples though in the 80s was that they were really short Memory was at a premium. So a symbol wouldn't really ring out all the way And it was a one-shot sample. So when you hit the drum, no matter how hard you hit You'd hear the same recording just volume adjusted up or down depending on how hard you were hitting But it was a really good initial step And also Simmons was also messing with samples combining that So you were getting like a dual kind of module that was synthesizer based and also sample based at the same time And uh, yeah, interesting This is a probably good time to mention like a couple of the key things that sort of tie together 80s era electronic drums The first thing to mention is that early 80s electronic drums and late 80s electronic drums were kind of different from each other Like this decade like companies were scrambling to outdo each other so Like the innovation pace was really really quick and that's one thing people liked because every every year they were scared It was like buying a new iphone like thinking to yourself. Oh, what about what about next year? They're going to have something that's 10 times better and i'm going to wish I didn't buy my my iphone Yeah And that was literally a thing in the electronic drum world for a while because The speed of innovation was really quick Another really big thing was that actual drum sets emerged like you were mentioning in the 70s People eventually thought of that and had the kick drum the floor toms and the snare And then they used the acoustic cymbals with these a lot of times believe it or not Well, that was actually a really popular thing because cymbals are really hard to emulate, you know, they just uh They have a flex to them. You know what I mean? They just you feel different when you're hitting an acoustic cymbal And companies have spent untold amounts of money trying to get to that point But even today we're still not quite at that point in my opinion So they were using acoustic cymbals a lot Yeah, it again bill broufford who I think of and i'm looking at um Uh an album cover or I guess an ad or I think it's an album cover on on your um Uh video and it's like yeah, he's got uh, he's got octabons. He's got roto toms. He's got an acoustic snare he's got Looks like an acoustic bass drum and a uh Simmons You know octo kind of pad and then he's got like a gong bass drum and Crash and no real I don't know at one point I was trying to calculate the the cost of just the electronic components of some of his sets And at the at the end of the 80s, he was playing with the set if you adjusted to today's dollars It would be like 30 grand just in electronics And then acoustic drums on top of that and you know Um companies are mailing that to him for free. So yeah, yeah, he had he had literally everything at his fingertips God and you have to have a good pa system because if you're at home And you're playing with like, you know, you know a rolling bass drum and you know a real snare you need to have You need to be able to level things out and get the electronics up to the volume to have this symbol makes sense So then you got yeah, you know and you also have to worry about I don't know how how you would really do this like with like gating or something You have to worry about hearing drum pad noise through the simple mics that type of thing Like using electronic and acoustic drums together does get slightly complicated Especially when these early pads, I should probably mention this they were like, uh Hitting a four mica countertop. They were incredibly hard I've got a set of these set up in my basement right now because I'm about to record Using some drum plugins that emulate these early 80s drum brains Uh, but they were incredibly hard and people were getting Real almost injured if they played these hard and long enough Uh, the playing surface in the 80s was really the one thing that was going against them, especially And that would be fixed in the 90s But the playing surface was really really hard and also fairly loud at the same time Hmm man, that's just uh There's so many things where even today you play some like a cheaper kit and you just play it and you're like, uh, I don't like like Uh, I always say that if whatever someone has that makes them play the drum So if you're out there and you have non mesh heads, then I'm not talking about you I'm just talking in general But like if you play a kit that doesn't really have mesh heads. It's just got the pads It doesn't to me. It doesn't quite feel right. Obviously, it's less expensive so more people can get them but there's still um Just it it's you got to pay a lot to get A electronic kit that feels right, which I think is still I'm sure it was true then. It's definitely true now Yeah, it prices are going down now. It's finally becoming a thing Yeah, it was being held back because of patent reasons well, which we'll get into later on But uh, it was definitely the playing surface was horrible. I was uh, I was talking to the drum tech for uh Who was it? It was the drum tech for rick alan and he was talking about how much How much those pads hurt and he was the guy that was setting them up And and again, they chose that surface on purpose because of articulation If you've ever tried to like do rudiments on a kitchen countertop or a piece of wood Like the rebound and the articulation was great. You know, I mean, but it's just long term that That force is going right up to your elbow. You know what I mean? It hurts over time And also midi, uh, you were mentioning midi which is a good thing because that was invented in the very early 80s It came in a bunch of different steps It like midi itself wasn't all of a sudden invented one in one day But it became more and more popular and drummers are buying it and choosing certain drum sets over others that didn't have midi And that allowed people to do like bill broufford He was the king of midi like some of the routing he was doing and being able to play chords Like musical chords on his electronic drums because he was tying together multiple modules and a keyboard all together Like the the stuff that you can do with midi is really really impressive even back in the in the 1980s when it was still brand new Yeah, and so people, you know, if if you're you know, if you don't know that's midi is musical instrument digital interface um And like you said the stuff you can do with it is insane I've talked to some older, you know, audio engineers Well, they would just use midi to connect things and do things that I would never think of. Oh, yeah Simmons even had something I think it was called the mtm Where it was literally just like an elaborate routing device Where it was just a box where you could combine different things and send messages this way and that the best way I know midi sounds really complicated The best way I've figured out how to explain it is that midi is a description of how you're hitting a drum How hard and what part of the drum? It's just it's just saying Justin hit the snare rim at 52 out of 127 level of of No velocity velocity is explaining how you're playing So that when that midi signal goes to your computer today I can change the sound and it will play the exact volume and the exact kind of sound that I need And I can change it. I can even drag it so I can tell the computer now Hey, he actually hit it at 127 out of 127 level velocity You can do all that crazy stuff because midi is that powerful Yeah, and you know drum related everyone's you know programmed and use a little pencil and drawn midi stuff One midi experience I had which was totally unrelated as to drums, but I had to do music They didn't have money, but I was doing I recorded I've recorded a fair amount of Audio tours for museums like a voiceover and they needed music and one thing they wanted was like classical piano music Which is great because a lot of it's not you know, it's past. It's it's like common Creative commons. It's like past. It's you know, it's it's 300 years old or whatever But what I would do is download midi files that were like, you know free piano midi.com or something Loaded in choose a natural sounding You know 88 key piano grand piano Make you know put a little reverb and then boom midi midi made this possible So I didn't have to hire a pianist It's obviously very low in the background of a you know a museum walking tour, but um Hey, it's uh, thank you midi. There's something to be said for something that doesn't have music rights anymore Yeah, I mean you can't get sued. You can't get a copyright strike.  So it's just so powerful You were mentioning a reverb. This is another interesting thing You know just because you had a drum module doesn't mean you had access to reverb A lot of times you'd have to go buy a reverb unit a giant slab of metal That'll just just created reverb So you'd run your drum module through that and today I take that for granted just a click And with my mouse I can add that inside of my DAW or inside of my drum brain But back then the 80s, you know sound had a lot of reverb a lot of a lot of stuff It wasn't just the drum brain sometimes that would create that thunderous sound Yeah, we take everything for granted now I mean, I shouldn't say we meaning everyone who's listening that's out there But I certainly do where I'm like, I was born in the 90s. I have to take it for granted Yeah We're spoiled little brats, you know, no, I'm kidding We kind of are we just don't know it. Yeah, no All right, so 80s are big one thing and I may be getting ahead here again in the 90s Or I just I remember seeing a in your video like an ad And it was for D drum, which one of the brands obviously I didn't really know Maybe I'm just an idiot, but I didn't know D drum was that old Yeah, um, I even forget for for the history show I made it I made it really detailed in four hours long. So for this this uh, this podcast I went back and was like watching the video taking notes and trying to condense the more important stuff And I was like, wow, I forgot even though I made the video I forgot that D drum was actually a contender in the 1980s They wouldn't really rise to be like one of the big names until the 90s But they were definitely a thing and they were owned by clavia And then later clavia sold them off to armadillo enterprises But I think in the early 2000s Interesting. Wow There's like you said in your video, there's an unbelievable amount of detail of like every basically You know electronic drum Kit and everything that existed, but we're kind of going high level here, but there's a lot of brands I mean, there's a lot of It's like technology. Yeah, it's almost like the dinosaurs It like, you know or any kind of species like evolution like one or two survive and everyone else dies off It's really sad, but it's just it's what happens over and over again There's a bunch of companies that pop up in the 70s Most of them die off a bunch of companies pop up in the 80s a bunch of them die and it goes every decade There's a whole new crop of companies and the interesting thing is that in the 80s There were a lot of companies trying to piggyback off of simon's success So they were literally creating stuff that was kind of kind of like a clone of simons drums And especially we saw this like in south america. There were some companies down there No one could afford a simons drum set. They're in south america. You got to ship it all the way over there So they just made their own stuff I actually got to talk to one of the guys that had a simons clone company back then And then in the soviet union in the 1980s and in the 1990s they would literally borrow The synthesizers from bands that were traveling through, you know from whatever from the uk uk people would tour the soviet union playing concerts And scientists are you know people would take apart the synthesizers see how they worked Give them back to the band and then just create a ripoff And it was state controlled So the government was making electronic drums back then and I got lucky enough to purchase a couple of them recently How are they cool? I mean it sounds like anything soviet and like You know that whole era is just cool One thing I can tell you is that there's an unnecessary amount of metal, you know what I mean? It's just like You know, it's like I feel like I could accidentally kill somebody if I threw this at somebody. You know what I mean Man, yeah, it's it's just cool how there's certain countries doing stuff that we don't even really realize because we're We're stuck in just the europe and the united states So those are the only parts of the world that exist But there were some other electronic drum innovation stuff going on outside of that as well cool. All right, so um Is that basically, you know the 80s? Do we move forward from there? Yeah, just a couple of bands to mention that were you know popular in the 80s using electronics Got to mention neil pert of rush. Um, you know Phil Collins the genesis Um durand ran the police bill bruford, obviously Um Yeah, those were some of the people that were really like using electronic drums and bringing it to the forefront The one thing I have to mention about the 80s that ties into the 90s Is that for some reason or other maybe it's around 87 or maybe 88 For some reason the electronic drum industry started to fall apart Or sales started to go down something was happening. I'm not exactly sure because people don't really write about it that much But a lot of companies all of a sudden stopped making electronic drums Companies were exiting the industry all over the place. For example, like dynacord. They make speaker systems for stadiums now They don't make electronic drums anymore Um, so for some reason sales went down and it was a bad time to be an electronic drum company Um, and especially hit simmons by surprise He was uh making these electronic drums and they were getting more and more expensive as the 80s went on Because he was hitting success after success He was in the lab creating more and more elaborate electronic drums And he eventually created a drum called the sdx And he made it just as the industry was going into a decline And this sdx if you convert it to today's dollars Uh because it was so powerful and because electronic drum or electronics like computer stuff was so expensive back then It would have cost you or me $22,000 today Something like that And yeah, so bill brouffer was the only guy that could afford it essentially Yeah, so that's happening and it kind of hurt the company I think the I think they only sold like a hundred or two of them and the company lost about a million pounds Um in currency. So that brings us to the 90s. So the the industries and a slump basically as the 90s begin And then grunge hits Right think of like music changed and obviously you had the hair metal bands, which weren't as electronic electronic I guess obviously you had deaf leopard, which is its own whole entire topic with their other thing But yeah music just changing then you had nirvana and all that stuff, which really wasn't electronic drums, right So basically what happened was the electronic drum fad was over and then you had that the companies actually cared about making electronic drums That actually stuck around if that makes any sense. Yeah going into the 90s the big three companies Were already around in the 80s, but they were kind of like background players They kind of existed but Simmons was like this Goliath that was just stomping the competition But then Simmons goes into a down a decline in the 90s And at the same time Roland Yamaha and D drum are are going up and as far as sales and as far as popularity goes So Roland was making electronic drums like the alpha system and stuff like that. They had a midi system But in the in the 90s, we saw the td7 and the td5 at the beginning And this is the beginning at least in my mind of the classic rubber pad electronic drum set that a lot of people make fun of Today, but back then in the 90s It was actually like a brand new thing a small compact electronic drum set that you wouldn't go broke buying Basically, it was like a mid-range type of deal and that was that was actually a brand new thing You know it and I think that's a perfect point to like in your video You mentioned at one point you said someone created one of these pads because he wanted his son to be able to practice Yeah at a quieter level I think so far we've you've done an amazing job But we've we've really been talking about like bill like again the king of all this I think bill bruford people were using these to practice at home because they lived in an apartment or something Obviously not a $22,000 module But and that's really the the the heart of a lot of this is to play quietly Yeah, that I feel like that transition happened somewhere in the 90s because electronic drum companies suddenly realized Oh, we need to we need to have something. We need to have a selling point. We needed we need to create our own thing We're not a fad anymore No, people don't necessarily need the thunderous 80s drum sound anymore So we need to we need to find a new niche if that makes any sense Yeah, and so these companies especially the ones in japan, you know, like, you know, like roland They're they're Specializing in these smaller electronic drums and and they've only been kicked, you know Dragged kicking and streaming into larger electronic drums as the decades go on But uh, yeah, that was the beginning of the smaller practice-based stuff And another thing to mention is that some of these 80s era electronic drums They didn't necessarily have like realistic hi-hat open and closed They didn't have three zone ride symbols and stuff like that that you take for granted now So that was something that they were working on in the 80s Because they were trying to make something that was more emulating acoustic drums But they were still in the uncanny valley though. It's kind of like early CGI, you know, where it's yeah Like yeah, I know what you're going for but it's still I get this weird feeling And that's kind of what I think of when I hear a td5 or a td7 or a td10 I know that these are emulations of acoustic drums, but they're not quite there yet D drum meanwhile was going with samples roland was basically using Some technology they were taking from their guitar pedals and they brought it over to the drum stuff to sort of emulate You know shell depth and drum head changes with the td10 D drum was hardcore We're taking samples of acoustic drums and we're putting them in this drum module And if you want more you can buy 10 floppy disks and we'll give you more So that's and they were like they were like holding on to the high end of industry in the 1990s as far as I can tell Yeah, it's still today. I mean v drums are like I mean as you know, obviously, but they're like the I mean, I'm sure there's other brands that have extremely high end ones but I I feel like they're the most like Professional like I remember at drum days, which was in columbus as an ohio guy. I don't know if you ever went to it Omar hakeem did a v drum presentation And I remember he had he did like the james bond theme and had everything triggered and was like playing the Oh, yeah, yeah parts and yeah, I remember there's an old youtube video if you want to look that up at some point Cool. Yeah So some of the big drum sets from the other companies would be like the d drum 3 and the d drum at And then yamaha sort of came out with some stuff to compete with roll-in style You know smaller rubber pad based stuff with their dtx line of drums And then meanwhile simmons unfortunately is sort of dying off Dave sims is making electronic drums and a retrofitted barn in his backyard and the companies Unfortunately going into a decline He would eventually resurface in the 2000s with a deal with guitar center There was a whole drama behind that But he kind of like exits the industry and it's rolling d drum and yamaha and what I really need to mention is that um at the end of the 90s the invention of the mesh head comes out and that's a collaboration between d drum and rimo And this is really really important. It happens around 1997 They get a 20 year patent so that gives them a 20 year runway until 2017 Or they own mesh head drum sets Um no one else can really make a two ply mesh drum set except for rolling And that gave them a huge leap forward over other companies Now I personally think that a mesh head is kind of inevitable Someone who's eventually going to invent it. It reminds me a lot of like a zilgin l80 You know zilgin made the the l80s and the gen 16 and everyone all of a sudden copied it But if you really think to yourself, you know, someone eventually was going to drill a lot of holes into a symbol to make it quieter It was just going to happen someday. Yeah And I think of that same thing as with the rolling mesh head They got inspired I think because someone went to a store and saw a trampoline And I like well, wait a second if you hit a trampoline with a drumstick It'll rebound like an acoustic drum You can make it as thin or as thick of a material that you want And you can really do whatever you want with it and really tailor it and tune it So that's where they got the idea as far as I can tell Hmm That's so there's a lot of things that I've come across in these episodes that are like Yeah, this got like the history of the high hat or something like yeah, he might have done it or he might have done it But simultaneously it was happening in england and in turkey and in like it was just inevitable that Someone was going to do it and and and I agree but so so does that mean that The only mesh heads you would have seen up until 2017 would have been on roland I mean, I feel like that's So it's it's complicated So you need to get a patent in every single country that you want the patent in Unfortunately or fortunately depending on how you want to look at it. You can't get a european patent You need to get a patent for mesh heads in in the uk and in germany and france. This is my understanding of it I'm not a lawyer But roland essentially you couldn't make a two-ply mesh head in the united states or japan And if you're a big company like yamaha, you don't want to make five versions of your drum Just to comply with patents in this country in that country you need to make one drum set You know simplify everything and to do that you have to go with the lowest common denominator So they stuck with rubber pads because that's what yamaha had to work with Until they developed their own proprietary silicone pad design Some companies in the united states if we jump ahead into the 2000s would be pin tech and heart dynamics They would either pay roland a licensing fee. So now roland's legal apartment was now a a Monetary revenue source for the company companies were paying them for the right To make mesh head drum sets Or they were skirting an issue by only using one ply mesh heads and not installing them on the drums There's there's a whole legal You know thing going on and then meanwhile if you're over in europe The patent really doesn't apply to you as far as I can tell and so they were just making mesh drum sets Yeah, so I had european viewers are like hey jesson What about this all-mesh drum set from a company called millennium? They've been making it since like 2010 or something and i'm like well I don't live over there. So I can't tell you and also they have different laws. So It's it's very very complicated. But another thing that gave roland a big advantage was they just had a A really good marketing team, believe it or not They were making these vhs tapes showing off their drums and they were incredible. They got me hooked on electronic drums I saw vhs vhs tape in 2004 And it got me hooked on roland drums and later other electronic drums as well Hmm. Yeah, I've watched some of them on your channel. They're they're pretty You know 2004 2002 2004 2005 it doesn't seem that long ago, but you watch your videos and you go man, that looks old Yeah, yeah, you can tell it was like shot either on tape or on film Yeah, and and people like me will find a tape and then digitize it and put it on youtube But yeah, but yeah, not only did they have a good marketing team They spent a lot of money getting big drummers to play their stuff and also getting Just just good vhs tapes and good advertisement photos But they also had a lot of talented people the people that worked at roland in the early 2000s Would inevitably go on to work for atv for elisis For yamaha, like they had all these talented people And there's really not that many people that are really talented in this industry not trying to Make fun of anybody, but it's a small industry There's only so many people that work in it and roland had so many talented people a really good team of people And they would have inevitably move on to other companies and take over departments or whatever and other places Yeah, and you know, I'm interested too now because you mentioned elisis So I was telling you before we started recording, but I'll repeat it that I picked up a um, let me look at a dm10 mark 2 and elisis uh electronic kit um, I traded a focus right claret 8 Pre um interface for which I think is a pretty even trade. I think I think I might have actually done a little better. Um Because i'm pretty sure that I don't think they make this exact elisis anymore You you're the guy to ask, but I think it was like, you know, thousand dollars or so I think that I think that drum set is still being made if it's the if it is the mark 2 Yeah, and it's it's still being made.  I got an angry deal But he was super nice, but then I gave him the interface He couldn't get the thunderbolt to work on his computer So he had to buy a mac and I was trying to help him find converters So it was turning into one of those kind of trades where you're like Okay, he just wants to get rid of a problem. Yeah, can we stop communicating now? Like The deal is over, but anyway, I bought it. I traded for it. I love it I've been recovering from a torn Achilles tendon and it's just I kind of got it because I was like Maybe this is a good way to like I can I can play it a little bit I can play it at night again having a baby and and just start to get back into it But I love the thing. This is the first electronic kit I have personally owned myself and I am just loving it. Um, I've not messed with it too much beyond You know, the internal sounds and just playing to like cool jazz too and you play along and it's like, oh, yeah It's it's the flexibility Yeah, because you can you can create a jazzy type kit and then the next second You can create like an arena type kit with the right plugins on your computer or whatever Yeah, absolutely. I gotta hook it up to the computer. Um But anyway, for the sake of time now, where do we go from there? How do we get up to modern day and what's going on now and maybe what's going on in the future? okay, so The 90s the industry pretty much recovered by the end of the 90s as far as I can tell I'm going into the 2000s And when I look at the 2000s sometimes like the 2000s and the 2010s kind of blend together in my head Because that's when I started paying attention to the electronic drum industry But the way I break it down is that in the 2000s you had Roland Elisa Singh Yamaha. They were the big names They still are today And what they were doing was that they were taking all these little innovations that other companies had already thought up in the 90s and the 80s Like literally nothing is new under the sun like everyone's already thought of everything But the problem was no single company had all those innovations in one flagship drum set yet You know, I mean like the circular cymbals some company over here thought of it But this company over here had the mesh heads and this company over here had the high quality samples You know that type of deal So in the 2000s Roland and Yamaha like two box or whatever these these types of companies They were creating drums that were really tying together all these loose ends and making something that you could use professionally You could use it quietly quietly and they were truly starting to get better It seems like a lot of those problems are gone of like the 80s like that Like the symbol that has absolutely no Yeah, this is one recording of one hit being played at different volumes over and over again There was no multi, you know, there was no round robin multi level samples type thing going on Oh and another thing was that Chinese companies really jumped in to the electronic drum market in the 2000s And I know a lot of people make fun of these these cheaper electronic drums But the fact of the matter is if you are if if you're a teenager and you want to play A drum set and if your parents don't let you play an acoustic set because it's too loud for your apartment And all you have is 500 bucks until the 2000s. It was almost impossible to get a cheap electronic drum set They weren't so freaking expensive Even the mid-range ones were really really expensive And people think electronic drums are cheap now But I mean you can actually buy a full mesh drum set for 300 now That was not a thing until you know the 2000s and the 2010s And usb midi was being built in so now you didn't even need an interface If you wanted to plug it straight into your computer Yeah, another thing we take for granted. I mean really is just The elesis like surge or whatever and but on the other end of that there are also You know, you look on and I'm sure you have demos of all of them.  It almost looks looks like I feel like that's where it is now Yes, um, that began in the 2000s having full-sized electronic drums It began actually in the 90s, but they weren't really popular. There was one company. They're like the space muffins drum sets Um, but in the 2000s, that's when you started to see companies like drum tech in germany Joe becky and field and these companies starting making larger electronic drums that were acoustic shells with electronics in them You saw companies selling triggers. So if you didn't want to spend $5,000 buying one, you could just do it yourself diy So there were companies selling the mesh heads and the sensors and you could do it yourself And then if you move ahead into the 2010s, um, this is when prices for decent electronic drums started going down Like it was the process began in the 2010s or the 2000s maybe But by the end of the 2010s you could get a decently large electronic drum set Uh, there were good drum plugins going on Um, and you could really cobble something together for less money than it used to be I know people that grew up in this age of electronic drums don't see it that way But electronic drums were really getting cheaper and better at the same time It wasn't revolutionary change like at certain points in the 80s where things were just moving really really quick But it's been a slow progression where things keep getting cheaper keep getting better And uh, yeah, we're getting to where we are today Yeah, which I mean things are It's it happens in a lot of these, uh, you know history episodes where you sort of hit Today and it's like well, what could change? You know, it's it's really Very, you know, it seems like it's at a at an apex of like, okay. It's pretty cheap There's really nice ones like where where are we going from here? That's a really good question and I've learned that it's almost impossible to predict the future Yeah, we're in the same situation that cell phones are in right now Actually, I really see a parallel there. You remember um cell phones in 2007 it seemed like every single year something was Incredibly incredibly awesome happening some some really big change happening in cell phones But now it's like the iphone 12 and the iphone 13 whatever they're almost the same is slightly better Electronic drums are starting to get towards that But I'm going I'm going to guess that we're going to see larger electronic drums that look more acoustic like For the feel being similar to Acoustic drums you want to be able to jump back and forth between acoustic and electronic And not feel like you're stepping into an alien planet And it really helps you because if you're practicing 24-7 on an electronic Then you play a real gig on an acoustic You don't want to be caught off guard and that's what used to happen all the time My first drum teacher literally didn't feel comfortable playing an acoustic drum set because he only played electronic And I feel like that wouldn't really happen in the same way today because electronic drums Are just so more advanced than they used to be in the 1990s. So that's a nice progression um, I feel like We're seeing more drum modules that have drum plugins built into them So you'll literally get a drum module that has a basically a tablet in front of it And then it has a plugin like steven slay drums or tune track And you'll see inputs on the back of it that's that'll happen more and more and instead of being $2,000 Eventually, I think they'll get a lot cheaper So that's what I think is going to happen It's going to be a slow progression of cheaper drums that are just better And the the cheesy electronic sounds that will fade more and more into memory Yeah, and I mean obviously the the quest for perfect Accuracy like I even find and albeit I bought it from this guy that he had in a pile in his basement on the solisis kit but You know, I hit the hi-hat sometimes and I realize it's like it's like a millisecond off from when I hit it And then the next time it's on and like there's just I feel like that that Perfect accuracy and just like, you know, your hands you still you still have to pay for that. Unfortunately Exactly like a high-end brand like roland. Yeah Man, this is just I just can't This is so cool. I appreciate how prepared you are and obviously you having done that video That I will share in the show notes Kind of set this up for you to to have you know, you're outlining everything but Man, this is just such an awesome episode. I'm Beyond honored to have you here and real quick. I do want to mention I did find in my notes that I believe a gentleman named terry k Did recommend an electronic drums episode And also a history of home recording which that'll be a fun one to do Later thanks terry. Yeah, thank you terry so Yeah, and if you like this justin's gonna he's gonna take a couple extra minutes after we record this We're gonna do a quick patreon bonus episode where I'm thinking it'd be cool if I asked you about Maybe some recommendations on what you would tell people to buy at a couple different price ranges If someone's looking to get into it and you can say Don't buy this don't waste your money on that buy this pay the extra couple hundred bucks so maybe we can talk about that in the um Patreon bonus episode, um, which if you want to hear that and a bunch of other ones that I've been doing every week You can go to drum history podcast calm and uh, there's a patreon button. So, um Yeah, justin man. I appreciate you taking the time to be here and uh and do this episode and share your immense knowledge um Again, it's 65 drums on uh, youtube justin is a youtube star I wouldn't go that far, but thank you so much for having me on I appreciate it If you like this podcast find me on social media at drum history and please share rate and leave a review And let me know topics that you would like to learn about in the future Until next time keep on learning


Video equipment rental costs paid for by peep code screencasts. So what's Ruby doing in a Java IDE like NetBeans? Lots. Claim of an IDE is Integrated Development Environment. This is, you know, everything that a developer needs to do that can be done within the environment. That's the claim, or at least the goal. Short story is NetBeans does a quite good job at it. And I keep, part of it is I didn't go outside of it and then I discovered, oh, that is available in there. I just didn't know about it. In fact, I discovered a few things about it just working here. Back in February, I was looking for a faster way to develop and my minimum requirements for an IDE is that I can create files, all of the text files, I don't need graphics editor because I'm not an artist. I can update them, edit them, syntax, coloring, or highlighting. I find it really nice. I might be willing to give it up if there were a lot of reasons, but I really like it. When I first found it, oh yeah, it's like it, it's kind of pretty. And after a few years of using it, I says, ooh, black and white, that's kind of anemic and slow. So, syntax, coloring, I like. And in fact, NetBeans takes syntax coloring to the next step, very consistently and very logically.  There's debugging and there's version control support. I won't hire an employee, a programmer who doesn't use version control. I'm sure not going to hire an IDE that doesn't have version control support. So, NetBeans certainly meets those minimum requirements and it goes a bit more. I'm not going to cover those minimum requirements. You can look at the flyer, you can go and use it. What I'm going to cover is the things that I found I didn't expect, the pleasant surprises. And I'm going to cover four, change highlighting. Like syntax highlighting, this is change highlighting. I like it. It helps me go faster. So, I'm calling incremental or local undo and redo. And autocomplete and the API, you know, to the documentation of the API. And they're sort of bound up together and I'll cover them together in testing support. Okay, let's go to the real thing. Oh, I want to plug, stick in the, you know, the bibliography or the links to resources here so it doesn't get pushed off the end. NetBeans.org is the website for that. Go there to get tutorials. There's a bunch of them, general purpose and at least six Ruby or Rails specific ones. There's, like I said, there's flyers out front on it. Nice, pretty two-sided color, glossy. And no mention of Ruby or Rails. Ruby and Rails support is in beta, but I'm using it for production work. I don't have any major complaints about it. It was introduced in 6.0. They're now up to 6.1, go and get 6.1 with the Ruby Rails bundle. You know, it's a nice bundle, one download, install, it went in cleanly. It takes a little bit of time to catalog stuff. But once it's cataloged, you know, it pops up fast.  Okay, change highlighting. This is the edit window. And that blue bar on the left says that these is blue. Yes, blue. It's modified. The green down here says this is a new line. There's also pink, which I'll show briefly is where lines were deleted. And those colors are consistent across several different views. And in fact, I discovered modified files are blue. New files are green. And there isn't any delete support yet, but I expect, you know, maybe the little ghost will be there in pink when that happens. Now, they're nice visual cues, but they're more than just visual cues. If I hover over it, it'll tell me, you know, what it used to be. And in fact, if I click it, it will show me what it used to be. And I can navigate down to the next change, or this is what I'm calling local undo, because the undo and redo buttons up here are chronological. But these are local. Now, another thing I just discovered that's a slick thing is what was that, that raise, I turned it into an if because it's no longer, I figured out it's no longer a fatal condition.  Well, that code has been indented. But it doesn't clutter up saying this has been modified. All of it, you know, the modification has been indented. Smart. Okay. It's cruise on down through modifications. Just pop through them. And each time it's showing me what used to be there. Now we're at a delete. If you look over here, there's a little pink arrow. That says there's a delete here. And in fact, it'll tell you how many lines that are deleted in the tooltip, you know, and it'll show you what used to be there. It's too big. So scroll down and, you know, I could put it back in. I could incrementally undo it. Nice. Now that's the sort of on the ground level over here on the right. You again have blue and green and pink bars which says, you know, there are modifications, deletions, insertions there.  One of the things I like about this is NetDeans is exploration friendly. There are a lot of these tooltips. And just what does this do? Build main project. What does this do? Run main project. Okay, cool. So you have this, you know, change highlighting. It's, you know, it's eye candy. It's visual cues that make things go faster. And in fact, and then it hooks into something real. It's not just visual. It's, you know, sort of not just read only. You can use it to actually change the file. Okay. There's two other colors. Red syntax errors. And in fact, up here, this little square is green now. If I stick in a syntax error, let's put in an extra end. It'll turn red. And the red line down here shows where it was detected. So same, you know, and the other is sort of yellow line. These are Ruby and, you know, Rails style hints, language hints. Useful. Okay. The other thing is when you've got a file with a lot of changes in it, and you want to look at, you know, sort of side by side, what's the old and the new? Well, there's the traditional, you know, side by side diff. But it has, you know, a little bit elegant thing. What I call rubber banding diffs. To keep the unchanged lines in sync, it rubber bands the changes. Of course, you know, below there is modification. Green is an insertion. And again, I've got little things that will undo that change. The remove and insertion down here, I have, you know, essentially replaced the original with a modification. And again, you know, and if I can click here on the pink deletion, I can undo it. Now, up here in the middle, there's an arrow. Watch out for that. It undoes everything. And unfortunately, it does not have a tooltip. It says, oh, I wonder what this does. Ooh. That didn't want to do that. Well, thank goodness for undo. 40 seconds. 30 seconds. 30 seconds. Okay. Test support. It's got, you can run the whole test suite. You can run individuals, you know, through running rate tests, rate test units, rate spec modules, so on. The other thing is, oh, there's generators too. So you can do migrations. Auto completion. When I hit the end, it sticks in the closing. Same thing for quotes. Interpolation in strings. And it's tied into, um, I type in a class name, and it shows me, or a method name, and it shows me all the possible completions. Okay. So why are you running up? Win? Can you start coming up? The gray ones are, ones that is inherited. The black ones are ones that are actually in the class. So there's the dynamic finders that rails itself sticks in. Here's mine.  And, um, okay. I can return. It'll stick it in with a template. I can, any method name, highlight it, control B, it'll go to the definition of it. I like it. Thank you. Okay.


This is Akeel Mukhtar, I'm from Pulwama, I'm pursuing beard from Maxwell College of Education. Actually, I'm here after spending 40 hours in Banihal. The reason why I was at Banihal was to access internet. I had to submit scholarship forms and I had to unlock my mobile phone, which accidentally got locked by me few days back. For that purpose, I needed internet. I tried to visit DC Complex Pulwama where internet access was available, but that access was only available for limited purposes and limited time. But for this thing, I needed more access and more time. And when I reached DC Complex, I found people standing in longer queues. They were there for longer periods of time and there I met a friend who gave me an idea that we should go to Banihal where internet is available. Not internet, broadband is available. Then we planned to go to Banihal the next day. And the next day, on 20th of December, we woke up early in the morning, traveled some distance by foot and somewhere car and finally arrived at the station Amantipora. Then we left for Banihal at 9.50. And after a horrific journey of 8 hours, we reached Banihal at about 3.30. I suppose 3.30. I don't know the actual time, but it was 3.30. And when I reached Banihal, I found...  When I went to that internet cafe, I found many Kashmiris there. The problem was same, somewhere trying to get registered for NEET, somewhere trying to get their scholarship form submitted. And I was one among them. After completing my work, in about 20 to 25 minutes, I wanted to leave back to the home. And when I tried to leave back to the home, I got to know that the road was closed and there was no train back to the home at that time. Then I had to make a plan to stay at Banihal. And finally, I wasn't having an a box in my wallet. I finally found that truck. That truck owner accidentally known me. He gave me a lift and I stood there for the whole night. Bhatt Musadi Kriyaz, pursuing honors in biotechnology, leaving the home on 20th of December at 7 o'clock towards the Avanti Pora Railway Station to find the access, internet access at Banihal. Internet which turns the whole world into the global age and is the just source of information in the world is still under coma from last five months in our valley. The student community suffers a lot due to this barricade. You know, it's time to get registered for the NEET examination, which is a medical entrance exam. Students who are applying for the NEET is standing long in the queues for five to six hours, which is, you know, quite terrific. It's quite, you know, horrific. It's quite horrific. You know, I just go to the Banihal for getting the registration for the NEET. So, I spent my, it was the travelling from the Avanti Pora to Banihal was totally horrific. I spent my, I spent whole of the night in the truck cabin. It was too cold. I didn't get food and I didn't have enough money. I stuck it for long eight hours in the, you know, Banihal Railway Station. And when we travelled from the Avanti Pora to Banihal, we were disgustingly throwing out at the Anatnag Railway Station and we just had to wait for the two and a half hour. We totally disturbed our event plan, our, you know, outline of the, you know, outline of the trip. So, I request government to get access as soon as possible in our valley so we easily get registered for the NEET. The thing that I could have done at home, within just 15 minutes, I had to spend 40 hours, 40 hours to do that thing, to do that job. This is pretty miserable. The internet, which turns out to be the registered source of information in the whole world is blocked here in Kashmir from past four and a half months. At the end, I would like to request to Mr. Lieutenant Governor and Mr. Prime Minister kindly restore the internet as soon as possible because this is the most important thing that the students and other people need in today's world.