RUSH - Neil Peart Drum Kit Sample Collection From Sonic Real

RUSH - Neil Peart Drum Kit Sample Collection From Sonic Reality

RUSH tribute site Power Windows reports:

"According to the KVR audio forum, a company called Sonic Reality recently completed a Neil Peart drum sampling session, engineered by Nick Raskulinecz.

It appears the session started on March 18th in Los Angeles, and the final product is scheduled to be released by the end of 2008.

The end result of this project will be a Neil Peart Studio Profile, most likely a complete sample of Neil's Snakes & Arrows DW kit and his V-drum sounds - and possibly Neil Peart loops.

Sonic Reality has produced other Studio Profiles on such drummers as CHEAP TRICK's Bun E. Carlos and YES/EARTHWORKS/KING CRIMSON drummer Bill Bruford.

If you're curious about what this all means, you can basically buy professionally-recorded sampled sounds of drummers that you can use with music software on a computer - or plug these samples into keyboards or electronic drums. Studio Profiles cost around $79.00..." - AndrewOlson.com

RUSH Drummer Neil Peart Posts Images From "Latest Series Of Experiments In Travel Photography"

The following is an excerpt from a lengthy update RUSH drummer Neil Peart has posted at his website:

"From San Juan, Puerto Rico, to Los Angeles, California, April and early May carried me through seventeen shows and more than 7,000 miles of motorcycling. That journey quite literally stretched from the farthest Southeast to the farthest Southwest of the United States, and the scenery varied from tropical rainforest and Caribbean beaches to the Everglades, remote bayous, the lofty trees of the Deep South bearded with Spanish moss, the sage and mesquite rangeland of West Texas, the massive, eroded towers of Monument Valley, the cactus desert of southern Arizona, and the wide-open, creosote-dotted expanse of the high Mojave Desert, with its Joshua trees and the distant snowpeaks of the Sierra Nevada.

These images are part of my latest series of experiments in travel photography, a collection titled “Action Self-Portraits with Scenery.” While I ride along (on a straight and empty road, of course), I hold my camera out to the side, or over my head, and snap away. The technique yields many failures, and ongoing lessons in “remote framing,” but occasionally it captures the desired effect—the perspective of a helmeted rider passing through a backdrop of natural beauty.

The idea evolved when my usual riding partner, Michael, was called away on other duties, and I rode alone for a few days. Without a model, or designated photographer, I was trying to figure out how to continue my attempt to document the combination of motorcycles and landscapes. Scenery alone doesn’t seem nearly as interesting without a kinetic, human element, I don’t think, and parking an empty bike in front of a landscape isn’t very satisfying. Not wanting to fiddle with any kind of on-bike camera mount (especially after watching Brutus struggle to get one to work for the whole European run last October), I had to come up with something comparable to the “Tip-Cam” I introduced for my cross-country skiing photos. Or like the method I made into a theme on my Ghost Rider travels—parking my old 1100GS in the middle of the road on its centerstand, with scenery all around, and the road ahead diminishing to its vanishing point.

In that spirit, when I made the long solo ride to Monument Valley during a two-day break between shows in Oklahoma City and Albuquerque (eventually riding 1000 miles in two and a half days), I was determined to recreate the cover shot from Ghost Rider. On the same stretch of road where that photo had been taken ten years ago (ten years ago? Ten lifetimes), I posed my current 1200GS.

It was a stirring moment for me, haunting, resonant, and almost surreal. In those two simple images of stationary motorcycles in a stark, dramatic landscape, I connect all the journeys of the past ten years, throughout the world and throughout myself.

(Fun Fact: Ghost Rider still outsells my other books by more than double, despite its dark mood. As they used to say, go figure.)"

Read the full update and check out more "images" at this location.

RUSH Drummer Neil Peart - "In The Middle Of A Tour, We Never Talk About Making Another Album"

RUSH drummer Neil Peart has issued the following update: "People often ask, 'What’s next for the band?', but we learned long ago that when you’re in the middle of a big job, you don’t need to talk about another one. So, in the middle of a tour, we never talk about making another album, and in the middle of recording, we never talk about another tour. One job at a time, even in your own head, is easier to deal with—you don’t need another burden if you can keep it 'in storage' for a while.

For fifteen years people have been saying to me, 'I hear this is your last tour' (I’ve been saying it myself since 1989), but subjects like that don’t even get raised among the three of us. Certainly after the last two summers of heavy touring, which will eventually add up to well over a hundred shows, there will be no more of that for a while.

(I adopted my current motto, 'What cannot be altered, must be endured,' around New Year’s, and actually found it useful in such occasions as, say, flight delays. Only much later did I realize that the reverse was equally true, in a less passive way: 'What cannot be endured, must be altered.')

Some fresh challenges await me, no doubt. Later this year, I have agreed to take part in another big-band project, a Buddy Rich tribute concert in October, and that will be a huge occasion to try to rise to. I’m thinking a lot about that these days.

Read more here.