This section of The Destinators is a loose collection of ongoing projects that may not lend themselves to timely posts on the Home section. These projects mostly involve our musical pursuits. We also have a number of covers and a few original songs on Doug’s youtube channel, https://youtube.com/@dvshick.
We’re a Travelin’ Band?
No particular project has taken up our time of late, although we’ve been doing more playing together. In late May 2023, we played a “festival gig” as a duo – the opening set at the inaugural Route 100 Music Festival/ Mad River Valley ArtFest. Here are highlights from that:
Immediately after that, we hit the road and had an opportunity to test out our mobile studio. This video has appeared elsewhere in this blog, but here it is again:
And of course now that we’re back we’ve been busy in the studio at home.
Getting there…
Sue’s shoulder rehab kept her away from the drums again for 2021 and most of 2022 and, surprisingly, inhibited her singing as well. That was kind of disappointing, but it did give her an opportunity to start learning how to play a piano. All the rehab is paying off now, she’s back into playing the drums (not yet at 100%, but getting there!), and she’s going places on the keys. Here is an example:
In the video we are revisiting a song we did a couple of years back. This version features the addition of the piano, a couple of more years of practicing, more singing lessons for the guitar singer and a pair of shoulder surgeries for the drummer (who, you may notice, is now playing open-handed).
We had our first gig as a duo this year, which we talked about in this blog post. Here’re a few highlights from that performance:
Learning To Sing
When shoulder injuries took Sue away from drumming for a while, and recognizing that if we could both sing (esp. if we could do so nicely and in tune) the breadth of possibilities for our duo would be widened immensely, in August of 2021 we started online singing lessons. The courses are from Singeo, which is related to Drumeo, which Sue has been using for drumming for a few years. Singeo and Drumeo both had winter recitals for their students this holiday season. This was our submission:
Take this video as an early benchmark of the status of this project, and check in now and again for updates.
A Few Covers
This isn’t really its own separate project, but here are a few things we’ve been working on in the spring and summer of 2021, and beyond. Here is a sample:
The Covid Tapes
The Destinators used their COVID stay-at-home time to learn more about multi-track recording and audio and video processing. Here is our favorite video from that project.