newlin-deschler.com Blog

What I’m impressed about this is not Alex’s technique or sense of rhythm. He needs work on both. What I’m impressed about is that he figured out the double-bass-pedal beat all on his own.

We were listening to some nu-metal song with a double bass beat. I told him to listen to it and notice how the drummer was basically running on his bass pedals. He couldn’t wait to try it out.

He sat behind his drum set and started running on the double-bass pedals, but better than I ever could. He stopped and asked what to do with his drum sticks. I got up to show him, but he said he wanted to figure it out himself. Which he did, the next time he tried it.

Going back a couple of weeks, the smile on his face when he first played what I call the AC/DC beat (quarter note high hat, bass drum on 1 and snare on 3) was awesome to see. I was making him practice a straight high-hat beat with the bass drum on 1. Then the same high-hat beat with the snare on 3. I then tried to get him to do them together. All of a sudden it worked. He was playing the beat. He looked at me with a smile that went from one ear to the next.

I said, “Alex, you did it! You did a real drum beat. Now you know every AC/DC song ever written.”

He replied, “I wish I could forget it. It was so fun to learn.”

I replied, “There are plenty of new beats to learn, but they’ll be a lot easier now.”

Apparently I was right. As I said he learned the double bass drum beat without any problem.

We decided to test Alex’s N-Strike Longstrike CS-6 against an N-Strike Raider Rapid Fire CS-35 and an N-Strike Nite Finder EX-3. Nerf claims that the Longstrike has the longest range of any of their guns at 35 feet. Can it shoot a dart 35 feet? Check the video to find out.

To summarize, the Longstrike can shoot over 60 feet, depending on the dart used.

The Raider did pretty good, with some of the darts going past 50 feet and one making it 60.

However, the clear winner at distance was the Nite Finder EX-3. It shot a dart a whopping 85 feet! Unfortunately, the Nite Finder is single shot gun that isn’t much use in a battle situation.

We also did some experimenting with some of the darts. The darts that went very far consistently went very far. While the darts that did poorly consistently did poorly. There must be latent defects in some of the darts which keep them from going the full distance.

Update – April 3, 2010:

We got an unmodified LongStrike to shoot an incredible 85 feet today!