Equipment

·      Studio Kit: DW Drums in Blue Lacquer finish, tom sizes 8x10, 9x12, 16x16, 16x18 and 18x22 kick.  

·      Live Kit: DW Drums in Gray Slate ‘FinishPly’, tom sizes 8x10, 9x12, 12x14, 14x16, 18x22.

·      Snares: DW Drums 5x13 maple shell; Ayotte 6x14 Kepplinger custom stainless.

·      Sabian Cymbals.

The Live Drum System consists of several components.  Beginning with microphones: The toms are mic'd with Shure BETA-98's, with their 'pre-amps' mounted with MAY Internal Mic System in each tom; a May-mounted AKG D112 in the kick; Audix D2 above the snare; and a pair of AKG C1000S for overheads.  Each mic is wired into a Mackie CR1604VLZ-Pro, where gain, EQ and routing is performed.  Dynamics on each drum are controlled individually via insert jacks by a PreSonis ACP-88 8-channel compressor.  Reverb effects are created by an Alesis NanoVerb on the snare, and Lexicon MPX-100 on toms.  Additional tom texturing comes by way of one channel of Aphex Aural Exciter, which also adds fullness & punch to the kick.   For additional instrumentation, a Sony MDS-E12 MiniDisc player/recorder was patched into separate input's for click-track and program isolation.  Two Behringer 4-channel active DI's individually send one bussed kick channel, one bussed snare channel, two panned L-R tom channels, one OH-left channel, one OH-right channel and one MiniDisc program channel.  The eighth DI channel is wired to the main-out which will send all inputs except for click.  Monitoring other instruments/vocals can be hardwired (XLR) into a channel or via Sennheiser instrument wireless unit.  The main stereo mix is used for monitoring where all inputs are then compressed/limited by a two channel Behringer compressor and fed into Shure E5 in-ear monitors through the headphone jack.  This system provides a warm, consistent and reliable monitor mix while providing front-of-house full, natural acoustic drum sounds with consistency of electronic percussion.