After our first concert, we were listening to the recordings and I noticed that my china cymbal came across quite loud, so I decided to replace it with a digital China cymbal wich I connected it to my Alesis SamplePad Pro. It took a bit of getting used to, but I'm really happy with the result.

I also triggered my Gong drum on my SamplePad, beceause it gives me a bit more room to combine certain sounds and effects. All of this gives a stable sound at any venue you play at, which saves a lot of hassle at the FOH, especially since at some festivals you only have a limited time to soundcheck and get everything set up properly…so that’s why we keep critically looking at what we can do to make our sound, workflow, and performance even better.

Besides that, I also kept looking into how you can adjust your cymbals a bit in terms of volume and sustain, and this is what I found with the Cympad felts. They are a bit bigger and have a spring-like construction so the cymbal still has enough room to move, and it takes just enough sound away to have a nice cymbal mix, especially for the FOH.

After my endorsement of Mapex (2001) and Soultone cymbals (2015), I was looking for a new endorsement and have found it, after a long search, with TEBBS drumsticks, a German company that works just a bit outside the standard norm of drumsticks to find the right proportions of balance in pitch and weight.

and they also play really perfectly, not too light, not too heavy... and they are exactly what they promise

My snare drum is a Black Panther, birds eye maple shell, 14"x 5.5". I have had many different drumheads on it, but now I really have the best choice for my snare drum and sound for this project. I’ve now put on the new Evans Heavyweight Dry drumheads. These dampen the sound and give a bit of a drier tone. Also, because the snare often overpowers, I placed a dampening ring under the batter head, which makes the sound even drier and produces almost no overtones. The combination of the birds eye maple shell with this new drumhead gives a super controlled sound that’s nice for mixing at FOH and really fun to play, because you get enough attack and bottom. ...

I have had several in-ear systems and worked for years with Shure in-ears, but since this project I have started looking further, and now have the KZ-10 Pro and as a backup the Drumeo ear drum monitors. The KZ has a number of different drivers that reproduce the sound perfectly, subtle in the highs and nicely full in the lows. The same goes for the Drumeo ear drum monitors, which are specially made for drummers and have a nice three-way system.

And to get the sound from the rack to my in-ears, I put a mixing console in between, so that I can also color the sound a bit to my own liking.

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