 Hello and welcome to the drum history podcast today. We are back with mr. Paul Wells Paul welcome back on Thank you so much Bart great to be here again. Yes So this is part two of our look at the drums of Neil Peart We're picking up today On the Tama kit where we left off around 82. I want to preface this and say to people If you didn't listen to part one Then you can go back and check that out or you can start here. It doesn't really matter We're recording this before part one is released. So Paul, I'm gonna bet I think it's a safe assumption that when part one is released YouTube servers crash because so many people are so excited about it. We've received a lot of peace prizes Everyone is just in their mind is blown from our deep dive into Neil's kits. I think that's a safe bet World peace breaks out Yeah, war is over War is over. Yeah, what's the it sounds? It's like the end of ghostbusters dogs and cats living together. Yeah, that's hysteria Yeah, it happens just because of the drum kits of Neil Peart on YouTube and the podcast Yes, yes life-changing life-changing. So Paul Let's oh before we start you mentioned to me that there's some kind of stuff to clean up or add to the first batch Of kits we talked about so Here what you got despite my extensive notes. I did forget a couple of things. So a Couple things I wanted to mention first off. So we're starting with the the Slingerland kit the second Slingerland kit so as I said he received that kit in May of 77 and Around that time there were a couple of photo shoots that were done By I believe they were all done by a photographer named Finn Costello and you can see all of these on Getty images he was a well-known photographer that photographed a lot of rock stars and there was a Photo shoot that I think he did in Chicago Somewhere around the summer of 77 where apparently Neil For whatever reason that week was experimenting with using Ludwig silver dot heads on the entire kit So I mentioned before his preferred head set up in this era was Silver dots on the concert toms 6 8 10 and 12 But then Evans heads on the double-headed rack toms the chrome Exactly chrome finish on top and then a blue hydraulic on the bottom However, it's it was literally like you know, maybe a week He was using Ludwig silver dots, but man. I mean these photos. They're great photos, but they're they're really really common They're there they've been published in so many different books and so many different magazines And I think it leads people to believe that oh Neil used silver dots on all his toms in the 70s And it really was literally just the week those those photos were taking an anomaly So the photos that I sent you to use for this yeah YouTube video I think that I actually gave you a photo one of those fin castello photos that it should be designated Neil with silver dots so so you could see that and I think a lot of people will recognize that photo or that photo shoot, but You know every other photo I've ever seen from that era. He's using the Evans head combination two other little things and these are really Nerdy things the next album cycle hemispheres. I mentioned that he added a set of Tune symbols called either Crotals or Crotales. I think Crotals Sure. Yeah, an octave that he had mounted behind him above the the tubular chimes He also had a single Crotall that he had mounted on the kit just to the right of the hi-hat on a little Ludwig hoop mount symbol holder And he used that in the title track hemispheres and he used it At a couple points in that tune and then he later used it really famously in the tune YYZ The beginning the intro he taps out the rhythm on a Crotall before the band comes in ding-de-ding ding-de-ding Yeah, I mean that's that's a Crotall it to me is this just like drummer I always thought that would be like the I think a lot of people would maybe think that's just the bell of a ride or something like that Mm-hmm, but it's very clear or or a zil bell or something which it's probably yeah. Yeah, that exists. Yeah Interesting or a triangle or something. Yeah, it is actually a Crotall. Yeah, and it's when you hear it It's a specific sound. You can't quite get that sound from a zil bell But I see people covering that tune they usually play like the bell of a hi-hat or something like that And that approximates it, but but yeah, that's actually what he used one last thing that I forgot to mention. I had mentioned Starting in 78 or so he starts using this three Chinese cymbal setup with the Wuhan the 20 inch zilgen swish and the 18 inch zilgen Pang The Pang He uses without rivets just kind of as is but at some point on the moving pictures tour So I noticed this there's a photo of his kit at the moving pictures recording sessions Which would have been late? 1980 and there are no rivets in the Pang it looks just like it did throughout the 70s, but There's a photo from the moving pictures tour where suddenly the Pang has six rivets installed Hmm and every time you see it after that it has six rivets installed So either he got bored and wanted to change the sound and had somebody put six rivets in it or Possibly he broke the Pang or just got a new one that already had six rivets. So that's a tiny detail But I love those kind of tiny details when it comes to these sort of things. So yeah, no I wanted to I wanted to clarify those things and sorry for forgetting them I think I if I try really hard I can maybe forgive you forget for getting Yeah, they're probably gonna take back the the Nobel Peace Prize that I won. We just lost it. Yeah, that's too bad World peace it has ended So I appreciate you clarifying that though cuz I was Paul and I were talking before That you know as far as I can tell and you would you know better than me They're really I'm hoping this can live for a long time is like a really definitive look at at Neal's drums on YouTube and I was a podcast format because You know, there's books. There's magazines, but you know, it should be on each platform So I think you're the great choice for this and for people just now tuning into part two Paul is a absolute Neal, you know fanatic with his gear. He's a professor of jazz drumming at Juilliard He's a performer. He's he's the real deal and knows his stuff If that's all cleared up then why don't we move on here and you can pick us 82 correct. Yeah, well, we left off with the Candy Apple Red Tom a kit. I think I described that kit being a thinner shell version of the regular Superstar kit, you know super the Thomas superstars at the time were six ply birch the the the Candy Apple Red Kit was four ply birch and That was a custom finish. So my understanding. I don't know if I mentioned this but In talking to Bob Milherot who owns that kit now, he was able to find out that The Candy Apple Red finish was initially done by the percussion center at Fort Wayne I did what I think I forgot to mention a little bit just of the sound of that kit though because it's it's a You know Neil wanted to he wanted a thinner shell kit because he wanted more resonance He wanted more tonality and more resonance And I think you hear that if you listen to the drum sound on moving pictures versus signals and the moving pictures sound is Amazing. That's the regular superstar Thomas and it's got an amazing attack at this sort of great sort of clangy attack but I really hear on signals more kind of I guess more tonality more sort of bloom to the note There's more. I mean the attack is still there But there's you hear more of the the actual note of the drum And mostly you hear this difference on the on the 12 13 15 18 Double-headed Tom Tom's that's that's really I think you know kind of the meat of the kit for him And and those sizes, you know gave him the opportunity to you know I think make the most of those shells and I mentioned before that he had changed the bottom heads Oh, yeah, just inner bottom heads and I think that probably helped too But I do think there was a sound difference. It's a noticeable sound difference with those candy apple red drums. So Signals tour ends. I think around May of 83 they take a little bit of time off, but they are they almost immediately start writing new songs and Neil I guess was getting more interested in wanting to utilize electronic drums. So electronic drums 1983 I mean Just just watch any MTV videos from 1983 and you're likely gonna see a lot of electronic drums That was a really big trend in those days and you just heard that stuff you know either drum machines or Simmons Tom's or both on Nearly everything that was happening in those days as far as pop music and and even a lot of rock music And I think he wanted to get into those sounds. I think you know, Bill Bruehford was doing amazing things with electronics with Simmons SDS 5 drums originally which were all analog Really amazing sounding electronic drums with the famous hexagon pads So Neil didn't want to replace his kit He didn't want to like say, okay Well, I'll get rid of these toms and put Simmons Tom's here instead or didn't want to really change anything about his core setup So it came up with this great idea of a secondary kit And instead of the secondary kit being on like a second rise or next to the main kit The idea was like, okay, I'm gonna put it behind me. I'm gonna have this, you know It was this 360 degree drum kit that surrounded him completely So this of course meant that he had to get rid of the stuff that normally was behind him Which at the time would have been the tubular chimes The Crotals actually moved up to the little rack on the side where he had wind chimes and things mounted But he gets rid of the tubular chimes and he gets rid of one of the two gong bass drums He still uses the 22 inch gong bass drum, which is mounted sort of as a floor Tom next to his 18 inch floor Tom But he gets rid of the 20 that was up on a stand behind him So and then he adds this really interesting kit and it's like it's not in any way Other than there being four toms three sort of rack toms and a floor Tom It's not very similar to his kit in the front. So he has a single bass drum And it's an 18 inch bass drum and this goes back to when we were talking in the last episode about his first few kits How he had an 18 inch bass drum with his very first kit and when he got his first Professional quality kit his Rogers kit that had an 18 inch bass drum and then he got a second 18 inch bass drum for that kit To make it a double 18 inch bass drum kit So he really had a thing for 18 inch bass drums and when putting together this back kit He used an 18 which I think is very cool. Yeah, it's just like it's part of the story of Neil I feel like he kind of yeah, like his drum kits I feel like now they're like iconic and legendary and we all you know drool over them but I think he realized the like The through line of his drums and he kept like like the all-gold hardware and certain things he kind of kept He was a very smart guy very like thematic with what he was doing the whole way through Yeah, yeah, and I think he was aware of you know That it would be neat for him to to go back to something he used to use or you know would be sort of I mean He I think he was in some ways very not sort of anti-sentimental Sentimental, you know like not wanting to look backwards Yeah, but at the same time maybe had some fondness for the his first kid or his first couple of kits So maybe that was a little throwback to that So he's got the 18 inch bass drum. He's got a second snare drum And originally at that time for the first few tours he uses this Surround kit he uses an identical snare to his Slingerland number one snare They track down another five and a half by 14 Slingerland artist series snare But he did specify in interviews, you know, I've got the exact same snare But it doesn't sound quite as good as the main one interesting, which was painted red, right? Yes So, so yeah, I think we mentioned that it was originally a copper finished drum and then For the signals tour he decided to get it painted to match Yeah, the rest of the kit He was apparently afraid to even take it apart to get painted because he was afraid that it might somehow Change the sound of it. I got that early didn't yeah. Yeah. Yeah. 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Yep, and um I don't know if maybe he just said to zilgin at the time like oh, just give me you know the modern equivalent of that and Zilgin we're making symbols a bit heavier by you know 83 than they were in 74 Potentially, so I think he ended up with a bit of a heavier ride So you can hear that on some of the recordings that it's a pingier ride and then he's got four Simmons toms and then a couple of crash symbols and another Chinese symbol and another pair of 13 inch high hats and It's really an interesting set up because it's it's a bit different than his sort of main set up So it gets him into some different territory. He plays some different sort of Fills and different patterns and things but what I really love about this setup and what I think I know I didn't realize this for quite a while and I think a lot of people maybe also don't realize that Just because he's on this back Kit like if he's sitting back there He can still hit and reach a lot of stuff from the main kit So he's got if he's sitting behind The 18 inch bass drum and the Simmons toms He also has his concert toms up here to his right and he also has a Tim Bali from the front kit over on his On his right. He went from using Before he added the electronics. He had a set of two Tim Bali's get a 13 and a 14 When he added the Simmons kit, he got rid of one of the Tim Bali's And put the Simmons floor Tom basically the Simmons Tom is there instead So yeah, so he still has access to the Tim Bali. He's got access the gong bass drum is right here Just to the left of his hi-hat the all of the other Chinese symbols and also his other ride symbol the main kit ride symbol is to his left and if you listen to songs like Red Sector a he does these really cool patterns Where he has a hand on his on his the back kit ride and his left hand on the main kit ride And he's doing these 16th note patterns between two ride symbols, and that's really cool. It's a little bit like the kind of To surface riding that Steve Gad did, you know starting in the 70s where he would have his left hand on the hi-hat Right hand on the ride 16th so Neil What he Neil did that to like in subdivisions and some other tunes, but then now he's doing it between two ride symbols So that's cool. The mixing of the Electronic and the acoustic kits has been something that I've always thought is so cool I've never had the opportunity to do it because I've never really done it No, you kind of need it to be with a PA and loud enough for your electronics can get up to the volume to have real Symbols mixed with them. So yeah It's something that I always think is so neat and would love to try someday Neil's obviously in a very you know He's they're in it like an arena or something But it's a different pad feel and I've always heard famously that those pads didn't feel great on your hands The original ones were very very hard. Yeah. Yeah, and and actually the first so he the first time He used this setup was in September of 83 Rushed it a series of shows at Radio City Music Hall here in New York City I think it was like three or four nights or something like that It wasn't really part of a tour It was kind of between the signals tour and grace inner pressure coming out So they debuted some of those new songs that they were working on that would appear on grace inner pressure And he debuted that kit, but at the time He had the original Simmons pads the very hard pads But by the time grace inner pressure the tour came around he got the new pads that were a lot softer Yeah, with the red you're back on yes, exactly Which was cool because that the red back matches the kid and that totally super cool Can I ask a question that's like probably that's the most basic question that almost like like your mom would ask All right from the from the aerial view here. Does anyone like is there any record of like how does one get into this? Foley yeah circle drum set so you could see from the overhead shots the 18 inch bass drum has the Wuhan Chinese symbol mounted off of it and There's a little pathway between that and like the concert Tom The six inch concert Tom that he could kind of squeeze through and his road He would actually pull the the bass drum back by the symbol arm that's holding the Wuhan He would kind of pull it back so Neil could squeeze in through that way But it was not an easy kit to get in and out Oh, I feel like drummers like no matter what if we're in a room that's completely empty We will find a way to put ourselves in a corner that make it awkward to get into our drum set like It just happens even Neil Peart has to do that to like yeah, kind of slide something forward I remember as a I remember as a kid thinking that would be cool if he like parachuted down into that kid or something Yeah, yeah, I used to sort of think like oh, maybe that's how he gets it back there. It's a parachute Yeah, so a couple other things about the electronics I should mention so this so he was using initially a Simmons SDS 5 brain and although he only had four pads set up The brain actually had five Units it had five voices So the brain would have like, you know a bass drum channel a snare drum channel or toms, you know Whatever you can figure them however you want it and his SDS 5 brain had four tom channels and a snare drum channel So all I really hear on those recordings is Tom sounds, but you know classic Simmons like Tom sounds But Yeah, I don't know what he may have used the snare channel for or why he had that but it was it was there There are photos where you can you can see five channels Okay. Now another really important Electronic voice that enters his kit at this point is the Simmons clap trap Okay, so this is a really kind of lesser known Electronic instrument, I think actually it was put out by somebody else initially and then Simmons bought it and it became the Simmons clap Trap so it was basically a really simple little it's like a small unit about this big and It was a very simple kind of white noise generator that could be used to make sort of white noise percussion percussive sounds. Yeah, and it I guess I don't know how different people would sort of trigger it because it was really just a little unit that you could kind of plug something into but the way that Neil triggered it was with a foot switch and He had a foot switch that triggered the clap trap to the left of each of his hi-hats pedals So he had one on the front kit just to the left of the pedal And he had one on the back kit just to the left of the pedal and you can see one of the photos I sent you is a overhead shot of the red kit and you can see I think next to the hi-hat stand on the main kit. You can see a little black square That's the the the foot pedal trigger for the clap trap So he would take his left foot off of the hi-hat and hit this little trigger and it would make a sound now It was programmable, but usually when you hear the sound kind of like Like a clap sound kind of you know a little similar to actually the sound you get from From like the clap trap or the clap stack. Sorry that Istanbul a gop make and a lot of companies that make that exactly a digital well analog technically analogue an electronic Analog electronic version you hear it on almost every tune on Grayson or pressure Okay, he was really into the clap trap and you can hear him take his foot off the pedal Like you'll hear the hi-hat closed And then when he goes over to hit the clap trap the hi-hat opens with the clap trap And he would often use it as kind of like something to emphasize the backbeat on the snare You know, he would yeah, so you hear it all over Grayson or pressure you hear all over power windows For example the tune big money In the intro of the tune you hear this big snare drum and like clap sound That's that's him playing the snare drum and the clap trap simultaneously Yeah, and I think the power of white noise and like signal generator tone generators and stuff It's actually really powerful like almost yeah, like you think of like the drums and like closer by nine inch nails of how it's just like this like It's yeah, yeah, yeah, very cool. And it's very you know It's industrial sounding and it and it and it makes you think of things that aren't you know, they're percussive But not traditional drums or you know It's just sort of alternate sounds or like a thunder clap kind of sound Yeah drummers have gone for replicating some of those sort of things for a long time agree Yeah, it's it's it's very cool. So that becomes actually the left foot trigger now. He eventually Replaces it with a more sophisticated pedal that that traders samples and stuff But that becomes a really important part of his sort of sound arsenal Throughout the 80s and 90s and it's something that I think is really cool and it starts with the clap trap so On grace inner pressure I think that he was so enthralled with or at least intrigued by the Simmons sound and using electronics that I think I have the feeling he decided I want to use I want to find a way to use this sound on every tune on this album because every Every track on grace inner pressure has some Simmons drum in it somewhere even I think the tune Kid gloves. I think he hits it once but it's in there. It's in every tune. Yeah, you know So I think that's kind of cool that that's the sort of meticulousness He would he would approach these things with you know, like I'm really into this I'm gonna make this work in every tune on this record But not jam it down your throat and he's gonna keep it tasteful and of course Yeah, yeah, it's gonna be it's gonna be musical and yeah, so um, I Oh, I guess an important development also for the grace inner pressure tour is the way he figures out to make this 360-degree kit work was to develop a rotating drum riser Which yeah, cuz you have you don't want to see the back of the back of Neil's head Which is what he did when they played it at Radio City They he didn't have that revolving riser yet. So he talked about this in interviews He was actually facing the back. He was like facing the back of the stage He had his back to the audience when he played the the kit behind him So I think he was like, yeah, this isn't gonna work. We got to figure out a way to do this Sure He's not the first person to use a revolving drum riser, but I probably think he's It was probably the most famous for it I remember seeing them and whenever the riser would revolve during the drum solo the whole crowd I just feel yes, yeah, the coolest thing ever because it is the coolest thing ever Oh, yeah, coolest thing ever. I mean and it's totally practical. It's like well What a better what better way to you know for him to face the right direction, but man, it's cool, right? Yeah, which the budget of they they obviously of course they realized it I mean, he's a he's on the cover of drum magazines. He's huge Neil is such a big draw for rush fans in general that you to put that money and budget into it is obviously worth it Yeah, yeah, well, they were they were very visually oriented. They always had a great show always had cutting-edge lights Rear screen projections lasers pyro all that stuff They always had the the latest and coolest stuff and always incorporated in really Creative and cool ways and their shows. I remember it was a very big deal in the 80s when you started to see lasers in Rock shows, you know, that was that was really pretty amazing. I think maybe Pink Floyd might have been the first band to do that I know they did like rear-screen stuff. That was a big deal to us when I was a kid I mean if you had lasers, you must be good, right? You have to be good and then I've seen the the fad of I don't know if it was 80s or early 90s I believe I think it was 80s But the seem to be a bit of a fad that Neil didn't do but it's just of that time of the like drum vest Where it had pads in the vest Oh, yeah, like Mick Fleetwood or a couple other guys who come up and do it. Yeah Joey Kramer from Aerosmith did that in his truck solo. Yeah, and I think I'm I think maybe Tommy Lee had something like that Going on as well. Yeah, it's not great though. It's not Like and there's somewhere. There's a huge wire harness behind right. Yeah Yeah, I do think some drummers wanted to be able to get out front wanted to be able to like kind of yeah, you know walk around and Interact with the crowd in that way not be stuck behind the drums But I know if I think Neil was probably that I think he talked about this too I think he was the kind of drummer who was kind of comfortable with a bunch of stuff hiding him You know that he could sort of hide behind or at least real safe beyond. I know I feel like that I don't like standing in front of a crowd talking like I if I stand in front of like, you know Eight students at school. I'm a little bit on edge But I mean I can sit behind a drum kit in front of thousands of people and it's doesn't really affect me at all Yeah, so but I think having that that shield there helps sure. Can you remind me? I meant to I Know we talked about it before but at this point what pedals is he using? That's great. Actually, it's around this time that he switches fully to Tom a camco pedals Okay, cuz that's an interesting time Yeah, he was still floating around with the with the Ludwig speed king Right sort of in and out because I I know he had Tom a camcos because when he gave away The rosewood kit the rosewood kit was the first kit that he gave away through a contest in modern drummer around 82 or so Once he got the red kit in the equipment list He actually listed Tom a camco pedals as the pedals that would come with the kit But he was maybe going back and forth between camcos and speed kings. Those are really different feeling pedals totally That would not be an easy transition to make I think For me as somebody who uses I used either Tom a camcos or DW The very basic DW 5000 without the footboard But yeah that type of pedal that that you know has its roots in the in the the Gretch floating action pedal Yeah, the Martin or whatever Yeah, the Martin fleetfoot, right if you're used to that kind of pedal a speed king is likely gonna feel kind of weird to you Although I know our buddy George Flutus switches back and forth between a speed king and a camco I've seen him use both on on his videos. I think yeah, so he's able to do it But but yeah, I have a really hard time playing Speed Kings. Yeah, and there's just if anyone's more interested in that I always like to tell people that like there's an episode on the history of the 5000 pedal that has on that There's an episode on the history of speed king. Both of those are with Vincent Ward and then There is and I think in the DW episode. There's some info and then the Tom episode. There's some info So yeah, definitely check those out. Those are really great histories of those Yeah, and I love that somebody can talk about, you know, the history of a single drum pedal for an hour or more I mean, that's that's really cool. Yeah, exactly All right, so where do we go from there? Well, we go to the power windows album and tour 1985-86 and It's the same kit The only thing that changes about the kit. Well, the electronics changed significantly, but before I get into that I will say the only thing I Think the only other thing that changed was he started experimenting with different tom-tom heads again And I mentioned that with the red kid He's using red Evans rock heads, which is a double-ply kind of a heavy head and then red Evans tom-tom heads on the bottom, which was a single-ply head and There's a photo that's in the book chemistry Which is a kind of rare book that was that came out about 15 years ago a little rush bio There is a photo of him at the power windows recording session from above It's a great photo. You can see great detail the kit and he has Remo pinstrikes on The tops of the toms and then later on so there are photos from the power windows tour where he has the red Evans heads and the videos they did for the power windows album big money and mystic rhythms Those probably would have been filmed in the fall of 85. He's got the red Evans heads But there's tons of photos from midway through and later in the power windows tour where he's got pinstripes Including some of the ones I sent you the ones from behind the kit where you see a bunch of people kind of crowded around the kit That's from a clinic that he did He did a couple of clinics in 86 he did one for PIT percussion Institute of Technology, which is part of musicians Institute in Los Angeles I think that was early in 86 I don't know exactly when but then he did another one for the percussion Center of Fort Wayne around May of 86 And I think that the photos May or March somewhere around there spring The photos that I did I sent you I believe our photos from the Fort Wayne The percussion Center of Fort Wayne Clinic that he did and you can see really nice detail the kid I wish I knew who took those photos because thank you whoever took those photos. Yeah, they've been shared They've been shared all over the internet, but they're they're great detail photos of the kit. So Very very interesting electronic changes for power windows because Neil got very very very deep into sampling at this point and initially it was very very crude sampling by Even by like kind of late 80s standards So he got He started using a Simmons SDS 7 brain When I say brain, that's what you know The sort of unit that the rack mount unit that controls, you know generates the sounds that the pads trigger That's what I mean by a Simmons brain. I mentioned the Simmons SDS 5 brain So he got an SDS 7 and the 7 was a really interesting instrument that a lot of people use Bill Bruehford Use this extensively from about 80 for a 384 on it's all over the King Crimson 3 for perfect pair record So it was a it was a hybrid between analog and digital sounds or actually analog and sampling digital sampling so it had a Analog drum brain similar to the SDS 5 built-in, but it also had the ability to load Chips that were called it was it was a type of like memory chip at the time called an e-prom EPROM which stood for if I'm not mistaken Erasable programmable read-only memory So you could basically put digital information onto this chip and then install it into the Simmons SDS 5 Did by digital information. I mean a sample and then you could use your pad to trigger that sample. So These were really crude samples. It was 8-bit sampling which was sort of the the the crudest sort of most low-fi sampling That's kind of where sampling started and by the mid 80s I think, you know, you had the fair light and the sink sink Sinclair that we're already doing like 12 and 16 bit sampling which is you know much cleaner quality, but the the 8-bit samples They were kind of cool. They're there. Yeah, that's popular now like yeah, right as a retro thing exactly, right, right? So it was you know, but kind of kind of a little dirtier sounding and you know Very short you can only get like about a second of sampling time But Neil got really into sampling all kinds of found sounds You know He he sampled some Ethnic drums he sampled like tabla and and like an African talking drum and Some other you know sort of things like that. He he uses these sounds extensively on on this record on power windows and he was rush we're working with a producer on that album called Peter Collins and Peter this is the first time they worked with Peter and he ended up producing three or four other records and Peter really hated the Simmons like sound because it was by that point. It was kind of overused, you know played out Yeah, yeah, so so he encouraged them to find an alternative and Neil came up with this idea Well, I want it to sound like this like do and they said well, why don't we just sample your voice doing that? That's okay. So they put a microphone in front of me went do and They mixed that with the analog sound in the SDS seven But all of the sort of low-pitched electronic do kind of Tom sounds you hear on power windows are actually Neil's voice And he referred to them as voice drums, which is kind of cool. Yeah, I think these cards are like Like I found some in a studio worked out and we ended up selling a bunch of them But they're like one megabyte right and but in the day they were probably like hundreds of dollars at least. Yeah Yeah, so Simmons made a drum called the SDS one, which was a standalone pad It was just the hexagonal pad but it had this little additional thing at the end of it that you could stick one of those e-proms in and Actually just like it would just trigger that sample right off of the you know on the pad right that the thing Built into the pad. So he started so he used this these sort of sounds all over power windows He also used that the Simmons SDS Seven had its own unique kind of analog Brain your analog Synthesis style and you hear that if you listen to the tune of motion detector He's using a lot of SDS seven type sounds. It's like a lot of kind of white noise type sounds and Just typical of that particular Simmons brain and they took all of this stuff on tour man. They they on on the power windows tour They really upped Like their their keyboard tech had to do like 20 times more work because they use all like There's a lot of sampling and the keyboard stuff that Getty was doing too and they had to get all of these samplers And they toured with like I mean they had like 10 samplers on stage You know cut were backstage middied into the remote keyboards that Getty was playing and this was when you had to insert a floppy disk Like a big what five and a half inch floppy disc for like one sound and Insert another one into the other sampler and then a third one into the other and this is all you know Basically, you know like my my iPhone can do like yeah exactly and it's in the dark It's extremely loud. You're sweaty. I mean that's those that's a skilled crew Absolutely. Well, you know, this is a little side note. I've I've heard Rush were extremely good to their road crew They had a lot of people on their crew that had been with them nearly the entire career of the band in fact the keyboard tech Tony Geradios Geradio something like that is nicknamed as Jack secret rush fans know who this guy is he started working with them in 76 or 77 and he was with them on every tour until the last tour in 2015 They had other guys that were with them that long and I had heard that they paid their crew very well I don't know if they kept them on retainer when they weren't working, but they may have I'm not sure but you know You don't have that kind of longevity with with crew members unless you treat them really well they those guys, you know, they tend to kind of float around and go wherever the money is and wherever they can find work and You know, those guys consistently went back to rush and and that says a lot about How they treated people and and who they were I think is as well for sure I've had a very long term. What was Niels wrote his technique Lori's first tech was Larry Allen who worked from with him from about 76 or 77 until 97 and then They had their hiatus and then when they reconvened around 2000-2001 to record the vapor trails album Lauren Wheaton became Niels drum tech and I've met Lauren. He's a really cool guy and loves to talk gear loves to talk about Niels drums and He was it, you know amazing drum tech and Larry Allen actually it's interesting because Larry was not a Drum tech. He was just I think a friend of Niels and Like Niels like hey, you want to come on the road with us? And I think that what I've heard he didn't really know anything about drums and kind of had to learn on the job and Kind of came up with some kind of different ways of doing things I guess Lauren talked about that when Lauren joined if we see interviews with Lauren He would you'd say like yeah, you know, I kind of had to update a lot of things Because they were used to doing things a certain way the way Larry did them and you know I had more experiences of drum tech working, you know, he'd worked for Steve Smith and yeah I think maybe Billy Cobham and you know So he had a lot of experiences of drum tech and was able to kind of get things a little more up to date I guess yeah, we'll get to that later there. You can see Lawrence influence in some ways Yeah, that situation of like kind of just come with them come on the road to me It would be you know doable with like just a normal rock drummer But not the most technically difficult drum set to put together. Yeah, right history, right? Yeah Neil relied on Larry a lot because if Neil was interested in something He would kind of send Larry off to find out info about it Like if Neil was interested, he's written about this in interviews and articles and stuff He said like oh, I was interested in finding out about sampling So I asked Larry to find out what the best samplers were, you know, so he would kind of charge Larry with with Doing the nuts and bolts research for him and figure out what would work best for them Which is Yeah, I think Neil was kind of a little more hands-off As far as actually picking the gear and stuff in between Larry Allen and Neil Graham at the percussion center They would kind of come up with solutions for the things that Neil wanted to do speaking of which another interesting little electronic note For the power windows tour Neil found that because they were incorporating more and more sampling He needed a some sort of pad for the front kit. He needed to be able to trigger some more stuff from the kit in front and Larry and I think somebody from Simmons I think it was like this the Simmons guy in Canada or something they developed basically a miniature Simmons pad that mounted on this sort of shock mount between Neil's 12 inch Tom and 13 inch Tom and They named the trigger they named it Sydney Which is kind of funny because it's sort of a variation on the word Simmons the name So the Sydney trigger was this really small. It's probably about like, you know, about three inches But shaped like a Simmons pad and it went, you know, right between the toms And he would just kind of use it to trigger little Samples and little little events that he needed to trigger that he couldn't get to the back kit to trigger or something like that You know, there's certain little sounds that you see like if you watch videos from that time You'll see him like go over and hit he used that trigger actually all the way into the 2000s and eventually replaced it with a DOS pad DAUZ More modern version basically the same idea, but a small pad that you could kind of fit anywhere You can at first glance you can miss as I'm looking over at these pictures You can very easily miss a lot like I'm looking right. I was looking at that picture Yeah pinstripeds and I didn't even see Sydney there. Yeah. Yeah, it's I'm trying to remember everything too Like I said, I have notes, but I'm trying like just like no, thanks. Yeah, I'm sure I'm gonna miss something I apologize to the to the Neil nerds that are like, oh, but you didn't mention nothing, you know, sorry I'm trying to remember all of this and it's not my best But yeah, and it's also, you know, I'm really interested in the the sampling he was doing I'm really interested in like the claptrap and the left hand or the left foot Triggering and things like that. I may spend more time on that stuff than other people would maybe if somebody else was doing this They would spend more time on, you know, I don't know the ride symbol or something like that or you know, so I think it's interesting I think it's very cool. Oh, thank you. Yeah, I think so too So the next step is a big one This is where we get a completely different kit a different drum brand and an even further sort of step up in the sampling and electronics technology and this involves the change to Ludwig drums and Neil was very typically meticulous about Changing and he talked about not wanting to take anything for granted in his equipment and kind of reevaluating You know, not just saying oh, I just use the same drums And I just you know, but like not like sort of thinking like, okay, why do I use these drums? Why am I doing this? Why am I doing that? Does this still make sense and He decided that he it was time for a new kit He'd use the red the candy apple red Tom a kid had been repainted and been through three big tours and you know Recorded three albums. He knew it was time for a new kit But he didn't want to just get another kit just the same like it so he wanted to make sure he was using the best possible drums for him and What was interesting about this is I assumed so he basically what he did was he went to the percussion center of Fort Wayne and had Something like five or six identical kits all set up with the same heads and the same tuning and played all of them in the same room and compared them and I always assumed that this happened Well after so the the power windows tour ended. I think around May late May of 86 Hold your fire the next record comes out in September of 87 So they were presumably spend much of 87 writing and recording that I figured that this switch in this You know this stuff happened like after the power windows tour, but actually I in doing research for this podcast I discovered that it actually happened I don't know if I have the date here, but it actually happened during the power windows tour They had a bit of time off so may of 86 Yeah, in the middle of sort of the end of the power windows tour They had a few days off and this is actually when Neil did this test in Fort Wayne, Indiana So apparently all of these kits were a 12 13 and a 16 and I don't know if he had a 22 inch bass drum or a 24. I mean he was using 14 by 24 inch bass drums at the time So I assume that was what he used but it wasn't a full like 6 8 10 12 Yeah, 13 15, you know, it wasn't the whole thing Yeah, it was a five-piece kit basically, you know our 12 13 15 at 12 13 16 24 I guess and it's just to get the feel of yeah Yeah, like those are the sizes where he's gonna know he's gonna know he's gonna be able to make a decision Based on those sizes doesn't need the whole thing. So he had a set of Tom a art stars a set of premier resonators a Set of Yamaha tour series drums Ludwig super classics a Set of sonars now. He doesn't specify which line now at that time I'm talking May 86 It could have been the sonar light was very big Which was kind of a relative relatively for sonar thinner birch shell They were making them. I think they're still making signatures, which was like 12-ply beach And I don't know what else maybe they were making phonics so anyway, there's a sonar kit in the mix and Also a set of tempest drums, which are fiberglass drums made in Canada So all of those kits and identical sizes He also says that he would have included a Gretch kit and I'm gonna quote him exactly He says although I would I would certainly have included Gretch in this category I already have a small Gretch practice kit at home So I know they probably sound a bit warmer than I was looking for plus The company proved surprisingly Uncooperative in regard to this test. I just think that's the more I read that the more like I've been reading this article I was quoting from an article in Let me see April April or no May 87 modern drummer Where he talks about this whole process of picking the new kit and I remember reading that at the time and thinking okay But the deeper I go into like being a Gretch nerd and into Gretch history and I've owned numerous Gretch kits I just love that Gretch were like apparently You know Neil or Neil Peart or Neil Graham more likely at the percussion center called up all these companies and said Neil Wants to test drums could you send us identical kits to the store and apparently Gretch All these companies were like. Oh, yeah. Yeah, let's get Neil. Let's love. We maybe need our drums and and apparently Gretch are like Nah, no, we're not we're not gonna do that Maybe it's cuz like we now have hindsight, but I can't really I love Gretch, too But I can't really see him playing a giant mega Gretch kit for some reason yeah But you know what nobody could see him playing a giant mega Ludwig kid at that. That's true That was I remember at the time that was like whoa Ludwig. Oh, that's a left turn. That's some that's out of nowhere That's that I didn't expect that as a drum nerd in 1987. I was really like wow, that's yeah I mean, I thought a Ludwig is like, you know Buddy rich. She's Ludwig and and you know, I wasn't really into Ringo yet But you know ginger Baker and Bonham. It's also neat though that he did play Tempest or try them Yeah, Milestone becoming Tempest and then Now Ron De Net has it but pretty cool. Just with the whole Canadian Absolutely, yeah, he mentioned, you know, I Let me see the best the best drums from six countries and three continents. That's kind of cool Um, I actually should I want to talk about his Gretch kid It was it was mentioned in that quote that he had a Gretch practice kit at home And I was thinking maybe at the end we talked about some of the other kids But I'll mention it here. Um, at some point around 84 or 85 Neil he talked about this in one of his books. He said he was walking down the street in downtown Toronto He passed a drum store and in the window was this Gretch kit a 1214 20 basically like a jazz kit in Tony Williams yellow lacquer and he said like, you know He knew that like as a as a 12 year old kid He just would have loved that drum set So he went right in and bought it just for fun because like he said I think he says in the book Like I bought it for the the part of me that's still 12 years old That's all and that became his practice kit at home for years And if you read his book Ghost Rider Which is the boat the book that he wrote about his personal tragedies that he went through in the 90s You know, I mean, I'm sure right, you know fans know what what I'm talking about but just briefly he is horrible his is daughter died in a in a car accident and then Maybe less than a year after his wife died of cancer. It's like it just incredible Measurable horrible tragedies that he that he went through and the book that he wrote Ghost Riders about serve his Processing and coming back from that and and the yellow kid actually figures prominently into that because that was the first kid He didn't play for a number of years He had no interest in playing and then at some point the spark hit and that was the kit that he talks about taking that Kit to a studio the yellow Gretch kit and playing it And that was sort of the kit that he played that helped sort of bring him back Into, you know, the world of wanting to play drums again So that kit was significant to him and in different ways and and I love also I mean for me being a jazz nerd the fact that he had a Tony Williams yellow Gretch kit I mean, yeah, that's cool. The man with the biggest drum set has also a tiny little Yeah, in the same color as Tony Williams. Yeah, Elvin Jones had a had a yellow Gretch kit One of my favorite drummers and a colleague of mine at the Juilliard Billy Drummond has a yellow Gretch kit Will Calhoun plays a yellow Gretch kit now. There's a whole history of people that use that color I just think it's cool that Neil had one. Anyway, that is a total aside Let's talk again about this this so he had this some at the end of the power windows Tori goes in and tries all these different kits and he basically found that The Ludwigs gave him the sound that he wanted and that they had a little bit more snap and clarity and sort of punchiness and articulation that he didn't get from the other drums and the Ludwig super classics were At the time in 86, I think a new thing for Ludwig. They had been making since the mid 70s a Six-ply shell six plies of maple and poplar With no reinforcement rings. So the classic 50s 60s Ludwig shell is a three-ply shell with reinforcement rings But they dropped that in the mid 70s I think around 76 went to a straight shell six plies, but very thick very very very thick So each ply individually is very thick and in the mid 80s They came out with what they called the super classic which was a four-ply version the same shell Same ply layup like you know maple and poplar no rings, but a thinner version and that was what he liked He was into resonance. He was into thinner shells now that having been said these are still by Modern standards actually still pretty thick shells. Yeah, and I think Gretch really were the only company at the time Maybe making what we would consider in modern terms a genuinely thin shell You know DW would would make very thin shells later But you know at the time this was kind of thin shell technology. So he switched to Ludwig now I Want to mention a funny thing about this kit. There are a couple funny things about this kit Initially he ordered the exact normal setup with the concert toms 6 8 10 and 12 concert toms But shortly after I think when they started writing music for what became the hold your fire record I don't know why but he he ended up I guess he just again was sort of re-evaluating and thinking like well Maybe I want something different and he replaced the 6 8 10 and 12 Concert toms with 6 8 and 10 double-headed toms and what Ludwig made in those days They they're smaller toms. They actually made they were very long. They were like power toms You know with 6 8 and 10 deep toms Instead of I mentioned in the earlier episode that he had 6 8 10 12 concert toms And they were tuned a certain way and then he had another 12 as his first double-headed toms The double-headed 12 is actually tuned Previous to this kit much higher than the single-headed 12. So he'd kind of like have two different You know interesting. He thought of them kind of his two different sets of toms he would integrate them sometimes but Once he switched to double-headed toms for the smaller drums It didn't make sense to have two 12 so he just no jettisoned one And I think he just was really into the sound of the Ludwigs and just wanted everything to sound sort of consistent like one voice Now there's another thing about this kit again, these are minute details, but I'm gonna go deep into this And this is where I'm gonna I really didn't want to speculate on anything I didn't want to say well I think that this is this because I wanted to really just talk to you about Things that I know are factually true or can be proven They were either things that he specifically talked about like for example There's an article in Rhythm Magazine the British drum magazine in 1985 Around the time power windows came out where he describes his his practice kit at home the Gretch kit And he says specifically it's a 12 a 14 and a 20 so I know those are the sizes You know, that's not speculation that it was those sizes, but When I look at pictures of the Ludwig kit from 87 on So I have a pretty good one of my one of my talents One of my like bar tricks is I'm pretty good with certain brands of being able to visually identify Sizes drum sizes. I'm good at Ludwig and I'm good at Gretch Those two companies like I can just look at a kit and because of the the spacing of the lugs and The size of the lugs in relation to the size of the shell I can tell you like for example on a Ludwig kit a 12 an 8 by 12 inch Tom looks completely different than a 9 by 13 and a 10 by 14 They all look really really different even if like I don't see the three of them together I can tell you oh, that's a 9 by 13 because of the way the lugs are spaced and things like that It's just it's just something I have to test that at some point on sure Yeah, yeah, yeah, I will I will I'll put money on my good Okay, I'm that confident about about my ability to do this and I'm you know with floor toms a Ludwig 16 by 16 has a look and it doesn't look like a Ludwig 16 by 18 Now all of his previous kits except for chromie from the 77 kit on he's using 16 by 18 as his floor Tom Now when he did this test of the drums He specifies that the toms were 8 by 12 9 by 13 and a 16 by 16 He says in in this article in modern drummer that it was 16 by 16 floor Tom And I think that he really liked that size and decided when he ordered this kit to get a 16 by 16 Instead of his regular 16 by 18 for his single floor Tom, and I cannot prove that But that's this is one time where I'm gonna say like the speculation But I am quite sure and it's because visually I I'm very confident I can identify a Ludwig 16 by 16 because of the spacing of the lugs and also sound-wise When you listen to hold your fire, there's not a huge pitch difference between So he's got 12 13 15 and then the floor Tom in question Yeah, the the floor Tom on hold your fire sounds higher pitch than the floor Tom on any previous rush album it's a deeper lower pitched and kind of indistinct floor Tom pitch on early on on earlier recordings with the two Toma kits and Live recordings to when you hear like his drum solo when he's playing on the 16 inch floor Tom before you know When he's doing the cowbell thing like on show of hands. It's different man. It's a different sounding drum It's a different pitch in a different articulation than you hear on earlier recording. So I am almost positive That he had a 16 by 16 with his Ludwig kit and not a 16 by 18 Well, thank you. Yeah, I know other people would would disagree and that's cool That's put it in the comments section, you know, yeah, we can debate there. So That's we say the color. Can we yeah? I was just gonna get to that So this kid had a really kind of wacky color. It was it was white basically It's like a white base with apparently a very little hint of pink and And then some sparkles. There's like a little subtle sparkle to the kit Yeah, and there are not a lot of photos where you can really tell so there's an odd photo that that He did a photo shoot when he first got the kit and he still has the concert toms on the left and That photo shoot was used for a Ludwig ad that ran like 87 88 89 and When Ludwig ran that ad for whatever reason they Did a thing that was very popular in the 80s Where they took a black and white version of the photo and then they colorized it and they kind of Colorized it with these sort of pastel colors that were very sort of trendy and very west coasty in the 80s If you look at any 80s material coming from like Los Angeles in like 1987 it's a very sort of pink and Yellow pastel sort of colors and everything sort of wispy and So they did that they gave it that kind of color treatment But when they did that they colored the drums very pink So a lot of people see those photos and think like oh this kit was pink and it wasn't it really was white But it had like this hint of pink and under certain lights It would look pink but really when you see it in like the the live video a show of hands They came out from the hold your fire tour when like white lights are on it. It's just white It's mostly a white kit with like this just very subtle hint of pink, but you don't really see it It's basically a white kit. Yeah, well white has that characteristic of obviously like the wall behind me right now That's a white wall. There's a light on it. It looks great. It's whatever color it exactly. That's right Right how it works. Yeah, and and like a black kit won't really take any color Like you know kind of always look black, you know for the most part and that kit too I think white drums look really great with brat brass plated or gold-related hardware. Oh You know one thing I forgot to mention about the previous Tom a kit that was on the Grayson or pressure tour that he started modifying all of his stands So at that point he was using all Thomas stands for the most part and he started modifying them where he took the tripod base Off of them and had the pipes Basically installed directly onto the the riser that the sort of boards that are on the top of the riser It makes the whole kit look very streamlined because if you look at the photos I think I sent you some of the kit the first like 1983 the when he first started using the the 360 kit at Radio City, there's just a huge sort of like forest of Tripod double brace stands, you know There's just like a thousand of them there and and it's starting to look a little bit busy And I think when he got rid of the bases and started, you know having them sort of screw right into the riser It just made everything look cleaner and and and very cool actually it is So that was all Tom a hardware when he switched to the Ludwig drums He actually switched to a lot of premiere hardware Interestingly a lot of those stands are premiere stands and the hi-hat stand that he switched to was a premiere hi-hat stand And interestingly so Ludwig at that time used they were still using their classic T rods on the base drum The same sort of things, you know that they used in the 50s and 60s and 70s Same T rods that Ringo had on his kid and John Bonham had on his kid For whatever reason Neil took those off and was actually using Premier T rods which were kind of different But you actually look closely you can see premier T rods on the Ludwig base drum Interesting Maybe he picks up some premiere like things he liked on his taste test when he did the five kits and absolutely Yeah, yeah, he also talked about liking him. He did talk about playing a pearl kit, but He said that he liked the pearl free floating snare drum a lot the yeah, that's the free floating snare with the interchangeable shells He said that was a cool. I don't know whether he ever used one or bought one, but he He got more into like different snare drums a little bit later But but he did he didn't mention that drum as being that he thought was cool So did he switch the slingerland is this is his original like favorite snare out of there still there still there Yeah, painted white now. Yeah, that snare remains in the lineup until he switches to DW. That's that's right I remember you saying that yeah, yeah, so The other thing that gets massively upgraded at this point is the electronic setup So he gets deeper into sampling He for the first time gets a proper sampler. He gets in a Kai S900 which was a proper I think it was still 12 bit It wasn't even a 16 bit, but it was a good quality sampler and kind of a studio quality sampler And you got a couple of those and those stored sounds on three point five three point five floppies Which were more reliable than the you know The e-proms probably and he could have a lot more sounds and he started just going crazy sampling all kinds of again, like african and indian and Asian drums Temple blocks he also got into sampling, you know, like noise sounds like you know industrial sort of like hitting pipes and Hitting sheets of metal and all kinds of stuff like that classical percussion and this ties into so Through all of this. He's using previous to this point a glockenspiel on his left Above the timbali is below the concert toms. So he discovers at this point the the company cat kat that make The mallet cat, which is basically an electronic Mario has been on the show and oh the inventor of it. Yeah. Oh, wow. Well, I mean Yeah, I think Neil helped put those guys on the map because I mean, I'd never heard of one I don't think until Neil started playing one But it's basically a two octave or Neils was two octaves basically an electronic marimba that it didn't generate its own sounds It was just a MIDI controller And he would you know use the the sampler to you know as a sound generator So he had all kinds of marimba sounds xylophone sounds all sorts of things sampled That he would that he would play also all of at this point He dropped most of his tuned percussion He kept like one set of wind chimes, but he sampled his glockenspiel. He sampled tubular chimes. He sampled The bell tree the crottles all of the stuff got sampled and he he jettisoned all of those percussion instruments because They were a lot of extra stuff to carry around. They were very hard to mic I mean imagine trying to mic orchestral percussion instruments in an arena in a in a heavy rock show That's not gonna be easy. No So this was like, you know a very easy way to get those things, you know heard properly so he replaced all of that stuff with the samples on the mallet cat and He also changed a few things in that the electronic drum department. He added two more Simmons pads Kind of like basically so what he did was he actually eliminated one of those three Chinese symbols on his right So he got rid of the 20 inch zilch and swish He really didn't use it that much So I don't think he really missed it and in its place under the Wuhan China and the Pang he put these two pads and He could reach them either from the main kit because they're to his right just to the right of his ride symbol or When he's on the back kit, they're over kind of to his left now So he could reach them on either side of the kit So he has more electronic sounds to play with basically at this point more opportunities to trigger samples And then he replaces the clap trap He he samples that sound all of the sounds that he needed that the clap trap was was producing He sampled and he got initially a there's a company called shark that made a trigger pedal basically like a like a You know kind of looks like a modern version of a bass drum pedal kind of looks like one of those Remember the axis based drum pedal. Mm-hmm. It sort of looks like one of those it but with no beater it's just a pedal that does this and triggers electronic sounds again another MIDI controller so cool And then oh actually as a MIDI controller so the pads at this point he ditches the Simmons units and Samples whatever he needs from the Simmons units and then he starts using just the samplers that Kai S900s is a sound source and a Yamaha. I believe it was the PMC 10 was the it's just a trigger to MIDI interface So basically the pads go into the Yamaha Yamaha Trigger to MIDI interface and that assigns, you know, and you MIDI The sampler into that so all of the sampler sounds get assigned via the Yamaha device Into whatever pad you want them to go So that's that's actually for the time a very modern up-to-date sampler like, you know electronic drum setup Yeah, it makes sense to streamline things and put things in and it's like it's like he's shedding his skin of the previous Yeah, yeah huge setup. So so it makes perfect sense. It did get a little more streamlined I think having the tune percussion off of the kit made, you know, certainly sound-wise it made things a little easier for everyone Yeah, and And and you hear the stuff all over hold your fire I'd say probably every song on hold your fire have to think about it I think every song incorporates sampled percussion sounds of one One degree or another and there's a fair amount of mallet cat stuff like there's some spots replace some marimba things and You know, he's just really into this stuff and he wants to use it And he makes it all work really musically into these tunes Yeah, and also you really hear a change in the drum sound on on hold your fire the Ludwigs have It's even more towards that bright crispy Tonality like a lot of articulation and a lot of tone like a really distinct each tom has a very distinct musical note to it And you really hear that all over this record And I think he really did achieve what he wanted also I should say that the Ludwig kit also had the vibraphybing treatment He had the neat the layer of fiberglass put on the inside, you know, I think he achieved what he was looking for he was just looking for crisper cleaner sort of sounds and and it goes with the music to Alex Lifeson was using guitars by a company called signature which made guitars with active pickups which is a very sort of Punchy sound a very direct sort of guitar sound this sort of crisp and jangly guitar sound and I think you know Getty Lee was getting more into using a lot of rich keyboard sounds and I think Neil and Alex both needed to kind of up their sound to get more crispness to sort of cut through Yeah, the big keyboard washes and I think they really they they accomplished that on this record They they they did get through that stuff, you know, they project through the keyboards and yeah He's very methodical and knows what he's looking for and it takes his time and sets it up, right? Yeah, yeah, so a little head change to Neil started using mostly Remo clear emperors on the tops of the toms and Clear diplomats on the bottoms of the toms. So these are all the double-headed toms But he also sometimes you see some photos and footage of him where he's got an Evans clear head on the on the tops And I don't know whether that would have been the Evans UNO 58 at the time or if it was another Evans But it was like a thinner Evans head than he was using before I think he was again trying to go for more of a an open sound and Was not using as quite as thick heads. I mean an emperor is still a thick head But yeah Now did he paint it black was the kit itself? Is this a different Ludwig kit that I'm looking at the next kit? Yeah for presto. Yeah, okay So that is actually the exact same kit, but it's not black. It's actually a very very dark purple. Oh, I see Plum finish also looks really amazing with the brass plated hardware I think this is a really beautiful look for this kit but it is actually the exact same kit and the only thing really that changed with this kit was he ditched the Simmons pads and started using D drum pads and I think he just said it was because They felt a little better to play And maybe the Simmons look by that point. This is like 1990 Maybe the Simmons look the hexagonal pads were maybe seemed a little dated at the time. I'm not really sure You think that they're so iconic that you're sort of stuck in that Era but again now they're kind of cool. What's old is new when you see that right nowadays, but yeah Yeah, I got it must and it looks like a company paint works did it from your looking at your sure Yeah, so so yeah all of the finishes up through presto were done at the percussion center of Fort Wayne Although Bob Milhurat told me that he was pretty sure that Tom did So when he did the when he had the candy apple red kid He actually had that refinished a few times and that initially Percussion Center Fort Wayne did that finish, but then at a later date actually Tom. I did it He would send it back to the Tom a factory and But yeah, and then I guess the white finish was done at the percussion center But then paint works which was another company, I guess that did drum finishes They ended up doing the presto kit and they did they did the other You know Ludwig kits up until he switched to to DW at that point everything was done in house at DW But yeah, so the presto kit is basically the same that only big equipment change We get for the presto album is that Neil started experimenting with a lot of different snare drums Now he never really talked about this. I Assume he was recording with them with the slinger Lynn old faithful snare on You know these records were talking about but I actually don't know Because he didn't really talk about it. He talked about using the you know loving the slinger Lynn snare and using it live and we see it in the Photos from the permanent waves album sessions and moving pictures And and signals, but maybe he was using different snares already but he confirmed in a modern drummer interview that he got a There was a company called solid that made solid shell snare drums And I believe this company actually had something to do with Johnny craviado It may have been his company before he started working with DW and then ultimately started craviado drums Yeah, so he had a snare. I believe it was four by 14. It was a piccolo snare Made of a wood called cocoa Bolo. I hope I'm pronouncing that right is a very very hard an African hardwood that's very very dense and He had this this piccolo snare that he said he used on Much of the presto album and you hear it you listen to presto I mean immediately this album has a completely different snare drum vibe than anything you've heard from Neil before much higher pitched much sort of snappier and very very articulate and It's a really interesting snare sound and it's on much of the record. He in a modern drummer interview at the time He said that he also had a camco snare that he used a bit on that record now It was actually a tama camco. Oh, that's interesting without going too deep in the history Tama owned the camco name and Briefly resurrected the camco brand in the late 70s. I didn't know they made dry We all know about the pedal or right now We all know but most people know about the pedal and DW got the hardware and they're the tooling or whatever But I didn't know they were they had resurrected The maybe maybe that came up in the camco episode with Joe Luomo, but I Yeah camco are more famous for you know, the drums. They made in the 50s and 60s We're amazing drums. Yeah, and I guess into the 70s too But but yeah, they kind of there's a whole weird history with Tama and DW. Yes camco But but yeah, Tama did resurrect briefly the camco line and actually to get back to our jazz heroes Elvin Jones was their primary endorser. He was he had a camco kid in the late 70s. Yeah, and when that kind of faded away Elvin became a Tama endorser after that and use since we're stars and then grand stars, but I guess Tama had given Neil a camco snare drum and He mentioned in this interview that you know, I've had this drum for a while And suddenly it sounded great to me and I used it on a few tracks on presto. So I don't know what tracks He used which drum on I mean I hear, you know, it's it's all this sort of high-pitched really bright snare So and with you and mixing it could be this snare. Yeah, like this. Yeah, right, right So that's the big equipment change. I think I would say He's still utilizing, you know Samples and things like that but not maybe not quite as much as he did on hold your fire He kind of gradually starts using samples and things a little less hold your fire is kind of like the the pinnacle of Neil's Electronic use I think that's probably the record with the most electronic drums action happening on it. Cool. Um, so The next chapter is kind of interesting it still involves the presto kit, but so around so presto tour ends in the summer of 1990 and the next thing that we see Neil doing while they're actually preparing for the Roll the Bones album is Neil appears at one of the earlier Buddy Rich Memorial Scholarship concerts and this happens. I think it was in This is spring or early summer of 1991 Neil traveled to New York and played a few tunes with the Buddy Rich big band and this was Documented on video and yeah, I put out the video. Yeah, so Neil is using a variation of his Presto purple Ludwig kit and what's funny about this is I remember Hearing about this concert. I remember it was advertised and modern drummer and I didn't go to the concert I was you know in high school in Pittsburgh at the time, but I remember talking to my drummer friends and We were speculating like what is Neil gonna do and I remember one of my friends saying Oh, I bet he's gonna go up there and play big band versions of a bunch of rush tunes And I remember being really surprised when I saw that he was actually playing Jazz playing Buddy Rich arrangements. Yeah, I think he plays it really. Um, yeah So so what was really cool to me too was wondering, okay What kind of kid is he gonna use is he gonna bring the whole kid? Is he gonna what's he gonna do? And he actually kind of went to a Buddy Rich ish kid or a jazz ish kit where he basically did a four-piece version of his regular kit Same basic simple setup. He got rid of one of the 16-inch crashes and on it's a lot of 20 inch crash Yeah, he has three crashes splash the cowbells the ride and one China the the 20 inch Wuhan and But otherwise, it's it's just a four-piece kit and this is again. I have to mention 16 inch floor tom. I guarantee you that's a 16 inch floor tom. That is not an 18 inch floor tom 1316 now. Oh and the slinger and snare the bass drum, however That is not the 14 by 24 inch bass drum that is the normal bass drum from the polter fire Presto Ludwig kid that I have only recently discovered is actually a 22 inch bass drum And I I don't know why I didn't realize this earlier But the tom bracket the the the bass drum bracket on the top of the bass drum that holds the post for the rack tom Is a completely different unit than what's on the presto kit So the presto kit on the right bass drum has the tom out as a tom up But it's a it's sort of a superstar era bracket on the bass drum on the Buddy Rich concert he's got a much larger more modern tom a bracket and I also again, I'm pretty good at identifying drum sizes and it looks like a 14 by 24 to me It doesn't look like a 20. Sorry 14 by 22 doesn't look like a 24 He still wanted to play his double bass language on this concert So for the first time he uses a double pedal and interestingly he picked for whatever reason a Yamaha double pedal it's a it's a State of the art Yamaha at the time with a double chain drive and I used to have this I actually still have it The single pedal version of that pedal and it's a really great feeling pedal It still is and mine is like 30 years old at least at this point. It still plays great so Neil had the double pedal version of this and Around the same time he's played he plays that concert and around the same time he's working on the Roll the Bones album and I don't know if he was inspired by the little kit that he played or if it was again I mean he talks about in interviews at the time the same process of reevaluating You know, why am I doing what I'm doing? What if we change things up? What if we swap things around and around the time of writing Roll the Bones? he completely changes the kit up and He gets rid of one of the bass drums and he uses a single bass drum with a double pedal and with the Tom Tom's He basically takes the 16 inch floor Tom from his right in the normal position And puts it on the left to the left of the hi-hat and then puts all of the Tom's one position down so He used to have 12 13 15 and a 16 inch floor Tom Or an 18. Yep, right 12 13 15 Floor Tom So now the floor Tom's on the left. So that same group of four is now 10 12 13 15 and He has his tech Larry Allen drill the 15 inch Tom for floor Tom brackets and They they use that this is still the plum kit now Yeah, Roll the Bones was recorded on the plum Ludwig kit The the kit that came for the tour the Roll the Bones tour is actually not the kit used on the recording That's sure the recording was done on the plum kit also Ludwig Obviously, but all of the Tom's shift down a size. So now he's got six eight and then double-headed Tom's 10 12 13 15 inch floor Tom 16 inch floor Tom on the left and I Believe I'm not sure I don't have verification But he may have used the 24 inch bass drum for the recording But I suspect he had this 22 floating around which he used on the buddy rich concert I think he maybe used a 22 on Roll the Bones, but I can't verify that. No, that's a huge change going to the one drum It's in with the double yeah, it seems like and going, you know the mallet cat and he's not afraid to shrink things down And no, he's not afraid to take chances. He's not afraid to like I mean people You know, it was a big deal. I remember at the time It was a big deal, you know, think about it going from a double bass kit to single bass drum With what the double pedal was a really big deal Because if you look at rock bands in the 70s and 80s nearly everybody was using double bass drums It was really a thing especially hard rock and and metal, you know other than like I mean Nico McBrain always use single bass drum There are some exceptions, but I mean you look at MTV in the 80s You see a rock band or a hair metal band. It's double bass drums always pretty much a thing, right? Yeah You know, it looks awesome, but it looks great. Yeah, Bobby Blotzer Tommy Lee Lars old Rick Blas Elias Rob a few so Mickey D. I can name all of these guys, you know that I used to see Frankie Penali Double bass drum all all around, you know Fred Curry from Cinderella I mean I could probably go on Did maybe need help change the tide to oh now it's okay to do a single pet, you know bass drum possibly Yeah, also Grunge was coming in and drum sets were Yes, and I think to the left hand floor Tom I can't find I can't think of an interview where Neil says this specifically, but You know Dave Weckl hit the scene Dave Weckl started to really blow up around 85 86 the first chicory electric band record comes out in 1986 and Weckl used a floor Tom on his left just to the left of the hi-hat as well as one or two on his right and That was something that he got from his one of his teachers Gary Chester who was a famous studio drummer Gary had this whole approach of the sort of ambidextrous approach where he wanted to have All of the stuff that was here He also wanted to have here so that he could have a ride and a snare drum here a ride in the snare drum here He had a hi-hat on his left, but also a hi-hat on his right a floor Tom on his right, but also on his left So that he could just have a lot of possibilities He didn't have to reach over if he wanted to play the floor Tom, you know if he's playing on the hi-hat he could You know he'd have it here so Weckl Weckl did that and incorporated that extensively in his vocabulary in this time period and There were other drummers that copied him Steve Smith did a left-hand floor Tom thing around that time And I suspect maybe Neil was inspired by that Neil maybe saw a video of Dave Weckl or went to see Dave Weckl We don't know but I don't think it it may have come out of nowhere But I I suspect maybe he saw that Weckl was doing this and thought I'll try this Yeah, he wasn't intimidated by the new guy. He said oh, let me try that and exactly yeah inspired by I mean that was you know Inspiration man. I mean that's that's that's what it's all about. Yeah, and I'll tell you he came up with a whole bunch of really interesting patterns fills Incorporating this left-hand floor Tom the 16 inch floor Tom on his left There's a tune called bravado on roll the bones that has some really really great patterns Where he's utilizing, you know doing doing stuff with the left-hand floor Tom Almost using it as like a ghost note leading into a snare drum backbeat, you know I was like Boombap Yeah, like that kind of language or fills where and you know his left hand could go over to the floor Tom and have Offbeat 16th notes happening on this floor Tom It's just like all kinds of new colors and and ideas and patterns that you couldn't really do any other way other than having this Big drum on your left. So for the tour he gets a new kit. He gets this new Ludwig kit And the sizes are slightly different that the the smaller Tom shrink He goes to basically like standard size. I mentioned the six eight and ten For the previous Ludwig kit were sort of like power toms now the six eight and ten are sort of standard size I know the ten was a seven by ten and this the eight was probably it was probably Five by six and six by eight seven by ten. I think those were the sizes. I'm not a hundred percent actually But they were standard size small Tom's He still got clear emperors on these Tom's and I'll tell you something. I see over and over again on forums on Facebook groups talking about Neil Over and over again. I hear so many drummers say the Ludwig sound is my favorite sound That was the best sound Neil ever got Hmm, and I think that the this particular Ludwig kit The live kit on the Roll the Bones tour was the best sound personally. I think that's the best sound he ever got that's my favorite Neil sound and I mean, it's it's yeah There's something about the clarity that it was the perfect sort of combination of clarity tonality depth low-end sort of meat and weight Just a really really fantastic sounding kit and it just really suited his touch I think it was the perfect sort of marriage of the sound of the kit and his Touch and sort of approach to hitting the drums. Well, he got what he wanted. He he tried things out and yes, didn't it? It worked out. Yeah, absolutely That's good to know though for people out there to listen to what to do their own taste test of Neil and see what they Yeah, yeah, totally, you know listen to the lot listen to the to the studio recordings But also listen to the live recordings are a lot of bootlegs and things you can hear on YouTube You know, you can get a sense of what those drums sounded like live and and for me That's I think that's probably my favorite my favorite studio sound is is Probably on the next album counterparts, which is I believe was recorded on the exact same kit so there was something special about that that Blue shadow kit and that was another actually that was a sort of a custom finish And I don't know whether Ludwig did that or paintworks did that but Ludwig later came out with a version of blue shadow But it looked pretty different than Neil's kit Neil's blue shadow was a darker blue The the sort of catalog version of blue shadow doesn't quite look like Neil's did I don't know Yeah, what happened there were the custom job or something. Yeah, I think so maybe done by paintworks again I'm not actually sure. Yeah, that kid again was was had the vibraphy being treatment and But yeah, really the big change is that shift of the toms that the Jettison of the second bass drum and the shift of the toms and the left-hand floor tom So we moved to counterparts counterparts seems to have been recorded on that same kit The only thing that changes is he started using actually there's more Electronic drums more sampling on counterparts than there was on Roll the Bones for whatever reason he kind of got back into it a little bit and starts using again some more kind of like you know African and Asian drum sounds and and also some sort of like industrial like, you know weird sounds Metallic sounds and he also actually starts triggering with his left foot trigger. He starts triggering a tambourine sample He uses this on a number of songs on on counterparts. He uses it on Animate it's on I'm spacing a bit on what other tunes cut to the chase. It's on a bunch you hear it on You know, it's usually his left foot Except for one tune called cold fire where on the verses He actually goes between riding on the high hat playing eighth notes on the high hat And then for part of the verse he plays eighth notes on this tambourine And I actually don't know whether in the studio if he was triggering that sound or what but when they when they come around to The tour for counterparts. He actually has a rhythm tech tambourine Mounted above his ten inch Tom so that he can ride on it to make that section of the tune happen Now there was a different kit. He got a new kit for the counterparts tour And this kids very very similar to the Roll the Bones kit except it's a new finish it's a it's a finish that he refers to as black cherry and from for, you know Every picture you see of it. It basically looks like a black kit But there are some some photos of the kit that are recent that kit now lives in the Canadian Museum of History, which is in Quebec history. I mean yes, that's true. Yeah, so he has on Andrew's page There's a link to basically the manifest of all of the drums that were in the the counterparts tour kit And there's a photograph of each actually numerous photographs of each drum and each piece of hardware and in these studio Photographs they took for the museum. You can kind of see the hint of red That's in that black finish and these were like really great really well done paint jobs You know same thing with the pink kit, you know where the white kit with the hint of pink like they're kind of like They kind of look like one color But when you get up close you could see there's something else in there and like a lot of really fancy cars have that sort of thing Totally, you know, I was gonna say it's it's very much like that where it's like a master painter is doing this It's not so Neil would refer to these as hot rod finishes And I think he was inspired by the type of finishes people would do the custom paint jobs people would do in the 50s And 60s on hot rod cars. Yeah, and stuff like candy apple red And actually Fender guitars utilized a lot of you know, so-called like hot rod finishes Into yeah, like they did a candy apple red and Lake Placid blue and these other sort of finishes that were associated with With cars at the time. So I one thing I forgot to mention With the presto kit there is one other change with the presto kit and that is that He stops using the second slingerland snare with the back kit and he gets a Ludwig Piccolo snare He doesn't really play the back kit all that much at this point It's only on a couple of tunes live But he uses I I'm not sure actually if it's a three by 13 or a three by 14 But I think it's a three by 13 Ludwig Piccolo snare starting with the presto tour And he continues using that on the Roll the Bones tour and the counterparts tour Another thing that he does is he starts using on in the middle of the Roll the Bones tour He adds another snare drum on his left to the left of the the six inch tom And that's a funny snare called the Rimo Legato snare it's a it's basically like a piccolo snare, but what it sort of is is like It was it was a marching type snare. It was you know marching stairs are usually deep Yeah, it was basically a shallow version of a marching snare with a super tight thick head on it and I don't Yeah, Kevlar head and I don't know really what the idea was behind it But it had this really wild sort of almost sounds like a pistol shot kind of a sound to it um And he used that as sort of like a little effect snare And that's something that he continues it later on with all the dw kits as he uses a sort of small secondary snare is like a little effect snare up to his left And that's kind of a thing that this Rimo Legato snare kind of starts that trend And yeah, I guess um the counterparts kit the only other thing I'll say about that and again This is touching into this sort of speculation Like I I don't really want to say You know, I don't want to speculate on stuff But there's some controversy over whether the presto that sorry the counterparts kit had a 22 inch bass drum or a 24 inch bass drum So the roll the bones kit we know out of 22 And that is likely what he recorded counterparts on but um There is Sort of a kit manifest that was done for modern drummer Um, there was an interview with him in modern drummer around the time counterparts came out And they talk about the counterparts tour kit and there's some interesting things about that kit um According to that manifest He went from I mentioned the 10-inch tom tom being a 7 by 10 apparently on the counterparts kit. It's an 8 by 10 And I would say visually that looks like it was actually true that for whatever reason He ordered an 8 by 10 counterparts kit a 8 by 10 Tom for the counterparts kit the 12 by 15 inch floor tom on the roll the bones kit According to that manifest is now a 13 by 15 inch tom tom And again The few pictures of the counterparts kit from live shows and stuff. I think that's actually right. It looks Different than the counterpart the the roll the bones kit. It looks like he just wants to change it up Well, it's a heavier record Oh, I see it's they go back to kind of this heavier sound thicker guitar sounds They were kind of influenced by nirvana and pearl jam The heavier sound of grunge and seattle sound garden that music at the time they kind of It's a great album I love this record and the sound of this record is amazing and the drum sound is fantastic And I think maybe to capture some of that power live He went with a little bit deeper toms And I think that the bass drum it would make sense Because of that Musically for what they were doing that he might want to go up a size on the bass drum And when I look at pictures of the counterparts kit, it looks to me like a 24 inch bass drum a 16 by 24 I should note Now What's very interesting is I think when he had that kit made he had a 24 inch bass drum made and a 22 Because when you go to the uh, canadian museum of history the manifest of the kit in in that On that website That is a different bass drum everything is right everything is the counterparts kit as I know it But the bass drum is a different bass drum and they say it's a 22 inch bass drum And it looks like a 22 inch bass drum and the way that I know It's a different bass drum from the kitty toured with is that the kitty toured with which you also see I think I sent you a promo shot of that kit. Yes, the blue front bass drum head Notice that the tom bracket On the bass drum is a Ludwig tom bracket. That's like kind of the traditional Ludwig tom bracket Basically the same one they've used since the mid 60s when they started sort of doing a double tom post um The counterparts kit on the canadian museum of history website. That's a Ludwig modular um bass drum bracket that the tom holder is going into Yeah, so that is I think that to me that tells me that's a different drum Same color drum same color. Yeah, so I think maybe he ordered two bass drums Not sure which one he wanted to use and ended up using the 24 on the tour that's speculation I don't know if anybody knows Please tell me please leave comments or or contact us Let us know because I don't know the the answer to this I don't know What the story is between 22 inch and 24 inch bass drums between basically the buddy the burning for buddy 91 thing and all the way through the counterparts tour. So please Tell me I want to know Someone will probably know and let you know and this is like, you know, if they're this far into it and So speaking of counterparts, I am gonna brag a little bit. I got to after the counterparts tour I got to meet neil in new york city and this is my original counterpart CD that I bought the day it came out And neil actually signed this for me. Oh man. That's incredible. He he correct me if I'm wrong, but he's You don't get many signatures from neil, right? He was a little bit more elusive kind of a very shy very Hard to get. Yeah, he was very awkward around fans if fans kind of did the normal like, oh my god I'm such a huge fan. I love your playing. You're such a huge influence on me. He would just get really like, oh god This is so uncomfortable and he would avoid mega kit Yeah, he would yeah, he'd hide behind his giant drums and and he would try to avoid those kind of encounters Um, I met him at one of the buddy rich scholarship concerts. There was one actually on my 21st birthday in 1994 And um, I was able to get backstage My drum teacher at the time john riley and I went backstage and um, and neil was there He wasn't playing he was just giving a speech But I got to meet him and talked to him for A while after I initially calmed down and kind of approached him as though I didn't really care that much about him I just kind of started asking him some questions And he was very nice and he signed my counterpart cd, which is still a very fun memento to have I'm sure on the inside you're freaking out, but you're kind of like, oh, whatever. It's neil I was trying to keep it together. Yeah I was trying to keep it together to try to just like, okay. I'm just you know I know how to have a conversation with somebody. I'm just going to try to have a conversation Um, but he was very nice. He actually very when he talked to him like a normal person He was super friendly and chatty Yeah, which was really fun. So um And what was interesting is at that buddy rich concert in 94 He was in new york to do that concert and then had scheduled that week after that concert I want to say what might have been on like a sunday or something Because the next week he was going to go in and take his first lessons with freddy gruber He'd been hearing about freddy gruber and really wanted to study with him and um, you know This is well documented many places, but freddy got neil inspired neil to really Change his everything his technique his Sort of physical approach to the kit and the drum set completely changes Andy switches again to another drum company switches to dw and a completely new setup And um, I think that's gonna have to wait for part three. Yeah, it's like I thought we were gonna do it all in this one But not a chance not a chance Depending on how if things get added or whatever. I mean, we're almost two hours into this Oh, I'm sorry. I know like, you know, it's like I think it's great I can't I felt like I can't I can't leave out the details of like, you know What kind of sampler he used or what ply shells the Ludwig super classics were what heads you use, you know And I'm still skipping things. I'm not talking about the little hand The fans that he had on his kit to dry his hands off between tunes I'm not talking about the drum key that he had mounted on his base drum hoop You know, there's these little details. He had an ash tray mounted on the left bass drum Uh on the candy apple red kit. I could go into detail about those things. I'm skipping. I'm actually skipping things This is me being concise. So I'm sorry. It's still going on way too long No, it's it's not For people listening, it's not that like obviously and paul knows it's not that it's going on too long It's that you don't want to start something that's a an iconic Era similar to what happened in part one You don't want to start the dw era which a lot of people which I grew up with Yeah, two hours into this because I want to make sure people people can get to it. So we will do a part three Uh, I'll I'll find out if they come out in order I may have one in between just to kind of break it up and give me some time to edit a two hour mega needle episode But um, I think it's awesome. I rather I mean, this is what I love about the show and and topics like this is This will be on Platforms and youtube hopefully forever As a resource so I'd rather get it, you know, almost in the end probably five or six hours worth of neil You know, I mean considering that this is a band that played very long songs. Maybe it's appropriate You know, this is not the most concise band in the world. So maybe it should not be the most There's just a lot. There's a lot to talk about and I I hope that drummers enjoy this kind of detail the way that I do but Uh, you know, I just think it's all really cool and I'm really excited to talk about it So I'm yeah, I really appreciate you giving me the platform to just completely geek out on this stuff My pleasure. So uh, everyone listening. Thank you. Um, and I'll very briefly say if you're still listening to this at this point Thank you to everyone who um bought my friend Barry james book to help him with his cancer treatments I've gotten a lot of emails a lot of people have bought the book. Um, And if you want to get your hands on it, Barry was an original one of the he's one of the last living students of George Lawrence stone and it's counting stick controllers the book shoot me an email Drum history podcast gmail.com and we'll get you all set up with that. But um, so paul We will do it again. We will do part three and we will bring it on home and um, I'm honored to have you're the first three parter On the show and I think it's great orange county had One part one part two and then q drum which sort of goes with it. So yeah, yeah Well, it's it's a part three part is a dubious distinction, but you know, I'll take it It's I'm I'm glad it's you so um paul. Thank you for being here and we will see you on part three Yes, thank you so much part