Zombie Prom is a campy tale of teen angst set in the nuclear 1950’s. The soundtrack has its roots in the 50’s but the playing style on the cast recording has a modern flair. For the first time I was able to focus on more core kit and had very few extra curricular activities to worry about in terms of percussion and special effects.
I used a full, but a slightly smaller kit, than In The Heights. Read on for all the details!
When I heard that I’d be playing alongside a percussion player for In The Heights, I had visions of a simplified drum setup with minimal program changes to worry about. This was a short-lived dream, however, as the drum part has plenty of incidental percussion and various electronic and sampled sounds that needed to find a home on my kit.
In the end, this turned out to be my largest kit yet thanks to a Roland TMC-6 trigger-to-MIDI converter that provided 6 additional trigger inputs (and at least that many headaches).
Read on for all the fun details!
It seems that my rig gets more complicated with each show and preparing for the PYT production of Legally Blonde was no exception. We did not have a percussionist for the show, so in addition to drums, I doubled the percussion part where possible. This involved adding parts for triangle, tambourine, crotale, mark tree (a.k.a. the “broken glass” patch), bodhran and timpani in various tunings throughout the show.
Covering the additional percussion parts resulted in 82 program changes throughout the show and over 50 custom kits that needed to be programmed.
My Rig for Pirates was pretty simple (see picture below). The two toms did overtime as snare and timpani with the cymbal triggers serving up triangle and crash cymbal sounds. The BT-1 trigger was a nice addition to deliver the bass drum without having to deal with a foot pedal, but still allowing me to deliver simultaneous bass drum and crash hits.
It was my first time using the Roland BT-1 “Bar” trigger and I have to say it worked very well. I was able to get a range of dynamics and the small footprint was ideal for this show. There is some setup required on the TD-20 :
be sure to select the PAD-1 trigger type and set the RIM patch or it will bounce between the head/rim trigger sounds.
I also had to disable the rim trigger on the PD-100 it was mounted to so I didn’t get timpani sounds during the aggressive “Cat Like Tread” sequence.
zazula.me 
