My Gear

Jeff's Music Site

The equipment I use depends on what kind of job I am playing. For any standard rock or country situation, I will tend to keep it simple and use my 5-piece Slingerland kit. This kit consists of a 24" bass drum, 8x12 and 9x14 rack toms, and a 16x16 floor tom. All are in a red satin flame finish.

If I am working a pop or top40 situation I may include my Roland SPD-11 or SPD-20 to the Slingerland acoustic kit to give me a little flexability with the sound. I also have all the drums fitted with D-drum triggers so I can get electronic drum sounds with my Alesis D4 drum module while playing the acoustic drums!

I also have an old Zickos clear acrylic kit that I will use for any larger scale event. This is a double kit that includes two 14x22" bass drums, 14x9" and 14x10" rack toms, and an 18x18" floor tom. I usually use a Ludwig 10x14" deep concert snare drum with this set-up.

Of course for any dance or techno situation, I will use my electronic kit which consists of my Roland SPD-20 midi'ed into an Alesis DM-Pro sound module. this set-up also uses several other pads for one or two kicks, snare, hi-hat, floor tom, and crash cymbal positions. Of course the cymbals (and the drums) can be programmed to trigger any of the 1600+ sounds available with the DM-Pro, as well as the 700+ sounds available with the SPD-20.

Sequencing is alot more than just having a computer play drum or keyboard parts. Although these functions can be invaluable in themselves, a sequencer can also change patches on all the electronic instruments, run the band's light show, control the house mix, and deliver various cues to the performers, all in real time.

I use a Dell Inspiron B130 as the computer driving my MIDI sequencing system. I have Cakewalk Audio Pro 9.0 loaded and the machine is directly connected to my Midiman MidiSport 2x2 USB midi port. This allows me to control my own drum patches, play background percussion parts directly off my DM-Pro, play extra percussion or keyboard parts from my Korg 05R/W or Nanosynth, play bass parts from my Nanobass, drive the band's light show, control the house mix on my 24 channel Yamaha 01V digital mixing console, all this in real time.

Over the years I have accumulated alot of sound gear. Sound gear collection has always been kind of a passion for me.

As for the heart of the system, I have 2 mixing consoles, a Mackie 24-4 and a Yamaha 01V digital console with the 8 input I/O card added.
The Mackie is a nice clean, quiet mixer for general purpose mixing situations. Any soundman worth his lunch is going to be familiar with this console.
The Yamaha is quite a different animal, however. It uses digital technology to route and process its signals. As soon as a signal goes into one of its inputs, it is immediately converted to a digital representation and all filtering and other modifications are done to the signal in this form. The advantage is that there are no analog filters used so no coloration or distortion is introduced into the signal.
The Yamaha is also controllable via MIDI and has 99 memory locations to store entire mixes. It also contains most all the outboard gear needed. Internal are compressors, effects units, dynamics processors as well as four band, fully parametric EQ's.

For amplification I use Crown. I have always used Crown. They have always been extremely dependable, clean and quiet.
Driving the subs is a Crown Machrotech 2400 spitting out a solid 800 watts per side into the 4 ohm load.
The midrange is driven by an older Crown PSA-2. This amp is rated at about 450 watts per side into the 4 ohm load.
As for the tweets, I use a Crown DC300-A amp pushing about 250 watts per channel into the 4 ohm load.
The amps are all driven by a Behringer 3400 24dB/octave crossover and the subs are optionally driven with a DBX 120 sub harmonic synth to really solidify the bottom.

The actual subwoofers are 4 Peavey L-118 front loaded 18" cabinets with Black Widow drivers. They definately shake the floor!!
My midrange cabinets are composed of 2 2-15" McCalley cabinets loaded with JBL E-140 drivers. You can't beat older JBL speakers for delivering clean sound in the crucial midrange frequencies!
I use a combination Reinkus Heinz and Yamaha for the high end. The Reinkus Heinz horns are of the Manta Ray configuration with a relatively narrow dispersion of 60º off axis to get the high freq sound to the back of the room! They are loaded with 200 watt Reinkus Heinz compression drivers. The Yamaha are smaller 90º horns, passively crossed at 2K for covering the dance floor more effectively.