Palace's Matt Hodges - GEAR MASTERS Ep. 464

Hey I'm Matt from Palace, I play drums, I'm going to talk you through the kit. So right here we've got a 14 inch Tama snare, got a little bit of dampening going on here just to keep it a little tighter. I usually like to tune it a little bit high so the skin is quite tight and you get some nice response from the stick, lots of sort of rolls and stuff, it feels good to play. And yeah this is actually a higher one, it's not my own but it's a cool colour, it's a cool vibe so yeah I'm very happy with it, sounds great. We've got a 12 inch rack tom here, a 16 inch floor tom and a 22 inch kick. This is actually a maple kit although usually I play a Butch Bubinga but this is a higher kit for this tour but the maple kit sounds amazing, it's super warm and really boomy and big which is a real thing for our sound. We've got some Remo Ambassador coated heads here, I like to play coated, they're just a bit warmer, last a lot longer than the single ply clear. The floor tom I like to keep pretty deep and open and boomy so it really kind of rings out and it's really like deep and resonant and then for the rack tom just somewhere in between that complements the snare and the floor tom really. And on the kick we've got a Remo Power Stroke, it's a clear one here, it's got some really nice attack and the rings around the outside give it some nice little dampening so it feels really good to play that one. We've got an Istanbul, this is a Sindhi Blackman signature on 16 inch crash, it's very like quick and it's got a quick decay but it just sounds awesome and I've got this little chain on here to give it a little bit more kind of resonance, it sort of rings out a little bit more, it just sounds pretty cool and kind of complements the sound of the other cymbals because it's a little bit different, these are much more washy, this is much quicker. These are some vintage Sabian hi-hats that I picked up in a drum shop in London, I don't even know what they are but they just sound amazing and they feel really good to play so it's super kind of faded, I can't really make anything out on them but I've had these a really long time. Right here we've got a Zildjian K Dark Crash 16 inch, this is my main crash cymbal, right here Zildjian K Ride 20 inch and then the Dark Crash 18 inch on this side and I've got another little sizzler here, slightly different one to the one on this side but it's very similar, I mean actually this one was insanely expensive for what it is, these things are considering it's basically a bath chain, this is like the Rolls Royce of sizzlers based on the price, let me tell you. I just like the sound of the sizzles on these sides and then these ones are just nice and washy and open. So the kick pedal I've got here is my own, it's an Iron Cobra, Tamiya Iron Cobra, I've had it a really long time, it's just nice to be super familiar with the spring tension and all the settings on it so when I play it it just always feels consistent and the same so I always travel with my pedal, I've added this little strip of skateboard grip tape on top which just adds a little bit of grip which is cool and yeah I've been playing this pedal a long time so I'm just super familiar. I've got these Promark 5As, pretty standard to be honest but the Promark ones I just feel they're just a great weight, they feel really nice to play but yeah nothing too out of the ordinary there, pretty standard but they feel great. I've also got these mallets here which are lots of sort of cymbal rolls and vibey stuff and then I use a hot rod for a couple of songs on the hi-hat just to make it a bit lighter, a bit softer and the stick on the snare and hot rod on the hi-hat just for a bit of variation. That's it with the sticks. For the electronics I've got an SPD here but what I really use it for is just triggering For a couple of songs in the set we've got some kind of atmospheric noises so I trigger those in the song and play with the metronome so they come in at the right points in the song. I don't use the pads for any drum sounds as such, it's just for triggering noises in a couple of songs. So the way it's set up on here is I have two WAV files, one is metronome and one is music and they're both triggered to start at the same time when I hit one of the pads. So I don't use the metronome built in to the SPD and I don't have it coming from front of house, I trigger it here, the WAVs are saved onto here so they trigger at the same time. And then this is a little mixing desk, Behringer mixing desk that I use for my ears. So I don't have wireless ears, mine are wired, it goes right here. So I'm plugged in with everything drilled into my brain so I've got all the sound of the band, the backing tracks on the SPD as well as the click track coming into my ears. I can control the click track level right here so I can change if it's feeling a bit intense or whatever, I can control the volume of the click here and then I've got my input for the sound of the rest of the band here and master volume here. So that is my setup. So you can find us at wearepalace.com and our social media handles at We Are Palace.