Arc Iris' Ray Belli - GEAR MASTERS Ep. 189

[Applause] hey I'm Rey and I play drums in our Kairos and I'm here to tell you a little bit about my gear so let's start with the drums themselves this is a vintage Slingerland kit I believe it's from 1970 I'm not sure exactly what the model is but the sizes are twenty by sixteen kick drum which I'm very much a huge family 20 inch kick drums are my favorite and this one sounds amazing there's no front head on it which is something that kind of developed over the years it's very very low I'm not sure how well the sound translates but I've got a power stroke three Remo head on it yeah so it just has a really low pitch but it simultaneously has a really nice tone and I think that's because the shells are actually quite thin I think they're like three ply shells whereas nowadays most drums I don't know upwards of nine and twelve anyway three so there's the kick drum the this is a separate thing so I'll talk about the orange drums first this is a 13 by mm not sure 13 by something rack tom and 14 by 16 floor tom so they're only one inch apart a lot of times you'll see like a twelve inch rack Tom which is smaller than this plus a 16 inch floor tom which is bigger than this --see so these kind of bring the tones closer together which I like and they both have evany Remo evany Emperor's on them they're somewhat for me they're somewhere in between clear and coated heads so I'll just give them a whack they have like a really nice resonance but they still have warmth and cutting power and on this this is a 1950s WFL snare drum since ludwig before it became ludwig basically and again just has an emperor it's pretty standard fare but what's one thing that I do quite often is I have my main snare sound and then I actually use this quite a lot which is just a cutout of an old drum head it completely changed the sound so I get like a fat electronic kind of sounding thing so just again to hear the difference the the snare is a 14 inch 14 by 5 I think I think it's a 14 by 5 and now let me go on to the cymbals so this is a company that you might not know they're called a media it's based out of New Jersey they're a smaller cymbal company they've only been around for about five years maybe six or seven but not very long and I got hooked up with them at the basic drum convention back in 2000 fifteen I think I grew up in New Jersey and their headquarters happens to be in New Jersey the company's based in Turkey that's where their American headquarters and their amazing symbols they're they have lots of kind of experimental models so for instance this ride cymbal and of you can see it's actually quite wobbly and bendable yeah it has like a floppy shape and that gives it a really intense kind of wash but it's just so brilliantly designed that it also has a lot of definition so it's very clash crash shovel but it also has a lot of stick clarity that you'd get from a dry or cymbal [Music] there's just so many tones in there which I really like it's been my primary ride symbol for since since I got it 15 this is pretty standard oh by the way this is 22 inches 22 inches this is just an ordinary 16 inch dark thin crash cymbal it's called the old school series let's give it a whack so it's kind of kind of in and out you just hit it there it is and it kind of goes away and I have these high hats they're called the dervish series they're also on the drier darker side so yeah overall I go for a darker kind of cymbal sound all the sin of a fairly thin pin is in as they say and that's basically it there's one more thing which I can't demonstrate in its entirety because it has some electronics going through our keyboardist amp this right here is a contact pickup which I run through a DL for pedal right around over here so this when it's all hooked up it gives me a amplification and delay on the hi-hat rod just for one song that I play or the beat is something like so it's just a neat little tone that I get now you can use your imagination or just pretend that it's amplified and have some delay on it and I think that's it my pedals are both DWS I got a three thousand here it's the best hundred twenty something dollars you can spend and a five thousand but for the hi-hat and that's basically it Vader I love Vader drumsticks if I play two smaller rooms I generally use seven A's have one here they have a they have a barrel tip as opposed to like the oval or teardrop shaped which I really like they're thin and they're long and they have a flat butt which I'm not sure how that actually affects the playing but it just feels nice in my hand hi I can't explain how this makes a difference it might be totally placebo but I like the flat butt but for bigger rooms like this I go up to the fusion model it's basically the same thing it also has a barrel tip but it's a little heavier I think they're about the same length oh it would you look at that they're like identical identically long so this one is just a little heavier so for bigger rooms louder amplification I get more volume yeah but it's very similar feeling stick all around again I'm ray from our Kairos and you can find our music in all the places where you one would find music Spotify have a music and yeah got an up up to upcoming records this year one is Joni Mitchell's Duke blue we did a reimagine ation so we took those songs and just made them our own and then we have a third record coming out release date to be determined but you know find us on social media Facebook Instagram it's all archivists and yeah follow us there