Roland Drum Kits

The Glitch Mob at The Orange Peel

Scroll down for a slideshow by Rich Orris

Phantogram opened the absolutely packed and sweaty Orange Peel Sunday night with its brand of trip-hop driven by live drum kit breakbeats and Sarah Barthel’s airy and distorted vocals. Barthel’s stage presence dominated anytime the strobes came on and her flung hair turned into snapshots of intense motion. The band set the energy level high for The Glitch Mob – they weren’t nearly loud enough, but they got the crowd riled up and involved with danceable beats and tons of movement on stage.

And then The Glitch Mob came out to their light thrones and promptly stunk everything up. The band itself is basically a rehash of Justice’s characteristically choppy, lush and distorted synths , but with more dubstep-influenced beats and three people instead of two. Just another amalgamation of trendy European electronic music repackaged for an American audience.

I could comment on how ending a show on a remix of The White Stripes’ “Seven Nation Army” is the electronica equivalent of a rock band going out with a “Freebird” cover, or how Daft Punk’s “Harder Better Faster Stronger” is just dead and done and we can start remixing something else now, but those are just, like, my opinions man. I’d rather talk about how poorly the band used the equipment at its disposal.

At the heart of The Glitch Mob’s setup are three JazzMutant Lemurs , completely customizable multi-touch screens that can act like a keyboard, drumpad, sequencer and filter control, all at once. For each song, the band has a set of custom pages that have all the various instrumentation and effects they need to recreate a particular track. Melody lines are set up as a row of consecutive buttons, like a keyboard with only the right notes. The band can switch between different pages by reaching over to their accompanying controls, an array of physical buttons called a drumpad controller that’s basically a specialized keyboard. It’s all powered through four computers, a workstation for each member’s equipment throne, and wired to a central brain with a total of 18 inputs. It’s impressive and a lot of thought obviously went into setting it up, but they kind of missed something.

Let’s say you have the coolest guitar in the world. It’s made from the highest quality tonewood, completely setup to your specifications with your favorite set of strings, and all the effects you could ever conjure are at your feet in an infinite array of pedals. But when you go to play a note, you can only pick at one volume – the loudest – without reaching down and turning a knob. Is it really an awesome guitar without any dynamics?

Custom Graphic Wrap for Roland Drum Set | ICONOGRAPHY

Our client, Roland, is a leading manufacturer of many types of precision machines, including both of these musical instruments, as well as the printer that was used to print the wrap material.  Using the same process and technology that we use for vehicle wraps, this wrap was printed on our Roland XC540 printer with OEM Roland inks, ensuring the highest quality digital print output on our wrap material.  The pictures below document Iconography’s precision in wrap expertise on this  new TD-20SX V-Pro series drum kit. You can also see in teh background some shots of the wrap on a Roland HP-307 SuperNATURAL Piano .

Do you have an interesting wrap project? Give the wrap experts at Iconography a call to learn how nearly any object can be turned into a work of art! 714-527-5424 or email us at info@IconWrap.com .

Anatomy of a home studio, how everything really works, from microphones to MIDI

Keyboard

Jungle/Drum 'n' Bass for the Acoustic Drum Set, A Guide to Applying Today's Electronic Music to the Drum Set

The drum handbook, buying, maintaining, and getting the best from your drum kit

Modern drummer, MD.