Ask A Pro: Must Have Gear

This Month: Dream Theater’s Mike Mangini

The most important pieces of gear for me are my Zildjian artist model sticks [wood tip, 16½ x .585]. They are abnormally heavy due to the resins soaked into the laminated birch wood. The reason that I prefer my sticks to be so heavy is that the extra weight save me work and energy. It allows me to produce very strong strokes, with less effort than a lighter stick, at the faster temples I'm required to play for the type of music I'm involved with.

From a physical perspective, similar-diameter sticks made of hickory are simply much too light for me. They cause me to over-swing. I break them frequently, and I end up ripping them too tightly, which causes hand blisters and wrist pain.

From a sonic perspective, there's a certain snap that's achieved when striking a drumhead with intensity. Relative to the “snappy” strokes, the softer ones are less audible during live or studio performances. Without this snap, the guitar, especially, would typically bury a lighter tom stroke in the mix. A rock guitars wave style looks like a fixed stream of sound, almost at a peak level, which takes up a lot of the real estate in the high-mid and higher frequency range. The main advantage of using a heavier stick to produce the snap is that my drum hits, especially on my toms, will be solid and powerful, with plenty of clarity, and won't require editing, sound replacing, or layering of samples in the studio. By avoiding these post-tracking tasks for the mix engineers, a lot of time and money are saved.

My other piece of must-have gear is my Pearl RH-2000 remote cable hi-hat. I simply cannot set up my drums in the apex tom configuration with regular hi-hat stands, because the hi-hat cymbals need to be positioned above the toms.

Interview by Mike Haid