Ron Grassi's setup for Disenchanted at the Steel River Playhouse, in Pottstown, Pennsylvania.
Ron's gear list and write-up below photos.
Below: The Dootle Machine (description below)
Drums:
- Yamaha Stage Custom Birch Shell Pack - Raven Black Finish
Snare:
- Yamaha 4"x14" Recording Custom Brass Snare Drum
Cymbals:
- Zildjian 20" A Medium Ride
- Zildjian 18" A Thin Crash
- Zildjian 14" A Hi Hats
- Zildjian 12" A Thin Crash
- Zildjian 10" A Splash
Hardware:
- Ludwig Series Single Kick Pedal (L415FPR)
- Yamaha Hi-Hat Stand (HS-650WA)
Percussion:
- LP Trap Table
- LP Aspire Bongos
- LP One-shot shakers (two - taped together)
- Ratchet
- LP 26-Bell Tree (LP450)
- Grover Metal Slide Whistle (W10)
- LP 36-bar Concert Chimes
- LP Vibra-Slap (LP209)
- Miller Machine with Alan Abel 6" Symphonic Triangle
- LP Mounted Castanet Machine
- LP Cyclops Mounted Tambourine (LP179)
- LP Li'l Ridge Rider Mounted Cowbell
- LP Jam Blocks High & low (Blue/Orange)
Electronics:
- Roland SPD:ONE PERCUSSION Pad (for "gong" sound)
- EV ZLX-12P Powered 12" Loudspeaker
- "Dootle Machine" (custom built - see below) for sampled sound effects - timpani, chirping bird, Westminster chimes
Lumber:
- Vic Firth "Steve Gadd" Signature Drumsticks with Nylon Tips
- Vater KT-MAL-S Yarn Mallets (specifically for the MalletKat, custom built by Vater)
- Vic Firth M6 Hard Keyboard Xylo/Bell Mallets, Black Phenolic - 1" Ball
The Dootle Machine:
"Disenchanted calls for a few sound effects which were unavailable to the Sound Tech, so the Dootle sound guy (based in Sammamish, Washington) designed and built a simple sound effects device for me.
This unit (a compact orange metal box) houses a timpani 'comic booinnnngggg', a chirping bird, and Westminster chimes. For you tech people, this unit is based on an Arduino microcontroller which has a few switches connected to its GPIO pins. A subroutine polls them for a button-press event, and when triggered, sends a command to a DF Player module to play the appropriate sound file.
Programming is quite easy - you plug the device into a laptop and you copy the sounds (in wave file format) to it. This machine is the prototype, and I'm assured by Mike (owner of Dootle) that several improvements are on the way."
Disenchanted - Regional - Ron Grassi
February 2022
