David Stickney (Pound – drums)
SPB: Walk our readers through your kit and offer insight as to how you arrived at your sizes (shells and cymbals)?
Stickney: The best way to think of my kit is actually as 2 separate kits. The main kit is a typical, traditional kit: just kick, snare and two toms. My shells are made of steel, I have a 22” by 14” kick, a 13” by 9” hi tom, a 16” by 16” floor tom, and I have a 13” by 7” Chrome snare drum.
For cymbals, I have 13” hi hats, an 18” fast crash, a 16” trash stack, a 24” thick ride with a gigantic bell, and a 20” china.
If I turn to my left, I have a second kit set up that is very minimalist. I have a gigantic 30” old Slingerland marching drum as my kick, a big brass 14” by 8” snare, and two ride cymbals that I crash on, one 24” and another 22”.
I never play the two kits at the same time, I swivel between the two of them. The main kit is for all of the fast, intricate technical parts, and the minimalist oversized kit is for all the heavy, stomping beatdown parts. Think of it as a guitarist kicking on a distortion or a boost pedal -- it’s my live, acoustic version of that.
I wish I could say the idea started as a stroke of artistic genius, but it actually much more utilitarian than that. I had a giant kick drum I wanted to use (at the time just a 28”, I’ve since upgraded), but it didn’t sound good playing fast intricate grindy parts, so I had the idea, “I’ll just put it over here, and switch to it for the slower riffs.” It might not have even been my idea, Ryan might have suggested it. Neither of us really can remember the exact moment the idea birthed, we just suddenly started doing it.
