Occasionally I get the chance to play some music. One of my favourite gigs is called June Rocks, a solid rock show put on by a small high school in Massena (Northern New York). Every year the students get to try out for the chance to sing any song they want backed a professional band in front of an audience of about 600. It’s a blast.

My setup

Every year my drum configuration evolves a little bit, and gets a little bit more digital. Here is what it looked like on Monday:

What I’m using:

* An old 4-piece Yamaha Stage Custom kit

* Yamaha DTXpress II electronic kit pieces

* Tascam US-2000 audio interface

* Retina MacBook Pro with Ableton Live 8

* Akai APC20 Ableton controller

My whole set is driven through Ableton 8, which keeps track of all my tempos, runs my metronome, and plays all my loops:

This was the first time I incorporated electronic pads into my setup and it worked really well. I had a couple of pads set up as sample triggers for specific sounds and a couple for controlling the set (playing and stopping loops). Great use for an old electronic drum set you might have kicking around.

For monitoring I had the sound guy give me a return that I fed through my interface. That way I could set my own level through Ableton, and monitored everything through there.

Clips from the show

Here’s our band intro:

Here’s one of my favourite tunes from the night, “I Don’t Dance” by Lee Brice (cover by Bailey Cortese)