Every Single Alex Van Halen Drum Set

i really kind of get into a world of my own [Music] i approached the drums uh not as a an instrument per se but more an attitude viciously attacking something if i didn't play drums i'd be in a lot of trouble hey welcome back to the channel my name's justin today we're taking a look at how alex van halen used electronic and acoustic drums in his many drum sets over the years they were huge showy weird and even unnecessarily complex according to the man himself and one really interesting aspect of the van helen sound stands out that's his use of electronics let's go back and see where it all started alexander arthur van halen was born in amsterdam in 1953. the family moved to california when he was nine years old and became a u.s citizen when they first arrived alex and eddie couldn't even speak english for a while and that might be why they developed a close bond with each other so alex didn't start off with drums as his main instrument he picked up guitar and piano meanwhile his brother eddie bought a four-piece saint george drum set it cost him about 125 dollars with money he earned while delivering newspapers that seems like a killer deal today but after you factor in inflation it would be about a thousand dollars today i originally played guitar and ed played drums and it just it was so obvious so painfully obvious as a matter of fact that i just i couldn't cut it on guitar because we'd swap the instruments once in a while once i i found out that i was actually better at the guitar than on drums and then al was better on drums and guitar it worked it hit me like oh god he can play wipeout and i can't now the road to the band van halen is surprisingly odd i think when we played those first gigs as as the broken combs you know and you see what kind of an effect you could have on people what's the who who were the broken call oh it was ed and i and and three other guys i was on saxophone i know it sounds kind of shallow but it's addicting to play in front of people that at the same time had that that exchange between an audience and a performer that was switched over to the trojan rubber company which then got a name changed to genesis after they got a new bass player and mark stone but then everybody realized that genesis was taken up by another very famous band so they switched over to mammoth and when they got david lee roth as their singer they made one last name change to van halen alright so now let's get into the gear alex became a full-time drummer when he was 18. so as you'd guess he was churning through a lot of drum sets through his six decades of playing drums sometime around 1972 alex started playing gigs with a double bass ludwig drum set and a black diamond pearl rap and back then he wasn't using pisces he was actually using zelda symbols moving forward a year to 1973 or possibly 1974 alex put together his last normal looking drum set he would play in a very very long time this was a double bass ludwig classic set in a silver sparkle finish i find it interesting that the kick drums don't really match i think the one on the left is bigger by about two inches no resonant drum heads for him back in the day and the hi-hat stand was up as high as it would let him go the next big change came in 1977 the band signed with the warner brothers record label and began working on their first album alex can you tell us a little bit about how that developed now by playing five hours a night five days a week at different bars and clubs we used to play about uh five hours of really hard grinding rock and roll no slow songs at all and it just uh carried on over to uh our original music yeah well we were all going to different schools and uh living in a generally same area of california none of us are from california to come we don't sound like the eagles yeah the president of uh warner brothers came down and saw us playing in a bar one night we were playing for free and they said we want to sign you they began opening for bands like black sabbath and this is the beginning of alex going nuts with his kick drums this drum set had four bass drums bolted together with chains draped over the middle just because he decided to stick with having kick drums in different dimensions for the rest of the drum set he was still sticking with blood wig shells and a sparkle finish you'll also notice the occasional fire extinguisher on the kick drum for reasons and at this point in his career he decided to switch away from zildjian over to paiste 2002 symbols and sound edge hi-hats now let's move ahead to 1979. does this tour feel a little bit different you know you are headlining it's different than the fact that we can do a longer show now we can do all our material instead of just squeezing in three or four songs and then last year it was got a half an hour guys you know go do it now we can do what we want to do and uh have a great time on the album van halen 2 alex is still using the previous drum set for the recording but then he created a whole new drum set for the tour and as you can tell he had the tendency to choose drum sets that really stood out and this is when alex started to include tama octopons this would become a huge part of his look in future setups and one thing that really surprises me about some of these early drum sets is the symbol to drum ratio he was also keeping those fire extinguishers on hand you know just in case the metal drums and metal symbols caught on fire but his stint with metal shells was pretty short-lived because a year later he went back to maple shells and he was not finished with his mission to create the strangest kick drums known to man this time he used pieces of rubber tubing to combine four kick drums into two and now the iconic gong was now firmly in place behind the drum set he continued to use pisces 2002 symbols and the drum set featured a set of pearl rototoms as a quick side note i almost saw this in person i went to the rock and roll hall of fame in cleveland ohio to go check it out but unfortunately they removed it from the exhibits and i don't know where it is now so now let's move ahead to 1981. fair warning was a rough time for the band in terms of uh kind of a dark record things have started to fall apart with dave as an outsider i could see what ed was going through he spent a lot of time making that record oh no i think every emotion everything you feel you know depression anger everything comes out in the music alex decided to make a pretty big change to his drum set once again this time acrylic here's how alex explained it well in the past it had a visual light set by ludwig it had black and white stripes and was put together by gluing different strips together one of the first things we do before anything because dave tends to jump on the drums and stand on them and humiliate them is to test them for strength i stood on the drum and it promptly snapped in half so we took it to a place where they coated the inside with a quarter inch of fiberglass and the sound on it was unreal now one thing that i want to briefly touch on was the potential use of electronics on the song push comes to shove from the album his live setup didn't include any electronic drums so this might have been something they did in the studio for the recording only or possibly it could have been a sound they triggered on a synth right on beat for the entire song by a keyboard player somewhere and by the way in a 1981 interview alex decided to talk crap about overly long drum solos and overly long rock songs well first of all heavy metal back when it first started meant 20-minute guitar solos half-hour drum solos songs that went on in epic proportions i know for a fact when i've seen some of the bigger bands and the drums happens i'm coming if it goes onto four you know five ten minutes when it reaches in twenty minutes i'll be out there i'm gonna go over the first to get out and get hot dog and then i'll come back and start missing things we'll check in in a few albums and see how they're doing moving ahead to 1982 there was yet another album diver down and a new drum set that took yet another step in the madness he now had six kick drums on the hide your sheep tour and they featured lots and lots of tubing to me this was the strangest drum set he ever created here's a quote from him in 82 i wanted to try something different so what we did was take different lengths of tube which projected each from the kick drum each different length would accentuate different frequencies and we would isolate the ones that we liked and pump those out front we also mic'd the batter head of the kick drums so there would be a balance between what comes out of the front of the kick drum and the actual impact of the pedal hitting the head i put a little pad of leather on it so it gets the same attack you don't lose any punch and the heads don't break the front two kick drums were actually doubled kick drums of different shell sizes he decided to go back towards wooden shells instead of plastic and using pisces symbols from the 2002 series and the rude series and this tour was the first time we saw any electronics on his live drum set it featured three simmons pads up near the floor toms this was all powered by simmons sds-5 drum brain for the sounds as far as i can tell there's no obvious use of electronics in the diver down album so the use of simmons pads must have been a live show thing in 1982 alex was using the most cutting-edge electronic drum system available in the early 1980s so at this point van halen had a yearly rhythm going they would tour for 10 months of the year and then create a record in the remaining two months but that wasn't the case in 83 they were still playing off the previous diver down album but just because there wasn't a new album that didn't stop alex from experimenting with another crazy drum set no kick drum was safe from this guy here's a quote from alex for this drum set we're putting some radial horns in the front of the bass drums just to punch a little more highs out in the stage area in the front the batter head would be miked and the front would be mic'd and we get a balance out of that that way it would almost be like a pre-mix there will be a mix that goes into the thing before the sound man out front have a chance to accentuate the proper frequencies because all halls are different this year i changed the power toms the longer ones they just seem to have a little bit more resonance and depth if you tune them just a little bit higher then the drum actually should be tuned you get a cross between a regular tom and a deeper sounding one so now it's time to talk about 1984. this was a huge year for the band they created some of their most popular songs ever on this album the first configuration had five rototoms up front and center he also had some of the kick drums joined together with this accordion-like contraption too and his snare drum used an ungodly amount of gaff tape to dampen the sound by the time the tour hit the drum set had changed the rhodotoms were pretty much out and seven tama octa-bonds were in alex decided that what he really needed was a fully bedazzled drum set we also saw alex using what i believe was a fairly new series from paiste at this time which was the rude symbols of course in addition to his 2002's that was his primary symbol setup for his entire life the drum history podcast just did a great series on paiste that i highly recommend if you'd like to learn more about this era but in reality all those acoustic elements were just window dressing for what actually made the sound the simmons equipment the cymbals and the snare were acoustic of course but the toms were all simmons just hidden from view the kick drum sound really stands out because it was also electronic they glued plywood strips inside the kick drums and wired sensors into them which then connected to a simmons sts-5 drum brain this means the primary kick drum shells were basically just for show this gave the 1984 album a sound and feel which was very different from anything alex had recorded before and according to an interview with eddie it almost looks like choosing electronic drums were just an accident due to space constraints the band was recording in a small home studio and it just wasn't big enough to fit a giant alex van halen drum set but going with simmons allowed them to create some interesting sounds like the intro for hot for teacher and by the way if you want to see this drum set in person there's a good chunk of it on the wall of the hard rock cafe in tampa florida just ironically without a lot of the pads that made the actual sounds of the album next up was the album which was a pretty big change the lead singer david was out and sammy was in van halen's show is always a lot of improv improvisation uh especially with sami i never know where he's going to be what he's going to do he runs up in the trust 50 feet in the air and i can't even see him the entire album was basically a simmons drum set with feisty symbols and a six and a half by 14 rosewood snare but of course as drummers know the studio drum set and the live drum set don't always match the basic mentality he had throughout his entire career was that people paid to see a show and the cosmetics of the drum set were a big part of that on the acoustic side of things the drums were pretty much the same as the 1984 setup but with a different look to the shells and everything was sitting on this huge drum riser that looked awesome but it had a lot of problems well it goes 18 feet in the air 16 feet wide it spins 360 degrees weighs 5 280 pounds and it hurts when it rolls over your little foot here's what alex had to say about it so yeah the drum riser goes up we tried it once going down into the ground but sometimes it wouldn't come back up the people that sell you this stuff will tell you can do everything but the windows but when it actually comes time for you to try it out they're like you mean you're gonna be on it too oh no this thing is only rated for 500 pounds you've already got 1500 pounds on it so we use this thing on the 5150 tour where the drums were supposed to be completely hidden from view the audience saw nothing but the stage everything's underground and then all of a sudden boom the stuff comes up out of the ground except my drums i'd say probably 10 times out of 20. i believe the simmons pads and equipment he used in 1984 was pretty much carried over to the new album tour the sound was very popular so he kept using it but we have much better behind the drums footage on the 5150 tour to see what the configuration actually looked like and by the way as a quick fun fact if you really felt like it you could have bought some of his sims equipment a few years back for about 10 grand on this auction moving ahead to 1988 came his largest drum set he had ever put together again for me the drums are just a logical extension of myself if i want to hit a certain way i hear a certain pitch in my mind in a certain sound then i want to be able to make it sometimes it rotates but it rotates in the wrong direction i caught myself the other day and i was looking back hey where's the bail there they are the last time i went overboard with it was really three drum sets glued together because the stage rotated and whichever one happened to face forward was the one i played the drum set featured six kick drums with speakers in them and this time he didn't double them so it wasn't 12 kick drums bolted together it was actually just six really really really long kick drum shells you can still clearly hear a simmons pad and a solo that he did on the tour and then on the album you'll also hear simmons drum audio about three minutes into the song black and blue and also at least one of the kick drums was still triggering sounds from the simmons sds-5 brain alex was now transitioning away from heavy electronic drum integration back to a primarily acoustic setup moving ahead to 1991 through 1983 this drum set was significantly smaller than his previous drum sets it only had six pieces which then got bumped up to seven with the introduction of his second kick drum it turns out alex just can't stand only using one kick drum for concerts i'm just trying to remember what it was i was gonna do in the solo you know these little pieces i got i gotta glue them together [Music] now at this point in his drumming career the electronic drum integration was being paired down significantly according to an overhead look via mono drummer magazine in 1993 there was just one simmons pad on the far left of the drum set e-drums took over the industry in the early 1980s but that created a bubble that basically burst in the late 1980s the entire industry fell apart after a few more years the band came back with an album called balance and personally i feel it is the best thing that we've done as far as production-wise and songwriting-wise this batch of music and just the place and time emotionally and whatever where we were at this point in time and i thought it fit the record and the way things work in this band is like the brothers will always agree so i always know he's setting that up best i can do is go to mike and then pay him off or like really you know try to get him then you got a battle and then the second i leave the room the brothers get mike and convince him and then i come there were two drum sets that you would see in 1995 one in red and one in green they were both blood wig maple drum sets with power toms and mostly pisces 2002 symbols this was around the time that he switched away from using stage monitors over to using in-ears this seems kind of mundane now but back then it was really rare in fact you couldn't go to a music store and just choose between five or ten different kinds of in-ear brands because they just didn't exist yet okay so now we need to move ahead to 1998. i can't see any reason for this band to burn out because we don't do anything that would burn us out [Music] except part two we tried to be gentlemen about this and i guess we're just gonna get a little bit nasty right now so out of all this mess steps in a new lead singer gary alex van halen michael anthony gary charon and eddie van halen this is van halen three the third and final version as you guys would say and uh the minute you got here gary there was a there was an energy there was a connection every individual person of the band was great but putting them all together resulted in one of the worst albums i've heard in a really really long time van halen does it in three minutes i mean why take a half an hour when you're doing three now aside from the problems the album had the drum set itself was great is very similar to the setup that he had on his balance kit but now it came in yellow the toms got shallower and he added in some yellow congas near the hi-hat those patterns on the resonant heads are actually v and h in hindi for the electronics alex is using d drum clip-on triggers you can see one right here on the second high tom and possibly elsewhere that we just can't see like on a kick drum the company simmons was basically done for at this point so alex turned to the next high-end electronic drum company of the 90s which was d-drum so after all that mess van halen took a few years off so in 2004 there was a reunion tour gary was out sammy was in on the acoustic side of things this drum set was another ludwig kit and a natural finish it was a very large drum set there were three kick drums two snares and a bunch of octagons two of the kick drums were massive 26 inch shells i personally find it very interesting where they put the hi-hat stand on this drum set it's basically touching kick drum number one and as you'd probably guess he was still using the piste 2002 line because that's his favorite simple line of all time and on this kit he was rocking iron cobra kick drum pedals now talking about the electronic drum integration there are two d drum pads over the floor toms the octa-bonds also have the guts of some more d-drum pads of the same size placed inside of them that you can see right here in this photo and finally you'll notice two ddrum bass triggers over here i'm guessing they're doubled in case of failure or for sound layering purposes in 2007 there was another union tour this time with the og singer david lee roth returning i can only guess at the work that went into fusing these together no kick drum is safe from alex he decided to take another kick drum and turn it into a midi fridge for storing beer i guess between shows on this drum set he didn't have any more d drum pads over the floor toms and instead put all of his electronics inside of these converted octa-bonds and then moving forward to 2012 this was a temporary drum set he used to launch the album called a different kind of truth the actual tour kit was a return to form even with joining the forward facing kick drums just in a slightly different way there were also a couple of extra bass drums off to the side for reasons this one didn't even have a kick drum pedal on it and at this point in his career his drum set had been locked into a template the sizes the simple choices everything was pretty much familiar and wouldn't change that much from now on and that brings us to the final drum set we're going to be covering the 2015 setup budwig classic maple shells with chrome wrap and everything's got custom copper plated hardware kick drums are uh 26 rack toms are standard depth this is eight by 12 9x13 ludwig atlas pedals eight inch autobahn type drums 12 and 13 tim bali's over here and the key to the alex van halen snare drum sound is alex van halen now their last album a different kind of truth was successful and well received so naturally there was talk about them creating another album according to alex there are hundreds of unfinished songs just sitting in the studio archives filed away um you've never heard of you know how much how much do you want a lot probably about 100 records worth in fact they'd already pulled from that archive to create a different kind of truth but unfortunately the new album just never happened in 2020 tragedy struck as the original bass player mark stone died of cancer only 10 days later eddie who was also fighting cancer passed away due to a stroke this made huge waves in the music industry as fans everywhere mourn the loss of one of the greatest guitar players of all time the dna of this band was always alex and eddie and you can't have van halen without both of them so this marked the end of the band now i really hate to end the video like that so many classic rock bands have been getting older and we've lost a lot of iconic musicians over the past few years but i feel like we should be grateful that alex is still around with all the crazy things that were happening in the 70s and the 80s it's a miracle that so many of these musicians are in decent health at all so that was your breakdown of alex van halen's drum sets over the years have an awesome day and i'll see you all in a few again it's just it really it really boils down to if you enjoy what you're doing then it wasn't so much an objective that we're trying to reach in terms of where are we going with this it just it just happens sort of depends on what you enter this arena for you want to be a rock star okay well rock stars come and go musicians make music till the day they die they drop you know

Channel: 65 Drums

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Id: gXZRy02HoEE

Length: 21min 31sec (1291 seconds)

Published: Wed Dec 15 2021