[MARK TROJANOWSKI PERFORMING WITH SISTER HAZEL]

MARK TROJANOWSKI: Hey. This is Mark Trojanowski from Sister Hazel. I play drums and I use a DW maple drum kit and play Zildjian cymbals and I use Evans drum heads. Usually I use coated heads top and clears on bottom. I usually use some G2's on the tops and G1 Clears on the bottom, and in studio I may go to a single ply head, using G1 on the top and use a G1 on the bottom, and the snare drum is usually G1 coated with a Hazy 300 on the bottom side of the snare.

[MARK TROJANOWSKI PERFORMING WITH SISTER HAZEL]

I kind of grew up on a lot of the American drum companies, and the old style of making drums was pretty much back in the 40s and 50s where they used maple shells and they would use reinforcement hoops which are kind of you'll have a three-ply drum shell. And then on the top and bottom rim, you'd have like another two or three plies on top of that that was only an inch thick, so we'll have like sort of a hoop within a hoop on the drum shells, and so Slingerland and Ludwig and a lot of companies back in the 40s and 50s made drums with maple reinforcement hoops.

And then pretty around in the 70s and 80s, a lot of companies went to birch and started making like eight-ply birch drum shells and they were really, really heavy, and there was no reinforcement hoops and, you know, like the spawns like the famous Yamaha recording custom kits and the Tama Superstar kits. And so I had a couple of those kits as well, but then you know DW really made a push to kind of go back to that old style of making drums and using the maple shells with the reinforcement hoops and so I really feel like they give a different tone and the birch drums are really kind of loud and exploding and have their own character but the maple shells with the reinforcement hoops kind of give a more pronounced fundamental note. And DW also, on all their drum shells, specifically tunes each shell to a specific pitch so like the actual shell has a fundamental note that it'll actually resonate at so, you know, a lot of people will get their toms in thirds or fourths and fifths, and so not necessarily you're going to tune them to that but that you have that option if you want and that's like where the drum resonates the best.

So, they really kind of went into more of the science of making a shell and, you know, the big thing too back in the '80s and '90s was they try to get the least amount of contact to the actual drum shell, so a lot of companies, started what they call rim suspension systems that mounts the toms either on the bass drum or on to the stands and didn't physically go into the drums. They had -- they would mount the drum mount off of the rim of the drum so they hang in so when you strike a tom, it gets to resonate as long as possible because there's not moving parts holding the drum.

So pretty much now, all drum manufacturers, I would say pretty much at 90% of them no longer have mounts that are mounted physically on the drum. They all free suspend, and that's kind of the newer technology a lot of people are making drums that way and trying to put like for the lugs that actually attach to the rims, try use only like one hole that goes into the drum, so the theory is the least amount of contact or wholes in the drum will then allow the shell to ring the longest. And so, they we're pretty groundbreaking on doing that, DW, as far as you know, going to the rim suspension system and really trying to pay attention to a lot of those contact points.

And you know I kind of just still like you know being in contact with an American company and, you know, just was something that, you know, even with Zildjian and Evans up in Farmingdale, New York, and I also play Vater drum sticks, it was just something that I kind of felt like, you know, that I really wanted to. And all the companies are very family oriented, and so there's a deep history, especially with the Zildjian company and with Vater as well with the two brothers, Ronnie and Alan, so I kind of like that as well with the companies I work with.