FRANK ROSALY: Hello. My name's Frank Rosaly, and I'm a percussionist in Chicago. I've lived here about six years, and playing quite a bit these days, fortunately, and about two years ago I started getting into electronic manipulation of my drums, and I'm going to be playing tonight at Myopic Bookstore, and I have my electronic setup right here, and we're going to talk a little bit about what I'm using and how I'm using it.

[FRANK ROSALY PLAYING WITH A SAW BLADE]

So, my setup for this particular case consists of a 15" marching snare drum from the '70s that I converted into a bass drum. It doesn't sound super great but for the most part it's going to be manipulated through a Boss Bass Synthesizer pedal. So, the fact that it sounds a little bit boxy is quite all right because I'm kind of focusing on the electronic sound that I get from manipulating it with a contact microphone.

I'm also using -- what I, part of what I normally play, which is a four-piece Rogers drum set from the '60s. It's pretty much in good condition. A couple of the drums are a little bit out of round so they have a little gain to them and I kind of like them that way. So, instead of a regular rack tom, I'm using my floor tom in the place of my rack tom, and I'm going to use it a lot often as like my table to put different instruments on because it is amplified through a contact microphone.

And instead of cymbals for the most part, I'm using some thicker metallic items that I've picked up here and there. I have a concrete saw blade and then I have a regular circular saw blade that I utilize just because they're so pitched and there's contact microphones sticking on each of those.

Typically, I use like a standard four-piece bebop drum set with an 18" bass drum, 12" tom, 14" floor tom, 14" snare drum, and regular hi-hats, but in this case I'm using some really short dry cymbals because of the electronic musicians that I'm playing with today, I think this will make a nice color palette that'll match and kind of blend with what I'm going to be playing with.

I'm using this setup in particular just because it's easy for me to (a) manipulate my electronics because I have a small box with all my electronics sort of set up in front of me, and I can deal with the knobs and turn it down when I start making awful sounds really quickly, and there's a lot of room for me to work because my entire drum set is not in the way and my large ride cymbals that I typically use are not hovering over everything. So, I have a lot of room to deal with my percussion instruments and my electronics with this smaller setup.