Taylor Momsen and The Pretty Reckless @ Water Music, Hoboken, NJ

It's time for Round 2 of the sessions that will become the new release by Taylor Momsen and The Pretty Reckless on Innerscope Records, this time at Water Music in Hoboken, NJ. It's the old gang of Taylor, producer Kato Khandwala, guitarist and co-writer Ben Phillips, and rock-solid drummer Jamie Perkins. We're getting great sounds in WM's big room with my fave snare of the moment, my hot-rodded 14x5" Pearl Brass Sensitone. We've been using Jamie's 22x20" Ddrum kick and my Eames toms, except on a song called "I, Zombie", where we needed a more scooped and higher-pitched tom sound that I got by tuning the thin-shelled birch 12x8" and 16x14" Ddrum toms Jamie brought to the session. BTW, that's an old Slingerland bass drum shell being used as a tunnel to focus the bottom end of the Ddrum kick.

Taylor Momsen and The Pretty Reckless @ The House Of Loud, Elmwood Pk., NJ

I'm back at The House Of Loud working with my friends Kato Khandwala, Ben Phillips, and Jamie Perkins again, this time on an new record by Taylor Momsen and The Pretty Reckless for Interscope. Taylor is a talented young actress best know for her role on Gossip Girl, but she's also a really good singer and songwriter who is collaborating with Ben and Kato on songs for her CD. Drummer Jamie Perkins was brought in to put live drum parts over the parts Kato composed and sequenced and I was brought in to make the drums sound good.

This is a Rock record with a capitol R and Kato sets the bar just as high for the drums as he does for the rest of the production, so the first order of business was getting a deep and full kick drum sound. I took the resonant head off of the house DW bass drum and used my 1960s Gretsch kick as a resonator in front of it. We put a D112 in the DW and a Rode Classic II in the Gretsch to get a punchy thick sound.

I got to use a brass Pearl Sensitone on a song called "Light Me Up" and I'm really happy with the way it turned out. I bought it used at GC a couple of years ago for short money, clean up the bubbling plating, and hot-rodded it for the studio. The drum sings like Pavarotti and has a musical cut to it not unlike an old Black Beauty.