AJR's Jack Met - GEAR MASTERS (Revisited) Ep. 74

Hey, what's up? I'm Jack from AJR and I'm going to be taking you on a tour of the gear that I use on stage. So right here we have kind of the main thing that I use. This is a sample machine of native instruments. So we have eight different libraries here full of different sounds that are used for different songs. So like for instance, our first single was called I'm Ready and it has the Spongebob sample in it. I'm ready, I'm ready. So what I do is just go to A and then hit, I'm ready, I'm ready, and then that's what I do to trigger that on stage. And then we have all of our songs in here. We have like Let the Games Begin. So that's pretty much that. And then we have, we do the thing called a spoke step, which is in our songs, like during a lot of the bridges, we cut up vocals and like put them in like a weird pattern. So like, you know, so that type of thing. So that's the sample machine there. We got this about three or four years ago and I think it was the only one at that time that we knew about. But I think a lot have come out since then, but this is just so easy to use. It's like a really just simple concept, like 16 buttons, like choke grip, very, very easy control volume, swing, tempo. So I think it's just super easy to use and that's why we do it. So here we have a simple floor tom drum. And on stage I put, so the sample machine's actually to my left and the floor tom is right here to my right. And basically throughout our songs, a lot of the choruses are like really have a lot of impact and are very big. So to kind of strengthen that, I hit the drum with it. And recently in our live show, we've been adding a drum breakdowns where during the bridge of the song, all the music will die down and it'll just be us on the drum. So I'll take two sticks and kind of just riff a little bit on the drum. And you know, I try to go as hard as possible just to accent the image and I feel like people are pretty into it. So this is a Ludwig drum and it's actually my dad's childhood. It's from my dad's childhood drum set. So this is from like the 1960s and it's a jazz drum, which I should not be using because this is, I hit it pretty hard. Also it's the same set Ringo Starr used in the Beatles. So I'm really pissing off my dad every time I hit this super hard. But we'll probably trade it in for a new tom very soon. One that's not going to break after like a couple of times. I think we've gone through 10 skins so far and right, like if you could see that it's so dented. So it sounds pretty bad, but I'll have to change that pretty soon. So there you go.