Saturday 2 July 2011

Customizing a Drum Kit with Vinyl the Sa-da-kO Way

Shooting starts on Mycho Pictures vision of our latest track "Forced Evolutionary Virus" tomorrow and this week we have been shining up our gear to make sure everything looks all shiny for it.

The only problem is most of our gear is starting to look a little worse for wear and this includes Gregzilla's hybrid pearl export kit which was made up of 2 separate drum kits.

With time on our side and a vision of awesomeness in our mind we set to work stripping the kit of all hard wear, most of the kit had a silver wrap which was something that pearl had already put on there. I say silver but it had actually become a putrid greeny silver from being stored to near a window.

Not metal at all I'm afraid this has got to go.......

If your thinking of trying this type of customizing yourself most of it comes off easy but make sure you store the bits somewhere safe and do it one drum at a time, at one point here we nearly mixed a lot of parts together but with our friend the takeaway box we were able to keep it all separate.
With the drum stripped down naked like Gregs mum we quickly set upon it applying the vinyl wrap, after a double dose of measuring it and stretching it across the full drum we simply stripped the back off and applied, I have heard that people apply glue at this stage but the vinyl is sticky enough and to be honest once the hardware goes back on it'll be hugging the drum nice n tight.

We cut all the excess vinyl off the sides by resting the blade on the outside of the drum and running it round the drum itself.
Hint:if you do this at a 45 degree angle it should sit flush with the edge of the drum......schnick!

With the vinyl on we thought it was worth grabbing some Brasso and shining up all the silvery hardware before it went back on, we then made holes through the vinyl with a screwdriver from the top poking in, this helped stop the vinyl wrinkling when attaching the side bits on.

Bingo......!!

We basically repeated the process on all the drums and then onto the bass drum.....
we treated this a bit different, firstly cos its bigger but mostly because the hoops on the front and back had a a silver wrap trim. Rather than remove this we thought it would be better just to paint it black.

Choice of colour: Satin Black we also painted the entire drum rack in this

Once this dries we popped it back on careful not to scratch the paint now.....
After setting the kit back we admired the handy work but still felt there was something missing....?

We thought the kit looked great but really though that the whole kit would look better with the bottom resonant toms in black, armed with our shoe string budget there was no way we were going to get these so we grabbed the spray can and set to work again

Thanks to the awesome weather we had these dried quick smart so back on they went ....

As a finishing touch I was able to pop an Aku vinyl I had hanging around.
Heres Zilla trying his new kit out, not sure whether he likes it or not though.


So there you have it one refurbished kit!!!!
the blood red finished makes it look like its made from dragon skin and it looks the biz once its all set up for the video it should look shiny and immense in HD.

We'll be reporting on set tomorrow and be taking some behind the scenes shots to tease you all with so I'm sure you get to see the full finished product. until next time I leave you with the DRAGON...........