When you look at it, it seems as though Baroness have become one of the most talked about forces in contemporary heavy metal by doing everything in an opposite fashion to what convention would normally dictate.
Eschewing flashy guitar solos and all the other landmark excesses we’ve come to associate with heavy metal, the Savannah, Georgia outfit, led by the inimitable John Dyer Baizley, instead focus on what’s often missing from metal – the soul.
Catching up with drummer Sebastian Thomson, who joined the band back in 2013, it becomes clear that nothing about Baroness is conventional. As he explains it, he’s less interested in needing out about drum gear than the style that puts it to work.
Back To Basics
It kind of depends on the music that I’m playing, because I do different kinds of music. But we’re talking about Baroness, right? My kit in Baroness is very basic. I’ll be honest with you – it’s just a kick, a rack tom, floor tom, a snare, two crashes, a ride, and a hi-hat.
You could make it even more basic. I remember when I was taking lessons as a high-school kid, my tutor told me that all you need is a kick drum, a snare, and a hi-hat. You can do pretty much everything you need to do with just that.
Starting Out
I found the drums basically when I started high-school. My family’s originally from Argentina and we had to leave because of the whole military-government thing when I was a little kid and when we went back, I started high-school.
And as soon as I joined, these guys recruited me to be the singer in a band, because all the songs were covers and I spoke the best English, since I’d just come back from America [laughs]
So I was gonna be the singer in this band and I would go to rehearsal and the drummer would never show up, so this being the ’80s we had a synth player and he was like, ‘This is how you play a basic beat on the drums.’
And I picked it up and immediately started playing, kind of right off the bat, and it just seemed really super easy to me and that’s how I became a drummer. It was a natural thing for me.
My first drum kit, honestly, I’m a little embarrassed to say, we kind of stole it from a church. It was some weird Agentine make, it was completely shitty and scrappy. There were concert toms, only one head on a tom, that kind of deal.
Kick-Snare-Rack-Floor…
In Trans Am, I got very non-traditional. Honestly, there was a period there were I was so tired of kick-snare-rack-floor-crash-ride-hi-hat, it kind of made me angry, because it just seemed so traditional.
It’s like, here we are in the 21st Century, the drum kit has been around for 100 years, guitarists have all these pedals, synths have been around so long that the synths we love now are basically analog synths from the ’70s and ’80s.
I mean we’re way into the future now and yet drummers are still playing the same goddamn kit, and that really annoyed me. So what I did in Trans Am at the time was kick-snare-hi-hat, but instead of the two toms I used four rotators.
I didn’t use the rototoms in addition to, I used them instead of toms. And the thing is, even with a 14-inch rototom, because you can play pretty loose and put the mic right on the bottom, because there’s no shell, you can get this incredibly full sound that you cannot get with a regular drum.
If you think about a normal drum, think about where you mic it, it’s a pretty weird place to mic something, you only mic it there because you don’t want the microphone to get hit by the stick, that’s the only reason you mic it there.
So with a rototom you can put the mic right underneath the centre of the head and you get this incredibly rich, deep sound. So that’s what I used for a while in Trans Am and I talked to the guys in Baroness about it.
Getting Nerdy
The other advantage of rototoms is that because they’re smaller you can fit four of them in the space that you would fit two toms and the bar that they fit on kind of floats over the kick drum so they’re very easy to reach and I can do these kind of crazy fills.
So there’s two songs on Purple that use them and the question is now what are we going to do live next year? Am I going to use rotos or am I gonna use actual toms? And the problem is, and this is a philosophical thing, I don’t really like the really nerdy kids that have every bell and whistle.
I like kids to have a sort of weird concept behind their kit. I like kids that limit themselves. Like in Trans Am, when I was using the rototom kit, I didn’t use any crashes or rides, I just used stacked cymbals and stacked chinas, just to have a totally different sounding drum kit.
Gear Vs Style
I think there’s way too much emphasis on gear with young players, but it’s not really about how big the kit is. I’ll be watching videos on YouTube of other drummers showing lessons or tricks or famous drummers doing drum clinics and at least half of the comments are always like, ‘What heads are you using? What cymbals are you using?’
And it’s like, that really doesn’t matter, especially with drums. If your drums are round and your heads are relatively new, I can make that sound pretty decent and any decent drummer should be able to.
If you hit the drum right, with the right technique, it’ll sound pretty damn good. And if you think of drummers with recognisable sounds, like John Bonham, you immediately know it’s him. I mean of course he mainly played Ludwig, but he played lots of different Ludwig kits.
I think a lot of kids think that if they get the same heads that their hero uses or the same cymbals, they’re immediately going to sound like him and you’re not going to sound like him. You should be able to sound decent on the crappiest drum kit.
Baroness’ latest album, ‘Purple’, is available now. Get more info or order the album via the official Baroness website.
