Pearl Drums: Mike, the show was great! We have a lot to talk about but let’s start with the pedals you’re using…. Tell me about the Eliminator pedal.

Mike Wengren: I think the Eliminator pedal rocks! I’m all about!

PD: Before you switched back to double bass drums, you were using the blue cams. Which ones are you using now and did you choose them for more power or speed?

MW: Actually, I think it’s a little bit of both power and speed. I was using a competitor’s pedal before but then you introduced me to the Eliminator and it blew it away. I had moved the old pedal to my practice kit in the dressing room until it broke apart. I’m using the red cams now. At first, I switched just the left side to the red cam to compensate for the difference between the feeling of the double kick from a single kick. I liked the feel of it, so I switched to red on the main pedal as well.

PD: Are the springs on your bass drum pedals fairly loose and do you keep them tight?

MW: Between medium and really tight. I want them to be able to bounce back a little bit.

PD: The song you played tonight from the Valentine’s Day soundtrack (God of the Mind) had some heavy double bass drum parts in it.

MW: Yeah, that’s like the only tune where I actually do a straight 16th note pattern on the kick. I come from an 80’s metal background and I was all about Judas Priest and Iron Maiden. Priest really didn’t have a lot of double kick back then but I really was into any progressive metal. Scott Travis from Racer X was my boy! He was a big time influence on me. In Disturbed, I try to keep it simple and lay down the beat cause it’s all about the groove. I can’t help but throw in a little bit of double kick stuff here. I haven’t perfected my right foot technique so I have a lazy right foot.

When I first started playing, I used a single pedal for about a year but all of the drummers I listened to used a double pedal so I had to be a double kick guy! I switched right away and could play the double kick patterns right off. There are things that a lot of guys can do with only their right foot that I can only do on double pedal. I guess it’s kind of become my style. I’ve had drummers come up to me and say “Wow, that’s cool how you played that pattern” but the truth is that I can’t do it with one foot.

PD: You play with heel up always?

MW: Always, but I bury the beater in the bass drum head and I know you’re technically not supposed to do that but it’s more like a leverage thing to keep myself balanced.

PD: For those aspiring double bass drum players, what advice would you give to them?

MW: I would probably have to say the same thing that everyone else says which is to practice a lot. My thing was to sit up in my room and put on tapes of my favorite drummers and try and emulate what they were doing.

PD: Who were some of the guys you were listening to?

MW: Tommy Lee was the man in the beginning. Everybody wanted to be him with the huge red double bass Pearl kit. I got into high school and started to get into heavier music like Racer X, Testament, Slayer, and Metallica.

PD: You’ve just changed your rack set-up and you have a very distinctive configuration now. It’s very cool looking.

MW: Thank you! When we talked about the new rack set-up, you probably thought I was nuts.

PD: Mike has finally lost it! Is there a doctor in the house? Do you experiment a lot with your set-up and do you stay with what works at the time?

MW: For the most part, it stays the same but every once in a while I’ll throw something new in if it interests me. My set-up has pretty much stayed the same for years. Sometimes I’ll get compliments on just the look of the kit. My first set was a 7 – piece black Pearl Export kit... 12”, 13” toms and 16”, 18” floor toms with two 22” kicks. There were a couple of reasons that the second kick drum went away soon after. When Disturbed first started touring, it was a space issue cause two kick drums take a lot of space on stage. When we went into the studio, we found out that no matter how well we tuned the second kick, it’s never sounded like the main kick. So just for continuity, I switched to the double pedal in the studio and really liked the way it sounded. I tried it out live to help save space on stage and it stuck until just recently I went back to using two bass drums.

PD: How long have you been incorporating the rack in your set-up? I know you had mentioned that you had the DR-80 rack when you first started out.

MW: Yeah, I still have that! I was one of those guys who had the huge kit and the cage was a big part of it. I always wanted the full cage with cymbal rack that Pearl offered back then. My era was all the 80’s bands... even the hair bands. As lame as some people may say it is now, that was my thing. It was part of my roots and I’m not ashamed of it. I thought it was cool. So now I’m trying to incorporate the style and make it more modern.

PD: Why the double brace rack bars? It’s not something you see too often.

MW: The brace on the bottom holds the stand for my snare mic.

PD: So it looks clean?

MW: So the mics don’t move and they’re in the same spot every night. I went with the RJ-50 connectors in the middle to make it look interesting and I wanted to do something a little different.

PD: You just made the switch to a 4-ply maple snare drum. Why?

MW: Whenever I hit a snare drum for the first time, I just know if it’s going to work or not. When I hit that snare drum in your showroom and it was like “Okay, I’m diggin’ it”. Even though we tried out some others, I kept coming back to the same one. I took it to soundcheck that same day and it was great.

PD: What are your other snare drums?

MW: I have a ton of Pearl snares at home but my main snares on the road are the MMX 6.5 x 14 maple, MHX 6.5 x 14 mahogany, and 5 x 14 black nickel plated steel snares that I used for last year’s Ozzfest. At home, I have a 3 x 14 brass Free Floating piccolo and an 8 x 14 maple Free Floating snare.

PD: sPaG from Mudvayne said he had a brass model of the 8 x 14 snare. You should definitely hold on to your maple version since they’re rare! Do you tune snare heads fairly tight?

MW: Absolutely.

PD: Does that come from a marching background?

MW: A lot of people like the “honk” or “the over ring” or at least that’s what I call it. I’ve just never been a fan of that sound. I think it comes from my 80’s influence again cause there wasn’t that snare sound in those recordings. I like to hear the crack of the top head and a little bit of the bottom. We use an O-ring cut down to quarter size on the snare and place it at the bottom of the batter side. That seems to work fine.

PD: Some of the patterns you play seem to have a real heavy tribal influence. Is that something you have a deep interest in?

MW: Yeah, I’ve always been interested in different types of percussion but when I start to getting into that stuff, it never holds my attention long. When I was in school, I took lessons twice a week and it was the worst. I had this really old guy teaching me and we’d have the lesson in the basement of my grammar school. He would just scream at me for half an hour and I hated it! The weird thing is that the guy died a month later….. maybe from all of the screaming, I don’t know! I wasn’t into practicing rudiments cause I wanted to play drumkit. I would sit in my room and practice along with my favorite recordings and that’s how I learned to play. To this day, I don’t know all of the rudiments but I do practice some from time to time.

PD: What do you do to warm-up before a show?

MW: Whenever we’re at a venue that has a large enough dressing room, I’ll warm-up on an electronic kit I have with me. I’ll practice some of my beats and just kind of get loose. I also stretch out my hands, arms, neck, and back to before I go on.

PD: Is that part of staying healthy on the road since you do so many dates in a row?

MW: It can be challenging sometimes. There are times when we don’t get the best quality of food but you have to be smart about it. Basically, we have a job to do out here. It doesn’t seem like a job to me cause I love what I’m doing. But there’s a kid who spent his hard-earned dollar… whether it’s from his job or an allowance…. he goes out and spends money on our record and a ticket to see us. We owe it to every person that does that to put on the best show we can. It doesn’t matter if I don’t feel well that night, cause he wants to see a good show. Sometimes we don’t get a chance to return to a city for many months so this may be the only time he can see us. We like to have fun after a show but you just have to be responsible.

PD: Mike, set the Wayback Machine to your first gig. What was it like?

MW: Wow….. I totally remember it! Back home in Chicago, we played a Battle Of The Bands at McKinley Park and we were horrible! My first band sucked! We even had equipment failures when we played. Our guitarist started the song with this feedback note and when he strummed the guitar, nothing came out. One of my good friends went over and pretended to tech for him. It turned out the AC plug was shorting out so our “tech” held it in place until we finished. I think he was getting mildly electrocuted the whole time! We lost the contest but the whole experience was cool. I still have pictures from that show.

PD: Can we use those for the website?

MW: Yeah right!!! (laughs)

PD: What’s your favorite track from The Sickness to play live?

MW: I don’t mean to cop out on you but all of my songs are like my children. Every single one has their own individual quality and characteristic and I love them equally. The are some songs that have certain sections that are more challenging or more fun to play but they’re really all special. When I’m writing a song I try to remember that I’ll have to play this song for a long time. I don’t want to be sick of it in a month.

PD: Do you have any tattoos?

MW: I’ve got one on my left upper arm. I went with my two brothers and we all got the same tat, the Japanese Kanji symbol for “brother”. I was freaking out about the whole needle thing when we were there, but I went through with it for them. We’re pretty tight and I’m very proud of that. My little brother went first and I couldn’t let him show me up so there was no way I was pussing out! I used to have a double piercing in my eyebrow around last year’s Ozzfest. I like to throw my arms around when I play cause I’m really into the music and sometimes I’d brush my piercing with my stick. We were playing in Houston and I accidentally cracked myself in the head and popped out the ball that held the ring in. After the show, we had to immediately catch a flight to New York and I didn’t realize the ring had spun out until it was too late. The hole had started to close up so I said screw it. The whole thing with the piercing was to face my fear and I did it.

PD: Whenever you get one, what do you do on your days off?

MW: I’m a gadget freak. I like my technology and I like my gadgets. I have the laptop, the palm pilot, PS2, and all that stuff to keep me busy. I try to keep up on what’s available technology wise since I do all of the drum programming in the band.

PD: Where do the electronic parts come during the writing process and how do you determine where they fit in with your acoustic parts?

MW: We never really sat down and said “OK, this is how we’re going to write a song”, it’s something that just evolved on it’s own. Most of the time, it starts out with a guitar rift from Dan and then he comes to me to put a rhythm to it. We’ll throw it back and forth until we get a basic idea of the song and then add bass, melody, and vocals. The last thing is always electronics but we purposely keep spaces for that later. We never meant for that to be the main element of our songs.

PD: Did you have any hesitations about covering the Tears For Fears song “Shout” and how did it come into play?

MW: Back when we were playing the clubs in Chicago, we had to fill up a lot of time and we didn’t have that many originals then. We thought it would be interesting to take an old song and cover it but not just copy it..... but to make it our own. Our singer David comes from the New Wave/Punk era of Depeche Mode and Tears For Fears and suggested it when we made our list of covers. The lyrics actually say something and they’re pretty aggressive! We wanted to take it and bring the meaning of the lyrics out and make it a Disturbed song. I kept some of the original parts like the triangle sound at the beginning and some other loop things but added toms and double kick.

PD: Have you heard from anyone with Tears For Fears?

MW: Actually we have! Before we were signed, we were in the studio recording the song for a demo cause we felt strongly about it and wanted to do it. During that time, there was a huge music conference going on that was hosted by our management and little did we know that Kurt Smith (bassist for Tears For Fears) was taking part in the event. Later on that evening, we were introduced to Kurt and we asked him to check out our version of “Shout”. So we go down to the studio and Kurt sits down in front of the console (with his back towards us) and listens to the track. The song ends and he just sits there......... silent......... and we’re thinking the worst. Kurt turns around and gives us the biggest smile and says that we captured the aggression in the song that they never did. Man, what great compliment.

PD: Any good road stories?

MW: (laughs) ......Pass! What happens on the road stays on the road. I’ll tell you some stories sometime, but you CAN’T print them!

PD: If you could pick a band to sit in for a night, who would it be?

MW: Hands down...... Tool! Those guys are amazing musicians but I have to mention Sevendust cause they’re great guys as well.

PD: What’s the biggest misconception about being a rock star?

MW: I don’t know...... it’s different being on the inside of it all. I have a really simple style and I like to lay back and make sure I keep decent time for the guys in the band. I just...love....to....play....the drums.....period!!! I get to wake up everyday and play my drums, get paid for it, and get to meet other musicians I respect. It’s the best!

PD: Last question........ Ginger or Mary Ann?

MW: Mary Ann! The girl next door...innocent and corruptible!

*Interview by Derek Wolfford – Pearl Artist Relations