Monday, December 20, 2010

Megadeth - Double Platinum in Australia!

The Reflex, is a lonely child….

Greetings Ddrum fans!

Lots of activity at the offices of late, gearing up for NAMM (National Association of Music Merchandisers). All kinds of artist and product happenings I would love to talk about, but am not allowed to yet. In the meantime, we briefly played host to Tim Yeung of Morbid Angel on Friday. Tim was down shooting a product demo for Sabian cymbals. I went down to the shoot, and got him set up on one of our new Reflex kits. In true metal fashion, we set him up with 3 racks 2 floors and 2 kicks. The shoot went well and the kit sounded incredible. Reflex looks to be one of the coolest things to come out of the collective ddrum imagination.

 After the shoot was over, I had a gig to play with my own band. I am a ddrum Dios player, and have a 4 piece red sparkle kit. Due to time and space constraints though, I carved a 4 piece out of the Reflex kit that I brought for Tim, and played my gig on it, instead. I can say, with absolute confidence, the Reflex drums are good, professional sounding, and professional looking drums. The face off lugs, and proprietary mounting system work extremely well. The shells sound incredible. It's amazing that no one has ever tried Alder in a drum shell before. It's warm and punchy, and extremely musical. This kit could easily work for any level of gig. A fact we are further proving, as both James Kottak with the Scorpions, and Isaac Richardson of 10DeepXperience are both touring on Reflex, currently.

Thursday, December 2, 2010

Grammy Nominations for Slayer & Megadeth

Megadeth and Slayer Nominated for a Grammy!

December 2nd 2010: Congratulations to Shawn Drover of Megadeth, and Dave Lombardo of Slayer! Both bands have received a nomination for a Grammy in the "Best Metal Performance" category.

Megadeth is nominated for "Sudden Death". It was written for inclusion in Guitar Hero: Warriors of Rock, which was released on September 28, 2010 in North America. The song itself was released on iTunes on September 24, 2010, and on September 28, Roadrunner Records made the song available for streaming on its website. It is Megadeth's first release with Dave Ellefson since The World Needs a Hero. Furthermore, Roadrunner Records has submitted the song to consideration for Best Metal Performance at the 53rd Grammy Awards making it the band's ninth nomination.

Slayer is nominated for "World Painted Blood" With much anticipation for the album after 2006's Christ Illusion, members of Slayer were revealing information about the album since early 2009. There were four different artworks released for the album, each which completed one-fourth of a map, that when put together, illustrates the earth painted with red. There are eleven tracks on the album, with origins illustrating death and destruction, war, serial killers, and the Apocalypse. The band is nominated for the title track, that shares the album name.







Both bands were featured in 2010's epic European tour, known simply as "The Big 4 Tour". The tour was documented and released as:

The Big 4 Live from Sofia, Bulgaria featuring live concert performances by Megadeth, Metallica, Slayer, and Anthrax, which are collectively known as "The Big 4" of thrash metal. The show was recorded at the June 22, 2010 Sonisphere Festival in Sofia, Bulgaria. The shows were recorded and edited and then aired in over 800 cinemas worldwide on the same day of the festival. It was released as a two disc set with behind the scenes footage and interviews, the DVD also features a limited super deluxe box set including the two DVDs, five CDs, a 24 page booklet, a poster, photos of each band and a Big 4 guitar pick.

At the time of this writing, the DVD has gone gold in Norway, Portugal, New Zealand, and Germany, and is officially double platinum in France and Australia.

ddrum is extremely proud of Shawn and Dave and the continued success of both bands. They are true titans of metal!