Mark Guiliana's drum kit and setup
Documented by Drum Faster
The drummer on David Bowie's Blackstar, and the man who worked out how to make an acoustic kit sound like a drum machine. A famously compact Gretsch setup — one rack tom, one floor tom, one ride, one pedal — with the damping doing most of the work.
2024 — Mark
The solo album that took Drumeo's Contemporary Drummer Of The Year. Same small kit, same philosophy: muffle everything, hit it in unusual places, and treat the acoustic drum as something to be processed physically rather than electronically.
Gretsch kit
12"x8" rack, 14"x14" floor
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Gretsch Brooklyn 14"x5.5" chrome over brass snare
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Zildjian K Custom 14" Special Dry Hi-hats
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Zildjian K Custom 20" Crash Ride
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Zildjian K Custom 22" High Definition Ride
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Vic Firth 85A sticks
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DW 9000 series hardware
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Remo Coated Emperor
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2016 — Blackstar
Bowie's last record, made with a band of New York jazz musicians, and Guiliana's drumming is its engine: skittering, broken, propulsive and audibly human. By some distance the most widely heard jazz drumming of the last twenty years.
Gretsch kit
12"x8" rack tom, 14"x14" floor tom, modest kick — that is the whole kit
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Gretsch Brooklyn 14"x5.5" chrome over brass snare
crisp and articulate, and dampens into a completely different drum
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Zildjian K Custom 14" Special Dry Hi-hats
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Zildjian K Custom 22" High Definition Ride
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Zildjian K Custom 19" Hybrid Crash
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Vic Firth 85A sticks
light and thin
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DW 9000 single pedal
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Remo Coated Emperor tom heads
heavily damped — attack with almost no decay
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