Catch Thirtythree Drum Setup: Tomas Haake's 47-Minute Concept Album (Meshuggah, 2005) | MetalForge

Frequently Asked Questions

What drum kit did Tomas Haake use on Meshuggah's Catch Thirtythree?

Tomas Haake used no physical drum kit on Meshuggah's Catch Thirtythree (2005). Every drum note was programmed in Logic Pro using a pre-commercial beta build of Toontrack's dfh Superior sample library. This includes all kick drums, snare, hi-hats, crashes, rides, and china cymbals — programmed MIDI note by note on a laptop. For live performances supporting Catch Thirtythree, Haake returned to his Sonor Designer Series kit, the same platform he used on Nothing (2002), augmented with electronic triggers to reproduce the dfh Superior sounds live. The two independent Sonor Perfect Balance single pedals that defined his technique since Nothing remained in use for the 2005 live rig.

Why is Catch Thirtythree a 47-minute single track?

Catch Thirtythree is a 47-minute single continuous composition because Meshuggah conceived it as a unified concept album without discrete tracks. The nine sections — Autonomy Lost, Imprint of the Un-Saved, Munspori (The Uncontrollable Spread), In Death - Is Life, In Death - Is Death, Shed, Personae Non Gratae, Dehumanisation, and Sum — flow into one another without pause or silence, forming a single unbroken piece. This structural choice reflects the album's thematic content: a meditation on consciousness and identity that resists the discrete interruptions of conventional song-by-song format. Rhythmically, it allowed Tomas Haake to program transitions and developmental arcs that span the entire 47 minutes without the artificial reset of track breaks — a compositional freedom only possible because the drums were programmed rather than performed live in sessions.

How did Tomas Haake set up his triggers for Catch Thirtythree live performances?

For live performances of Catch Thirtythree material in 2005, Tomas Haake used a hybrid acoustic/electronic setup built on his Sonor Designer Series kit. Electronic bass drum sensors and select pad triggers fed into the dfh Superior sample library, allowing the live performance to approximate the programmed sounds of the album. His two independent Sonor Perfect Balance single pedals — one per bass drum, no connecting linkage — drove the triggered bass drum sensors, maintaining the foot independence that is fundamental to his technique. The Porter & Davies BC2 vibrating throne, which provided tactile bass drum monitoring by transmitting kick signal as physical vibration through the seat, was especially critical in the trigger setup: hearing sample-triggered kick sounds accurately at concert volumes required the tactile supplement. Overhead microphones captured the acoustic Sonor kit; triggers fed the digital samples into the front-of-house mix.

What makes Catch Thirtythree important for the djent genre?

Catch Thirtythree (2005) is important for djent because it is the fullest early expression of Fredrik Thordendal's extended-range tuning concept before the genre had a name or community. While Nothing (2002) established the 8-string guitar in F# standard as Meshuggah's primary instrument, Catch Thirtythree built an entire 47-minute concept album around the sonic possibilities that tuning enabled — without the physical constraints of live drum performance limiting the rhythmic complexity. The programmed drums allowed Haake to write patterns that matched the extreme low-frequency density of Thordendal's djent tuning at theoretical extremes. When djent emerged as an identifiable genre in the late 2000s, Catch Thirtythree's combination of extreme rhythmic programming and extended-range guitar density was retroactively recognized as a foundational document — the album where djent's tonal and rhythmic ambitions were first fully unified.