City Drum Setup: Gene Hoglan's Industrial Precision with Strapping Young Lad | MetalForge

Frequently Asked Questions

What drums did Gene Hoglan use on Strapping Young Lad City?

Gene Hoglan recorded Strapping Young Lad's City (1997) using a Tama Artstar II kit with birch shells, two 22" x 16" bass drums, and a Pearl Free-Floating steel snare at 14" x 6.5". His cymbal setup was Zildjian A Custom series throughout. The defining addition that made the City setup unique was the Roland SPD-20 electronic percussion pad, integrated into the kit to trigger the industrial electronic sounds that define the album's character.

Did Gene Hoglan use electronic drums on Strapping Young Lad City?

Yes — Gene Hoglan integrated a Roland SPD-20 Total Percussion Pad into his setup for City. The SPD-20 is an 8-pad electronic controller that allowed Hoglan to trigger industrial sounds, samples, and synthesized percussion directly from his kit during recording. This was genuinely novel in 1997 extreme metal: where most electronic elements were added post-recording, Hoglan performed them live as part of his drum performance. The acoustic Tama Artstar II kit remained the foundation, with the SPD-20 adding the industrial texture layer that distinguished City's sound from purely acoustic extreme metal.

How did Strapping Young Lad get that drum sound on City?

The drum sound on Strapping Young Lad's City was created by Devin Townsend at The Greenhouse in Vancouver. Townsend's approach combined aggressive compression and gating on Gene Hoglan's acoustic Tama Artstar II kit — treating each drum strike as an industrial percussion event rather than a natural acoustic sound — with direct integration of the Roland SPD-20 electronic pad outputs into the mix. The result transforms what was physically a high-quality acoustic extreme metal performance into something that sits at the boundary of human drumming and industrial programming. Hoglan's metronomic precision was essential: a less consistent drummer would have made the industrial production approach much harder to apply.

Is City by Strapping Young Lad related to djent?

City (1997) is widely considered a direct precursor to the djent movement. Devin Townsend and Gene Hoglan established on City the same core aesthetic that Meshuggah would formalize in the early 2000s and that Periphery, Animals as Leaders, and other djent bands would popularize after 2008: human drumming executed with machine-grade precision, integrated with industrial production values, creating a rhythmic character that sounds simultaneously human and mechanical. The blast beat architecture, the electronic pad integration, and Hoglan's absolute metronomic precision on City demonstrated that extreme metal drumming could serve as the foundation for this industrial-mechanical aesthetic.