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• Name: Mario "D" Santana
• Instrument: None. (He's the drummer.)
• Place of Birth: Miami, Florida
• Favorite make-out spot: "On the lips."
• Justification for habitual shenanigans: There are precedents for … individuals who conceive and work on huge projects, often with little hope not only of recompense but of recognition. In other spheres, these people are called artists… -- Glyn Moody

Hi, my name is Mario Santana. I play drums for Second Set. I'm also the poor schmuck responsible for the website. About which, more elsewhere. Here, I'll tell you a little about myself and what I do in the band. I've recorded some wild ramblings about why I like being in Second Set.

First off, I should confess my love affair with my trap. The drums are a tough old Gretsch 12/14/20 from '77. I bought them from A Drummer's Tradition, the best drum shop in Marin. My 13" snare was made for ADT by a local fellow whose name I can't remember right now. I'm using the same DW5000 kick pedal I had in high school. The hat stand is a light Gibraltar with that super-smooth lever action.

My favorite part is the cymbals. The 14" hats are 7-year-old flat hole Mehmet-Agop Istanbuls. I have yet to hear general-purpose hats that I'd prefer. The ride is also an Istanbul, a 21" medium Vezir from newer, Agop-only times. A 16" Bosphorus Ferite/Antique crash replaced a Mehmet-Agop Istanbul that I cracked (after 6 years) while recording the Second Set demo in February of 2000. This was my cymbal setup for a long time. A while back, just to stop the other guys' whining (or so I tell myself,) I got another crash and a splash. I'm very pleased with the splash -- it's a 10" Istanbul Sultan, lathed much like my Bosphorus crash. The new crash, a 14" Zildjian A Cie Vintage, is the weakest link right now. I'm not looking especially hard, but you can bet I'll spend some time in any store that's rumored to stock turkish Istanbul or Bosphorus.

If you're still reading, you might like to know that my musical tastes run a wide gamut: Manu Chao, Portishead, BV Social Club, George Michael, Swapan Chaudhuri, and Rage Against the Machine are the the top few cd's in front of my stereo as I write this. No list of my favorite music is complete without mentioning The Iguanas, however. And my '61 Galaxy has an AM radio, so I've been listening to oldies and big-band stuff a lot, too.

I've noticed a funny thing, though. The more my music is influenced by others, the harder it is to hear that influence. To put it another way, others' influence on me musically seems to be inversely proportional to the amount and variety of that influence. My guess is that the leftover constant represents my own personal voice, a state to be reached asymptotically by listening, over and over, to everything ever recorded.