Vintage Corner: Sticks, sticks, sticks.

For several reasons, I find that I've gotten a little more deeply into vintage drumsticks.

Pads are fun, but now that more people are paying attention to them they've gotten harder and more expensive to find. And since I have a small stack of pads I use regularly, I'm letting go of some of the rest.

And I'm paying more attention to vintage drum sticks, because a couple of drum-geeky friends have been highly informative and encouraging.

Here's what's new at Rancho Beth:

1. Ingrained Instruments CUSTOM sticks for Yours Truly.
After a delightful interview with the fellas at Ingrained last month, Brian invited me to collaborate on a stick with him, a lightweight but still substantial-feeling 2B with bigger tips that would make it a great pad stick. After a few back-and-forths, this is what he sent me, and it's a GREAT stick.

Best of all, Brian engraved my name on the butt ends -- and spelled it right! -- and that is just about the coolest thing that has ever happened to me in all my work testing and reviewing drum stuff. I smiled for a week at this.

2. In other news, I've lucked out on a few recent finds of vintage sticks that are rare, interesting and cool --
-- WFL drum company sticks, 2B and 3S. These are obtained from separate sources, and compliment my 1940s vintage WFL snare drum nicely.

The 2B has somewhat skinny tips for a 2B stick, but remember that there was little standardization across different brands, as each tried to make the "best" stick in a given size.

The 3S is a Burns Moore signature model, and just like the same signature model that would later be released under Ludwig Drum Company.

There's a good timeline/history of Ludwig Drums at Wikipedia which explains the ins and outs of the revolving ownership and control of the Ludwig name between the late 1920s and 1955. Worth your time to check out. But here's the shorthand in terms of what labels went on products in which decades:

1909 - late 1920s: Ludwig & Ludwig
1920s - 1937: Ludwig & Ludwig Drums (under ownership of Conn)
1937 - 1950s: WFL (William Ludwig's independent venture, in which he was not allowed to use his name because the trademark rights were owned by Conn. In the early 1950s, Conn consolidated their two drum companies into Leedy & Ludwig)
1955: Ludwig Drum Company (Conn got out of the drum business to focus on wind instruments, and William Ludwig was able to buy back the rights to use his last name again.)

If you can find sticks from all of the eras, you can make yourself a cool visible timeline of Ludwig history, which I've managed to do:

(Top to bottom: 3S sticks -- Ludwig Burns Moore, WFL Burns Moore, Leedy and Ludwig, Ludwig and Ludwig.)

For the time being, I'm focusing on sticks that I've either tried before and want to have again, or much older sticks that complete a historic group like this one.

I still love pads, especially older historic pads from before 1950. Getting into sticks from the same period will be a nice compliment to my historical interests.

Happy drumming.