A Brief History Of The Modern Drum Set

Vintage drums are more than a small passion of mine. I have been obsessed with different types of drum sets since I was a kid, and always admired them as a thing of beauty. However, it was not until a few years ago that I began to learn about the actual history of the modern drum set.

Before about 1900, it was very common for most ensembles to use separate percussionists for all of the various drums, who would often play relatively few notes each, because their instruments were niche in nature. Obviously, it is still common today for orchestras to use multiple percussionists, but many classical ensembles are starting to employ the use of trap sets and trap tables which allows just one or two percussionists to group multiple percussion instruments together, and there is a significant premium placed on percussionists today who can play more than one instrument simultaneously, or at least in rapid succession.

After the early 1900s, with the advent of jazz and generally smaller musical ensembles, we find that drummers began to invent different types of stands and clamps which allowed them to group many of the basic percussion instruments into one group called a drum set. Some of these early inventions included the hi-hat stand, cymbal stands, and the bass drum foot pedal, which allowed drummers to move the bass drum to the ground so that they could play it with their foot while focusing their hands on other things. And interestingly enough, although the hi-hat is today a instrument which is played with the hands more than the feet, in the beginning of its use it was envisioned as having a similar function to a bass drum, in that a drummer could play the “crash cymbals” with his or her feet while focusing the hands around the snare drum and tom-tom drums.

Many vintage drum sets are similar to the drum sets of today, except for their sizing. Vintage pearl drums are among the only drum sets to feature most of the modern sizes for the snare drums, because many vintage drums featured larger snare drums than are common today. It is rare to find vintage drums obviously, because many drums of old were not as reliably manufactured as they are today, however vintage pearl drums were some of the best constructed drums of the 1950s and 1960s, and are therefore more common than many other brands.

Yamaha drums from older times have also done relatively well, again due the high standards of quality that were employed in their use. One of the most popular vintage yamaha drums is the black oyster snare drum, which was one of the first vintage snare drums to employ a lacquered finish consistently. If you are in the market for vintage drums, there are several good guides out there with more information, but the best advice which I would give you is to look for shells that aren’t warped, and have good tone and durability. Vintage yamaha drums tend to be some of the most reliable for all of these categories, because the build their drums with time-tested techniques which work to make each drum shell extremely strong.