Five Rules for Breaking Into a Market That Doesn’t Want You

What every new drum manufacturer needs to understand before spending a dollar on marketing.

The drum market is not waiting for you. That is the first and most important thing a new manufacturer needs to internalize before writing a single line of copy, signing an endorsement deal, or booking a trade show booth. Drummers are not consumers in the conventional sense. They are custodians of a relationship, with the brand they learned on, the kit their hero played, the sound that defined the records they grew up with. Entering that space requires more than a good product. It requires a strategy built on a precise understanding of who drummers are and how they make decisions.

What follows are five rules distilled from decades of watching drum brands succeed and fail. They are not theories. They are patterns.

Rule 1  Earn Your Legitimacy Before You Sell Anything

A new drum brand enters the room last. DW, Pearl, Ludwig, Gretsch, Tama – these names carry biographical weight for the players who grew up with them. The drummer who learned on a Pearl Export at fifteen, who saved up for a DW Collector’s at thirty, is not looking for a replacement relationship. He already has one.

This means the first job of a new manufacturer is not selling drums. It is earning the right to be taken seriously. That credibility is built through a very specific set of channels: respected artist endorsements – not celebrities, but the session players, the drum clinicians, the educators whose opinion carries institutional weight within drummer culture. It is built through editorial presence in publications like Modern Drummer, not through advertising pages but through gear reviews, artist features, and technical coverage. It is built through physical presence at events like PASIC, where the community convenes and where being absent is itself a signal.

The brands that have broken through in recent decades; names like Mapex ascending into the higher price tiers, or boutique makers like Craviotto earning serious collector attention, did so by accumulating credibility methodically before making broad commercial claims. Credibility in this market is not purchased. It is demonstrated, repeatedly, in front of people who know the difference.

Rule 2  Innovate Inside the Tradition

This is the central paradox of drum marketing, and misreading it is how promising brands disappear. Drummers want a reason to switch — but they will not switch to something that looks experimental, unproven, or designed to impress anyone other than another drummer.

The winning formula is narrow but powerful: solve a real, known problem that drummers already argue about, and deliver the solution inside a visual and aesthetic language that feels entirely familiar. This means the innovation lives in the engineering: bearing edge profiles, shell ply composition and wood selection, lug hardware weight and resonance dampening, tom mounting systems that preserve drum vibration. These are the things that fill forum threads on Drummerworld and Gearslutz at two in the morning. A genuine, demonstrable improvement in any of these areas is exciting precisely because it does not threaten the drummer’s existing identity.

What a new brand cannot afford to do is lead with aesthetics. Unusual finishes, unconventional lug shapes, dramatically modern hardware geometry — these things narrow the audience immediately. They appeal to the collector, the experimentalist, the player for whom a drum kit is also a design object. That audience exists, but it is small, and it is served by brands with established reputations who can afford the risk. A new manufacturer does not have that luxury. The visual design must follow the acoustic promise, not substitute for it.

The question to ask before any product decision: does this make the drum sound better, or does it only make it look different? No matter what the answer is, reconsider. 

Rule 3  Respect the Weight of the One-Kit Decision

Drum kits are not guitars. A guitarist can collect fifteen instruments and store them in a spare bedroom. A drummer who buys a second kit needs a house, a dedicated rehearsal space, or a storage unit. The physical reality of the instrument shapes the psychology of the purchase in ways that have no parallel in other instrument categories.

Most drummers, across their lifetime, will own two or three complete kits. Some will own one. This is not a category defined by repeat purchases driven by curiosity or trend. It is defined by considered, sometimes agonizing decisions made after months of research, forum reading, dealer visits, and — for the serious buyer — extended playing sessions on the actual instrument.

The marketing implications of this are significant. Every signal of compromise, trendiness, or short-term thinking is disqualifying. The drummer evaluating a new brand is asking, implicitly, whether this kit will still be the right choice in ten years. Whether the company will still exist to support it. Whether the resale value will hold. Whether the sonic versatility is broad enough to serve across different musical contexts as their playing evolves.

The marketing language that works in this context is the language of permanence: craftsmanship, material quality, acoustic longevity, the idea that this is a serious instrument built to serve a serious player across decades of music. The language that fails is anything that positions the drum as a novelty, a fashion statement, or a response to a trend.

Rule 4  Let Drummers Discover You — Don’t Push

Drummer culture has a finely tuned instinct for inauthenticity. It developed over decades of being sold cheap hardware at inflated prices, of watching endorsement deals that were transparently transactional, of reading magazine coverage that was indistinguishable from advertising. The community’s skepticism of overt marketing is not cynicism – it is accumulated experience.

The most powerful marketing channel in this world is a drummer telling another drummer, in a rehearsal room or a backline conversation or a forum post, that a kit is genuinely good. That transaction cannot be manufactured. It can only be earned, and the way to earn it is to invest in the content and the communities where drummers actually spend their attention.

This means detailed, honest video content. Not produced commercials, but proper recording sessions, miked correctly, with respected players who are allowed to give genuine reactions. It means being present and responsive in the communities where drummers talk. It means accepting that the review cycle for a serious instrument is long, that forum threads accumulate over months and years, and that the goal is not a spike of awareness but a steady accumulation of trust.

Brands like Sonor have demonstrated across their long history that this kind of trust, once built, is nearly impossible to dislodge. A new manufacturer cannot compete with that heritage directly. But it can compete with the quality of the relationship it builds with the players who find it first — the early adopters whose enthusiasm, if the drum deserves it, will do the selling that no advertising budget can replicate.

Rule 5  Know the Myths — and Know Which Ones to Challenge

Every mature product category accumulates myths. Beliefs that originated in genuine observation, calcified into convention, and eventually became indistinguishable from fact in the minds of the people who hold them. The drum industry has more than its share. And a new manufacturer faces a specific strategic dilemma: the myths sell, but building against them is often acoustically correct. Knowing how to hold both of those truths simultaneously is one of the most important skills in this business.

Consider the relationship between drum diameter and drum depth. In virtually every other percussion instrument, pitch range is adjusted by changing a single parameter – typically the diameter of the head. Depth is changed only when a fundamentally different tonal character is desired. These are two distinct acoustic levers, and they govern two distinct sonic properties. Diameter shapes the tonal range and fundamental pitch of the drum. Depth shapes its character: the sustain, the dryness, the attack-to-decay ratio. Changing depth does not simply give you a higher or lower version of the same sound. It gives you a different drum. All Percussion instrument builders have embraced this truth for centuries.

Drum builders forgot about it in a breath. Standard drum kit tom configurations have coupled these two parameters since the 1960s, meaning that as diameter decreases across a tom run, depth typically decreases proportionally as well. The result is that each smaller tom is not merely higher in pitch – it is also shallower, and therefore more open and sustained in character. This creates an inherent tonal inconsistency across a matched set that no amount of tuning fully resolves. The drum industry even has a name for the most visible symptom of this problem: middle tom syndrome, the well-documented difficulty of tuning the mid-range tom, typically the 13-inch, to sit coherently between its neighbors.

The Middle Dom Syndrom and how it was “solved”:

The industry’s response to middle tom syndrome is instructive. Rather than interrogating the underlying cause — the depth/diameter coupling — the market simply eliminated the tom. The 13-inch tom has largely disappeared from modern drum configurations, quietly dropped from standard setups over the past two decades. The official reason, to the extent that any reason is articulated, is aesthetic: drummers have come to feel that 13 is an awkward number, that the visual geometry of a kit without it is cleaner. The acoustic reason, that this particular combination of diameter and depth placed it in an especially uncomfortable zone of the tonal inconsistency problem, is almost never discussed. The symptom was solved. The diagnosis was never made.

This is drummer culture in concentrated form: a real problem, a practical workaround, and a mythology that fills the explanatory gap where the science should be.

For a new manufacturer, this creates a specific opportunity. The honest outsider position — acknowledging openly what the market has long sensed but never named — builds a rare kind of credibility with serious players. Not credibility through authority, but credibility through transparency. You are not telling drummers they are wrong. You are telling them that the tension they have always felt between what they were told and what their ears told them is real, and that your approach to drum design takes it seriously.

This does not mean waging a public campaign against conventional sizing. It means building drums whose proportions reflect acoustic intentionality — where depth is chosen because it produces the right character for that voice in the set, not because the diagram has always looked that way — and then being willing to explain why, clearly and without condescension, to the players who want to understand. Those players exist in every market segment. They tend to be the most influential voices in their communities. And they remember, for a long time, the brand that treated them as intelligent adults.

But I have to be honest here: most drummers will understand your reasoning, hear the difference, – and demand the toms to be built traditionally anyway. Story of my life. Never underestimate drum traditions. Being cleverer than your customers can put you in a very awkward space. They might acknowledge your advanced knowledge, but at the same time hold it against you for crushing their favorite drum myths.

A Final Note

None of these rules are complicated. What makes them difficult is that they all require patience in a business environment that rewards urgency. The drum market does not move quickly, and it does not forgive brands that try to force the pace. The manufacturers who have built lasting positions in this industry understood that they were not selling a product to a consumer, they were asking to be admitted into a relationship that the drummer had been building since the first time they sat behind a kit.

Earn that admission honestly, and the market will open. Try to shortcut it, and it will close permanently. Being right does not sell drums. There is so much more to it than you can fathom.

Stefan Korth

Stefan is a drum maker and entrepreneur. With his “silent drums”, he has his own approach to drum building: he has specialized in building drums that are actually played acoustically. In line with this, he created and very successfully sells Silent Sticks, drumsticks that are 80% quieter, as well as Heritage Heads, attack-reduced drumheads for acoustic use. He is married, has 5 children and lives with his family in Hamburg.

Sure, 1940s big band jazz was a sweeping sonic experience, 1950s rock ‘n’ roll could get raucous, and the Beatles and Kinks could shake it up in the early 1960s. But there was a moment in time when drumming got loud. Really loud. It started in 1965, took hold in 1966, and by 1967 a full-fledged assault by high-decibel, ear drum-busting volume was underway. And it was here to stay.

This matter of volume arose soon after the arrival of the Marshall amplifier, most notably the Marshall 100-watt ‘stack’ (there was also a 200-watt stack and a 50-watt half-stack, both also lethal), which the firm of Jim Marshall, himself a drummer (he taught Jimi Hendrix’s Mitch Mitchell), developed with input from Pete Townshend and John Entwistle of the Who. Their idea for a massive 8-by-12 speaker cabinet (8 x 12 “speakers) proved to be much too big and heavy for the Who’s roadies, so it was cut across the middle, creating the much revered – and reviled – Marshall 4 -by-12 cab.With all that Marshall power cranked to the max, Townshend bashing his guitars into the realm of intense feedback and Entwistle playing basses strung with piano wire (Rotosound’s roundwound strings were his idea), stage volume not only drove the meters into the red, it shifted the balance away from the drums, as the beat was getting lost in the churn of screaming six-strings and rumbling low-end bass. That was because drums were not mic’d at the time, so even with the drummer bashing harder and harder they were no competition for the air being shifted at full volume through those 4-by-12 stacks. It would be several years before the arrival of on-stage monitors, so, paradoxically, they played even louder just to hear themselves. And with Keith Moon on drums, The Who were plenty loud before the amps were even switched on.

A year later, by the end of 1966, blues-rock trio Cream had arrived. With Eric Clapton on guitar, Jack Bruce on bass, and Ginger Baker drumming this was three of London’s hottest players. They too had Marshall stacks. There was one for bass and one for guitar. Then there were two for bass, so there had to be two for guitar. Drummer Baker, whose double bass kit was – as with Keith Moon’s – inspired by seeing jazzer Sam Woodyard of the Count Basie Band at a London gig – was furious about the volume, claiming it was deafening and forcing him to bash his drums, not play them.

Despite selling millions of records the band split after only a couple years, due in part to Baker constant arguing with Bruce about the bass being much too loud. Even after the band’s sold out 2005 reunion concerts at London’s Royal Albert Hall and New York’s Madison Square Gardens, Baker was still furious about Bruce’s volume. To him, the bass-playing Scotsman was moving too much air.
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Cream in 1968: Jack Bruce, Ginger Baker, Eric Clapton…with Marshall stacks

But as 1966 advanced into 1967, the volume of the Who and Cream took hold. And those Marshall amps, well, they looked and sounded so cool that soon Hendrix, the Jeff Beck Group, then Led Zeppelin … all the major British bands had stacks lined across their stage. In America the trio Blue Cheer led the revolution. They were so loud that it was necessary to record part of Outside / Inside album with their Marshalls out on Pier 57 in New York Harbor. It cost them over $ 1,000 per day to be there … and be loud. 

By now, the late 60s, with bands playing outdoor concerts and bigger venues, microphones were being used to make those amps even louder. Drums too, as mics, typically two or three, started to show up around kits. One for the bass drum, an overhead and maybe one on the snare. Everything was now louder than loud, with some drummers following the likes of Carmine Appice, the archetype of heavy rock drumming, and going with bigger drums (Led Zeppelin’s John Bonham’s played a kit based on Carmine’s) and cymbals. Others removed the bottom heads of their toms and stuck a mic inside, something started by session ace Hal Blaine but popularized by Appice. Same with the bass drum –stuff a pillow in it to make the sound punchier and add a mic to make it louder. With Beck, Bogert & Appice, Carmine had two massive monitors,one on each side of his kit – a Fender Dual Showman stack and a Marshall stack with him stuck in between. Crazy loud.

By the mid 1970s, with bands playing much bigger venues – 20,000 to 80,000 capacity arenas and stadiums had entered the picture – high-powered sound systems took over from big amps in terms of music projection. But the big amps and big drums stayed, even in small clubs – they’d become a token of coolness. Single- and double-headed power toms, bigger and longer bass drums, deeper snares, thicker heads with power dots or EQ rings, and larger and heavier cymbals on heavy-duty hardware were the things to have. Sticks got bigger and heavier too, with some being made of virtually indestructible fiberglass or carbon fiber. There were also carbon fiber drums. And harder, non-porous synthetic shells including phenolic and fiberglass, which sounded bright, cutting … and loud. Hayman tried a metal liner for its bass drum as a means of increasing volume, though later settled on high-gloss urethane paint for the same purpose. Other companies including Asba and Ludwig created metal drums of stainless steel. Carl Palmer of prog trio Emerson Lake & Palmer played a stainless steel kit that included gongs and even a church bell that weighed in at a reported two-and-a-half tons. Volume had become the currency of rock ‘n’ roll. Indeed, Loud had become big business .Embed from Getty Images

Mahavishnu Orchestra with Billy Cobham drumming

And it stayed that way through the eras of hard rock, soft rock, arena rock, speed metal, the MTV 80s, the LA ‘big hair’ bands, the grunge of the 90s. Even jazz got loud when in the early 1970s Mahavishnu Orchestra, Return to Forever and Weather Report, with the double bass drum kits of Billy Cobham, Alex Acuna, Chester Thompson and others, the blistering guitars of John McLaughlin and Al DiMeola plus the soaring synths of Jan Hammer, Chick Corea and Joe Zawinul emboldened the spirits of Bud Powell, Grant Green and John Coltrane with high-wattage energy. Call it jazz-rock, call it fusion; it was quite a few notches up the volume ladder from bebop. Even Miles Davis, inspired by Hendrix, got kinda loud.

Volume ran rampant and unchecked for about forty years, until around 2005, when, inspired by 1950s amplifiers, some guitarists started to downsize their wattage and develop their tone. Instead of 50- or 100-watt amps, they went with 20 or 30 watts, often with the ability to switch down to 15, 10, 5, even 1 watt. The ‘lunchbox’ amps, tiny terrors that fit on a dinner plate, gave visual meaning to the reality that the game had shifted from the power rating of the amp to the tonal quality of the sound it projected. It was no longer about being loud, it was now about having tone. A less powerful amp enabled more dynamic playing within a tighter volume range: there was no need to turn it up to eleven. Spinal Tap loudness and amp stacks like Stonehenge had met their match.

In the drum world, because audio techs and recording engineers had trouble dealing with so much sound, some drummers had tried various accessories and techniques to reduce their volume without actually having to hold back on their playing. Rubber mutes, pads and gaffer tape deadened the response but killed the resonance and tone in the process, leaving only the sound of a wooden stick hitting a plastic head. Thwack, thud, thunk. Ouch!

For those seeking some serious control there were electronic kits. But those aren’t the ‘real thing’, are they? They don’t resonate. They don’t have tone. And with rubber pads, electrics to plug in, cables to connect, and the need for amplification, they’re like the karaoke of drums in that they attempt to be like the real thing. But they’re not the real thing; they’re synthesizers.

Still, the rapid rise of electronic kits did spark drum and cymbal companies into doing something for those who out of necessity or choice wanted drums with which they had more control over the volume. It was easy with electronic kits because like guitar amplifiers they have a volume knob and a headphone jack. Real drums and cymbals have neither. Instead, drummers must choose their gear and adjust their playing dynamics to suit each situation. For many that is inconvenient, difficult, even impossible. “The drums are too loud … don’t play so hard,” is commonly heard (or thought) by band members, families and friends. So what’s a drummer to do?

In their effort to compete against electronic kits drum and cymbal makers came up with smaller drums, cymbals perforated by hundreds of holes, rubber or silicone drum and cymbal mutes, plus various head types to either bring down the volume of soften the attack. One cymbal brand’s marketing said ‘Don’t Hold Back’. But largely it was about choking the volume, killing the tone and, well, offering nothing positive sound-wise. Indeed, hose options compromise sound for the sake of keeping the volume down in practice and rehearsal situations but offer little if anything when performing or recording. How can a drummer have their own personal sound when there is no resonance, tone or dynamic range to be had from their ‘turned down’ gear?

* * *

Like guitarists, drummers are now recognizing the benefits of less volume and more tone. I long ago developed my own concept of volume control by combining smaller, brighter sounding drums with small, darker sounding cymbals, so I could play softly and get crisp articulation, or bash away and only be as loud as those small sizes let me be. But not everyone wants to play an 8 “top tom, 12” snare, and 10 “hats; they are more about dynamic limitation.

Which is why, when Adoro’s Stefan Korth told me he designed Worship Series drums to excel within a lower volume range I took note. “They can get loud when played hard, though not as loud as other drums,” he told me. “I made tone the focus of the design, not volume.”

Wow, drums designed specifically for volume-sensitive venues including churches, schools, concert halls, clubs and studios. Also, because they’re not too loud they must be great on big stages, where they can be mic’d and the sound be more easily controlled by the audio tech. (Loud drums get turned down in the mix; quieter drums can be mixed into the sound.) 

Stefan also noted that, “In addition to drum design, suspension mounts ensure the shells resonate freely, to produce a warm and round tone that blends into the music happening around it. Tune higher for brighter, more cutting responses, or lower for deeper, darker and more funky and soulful sounds. ” The vibrancy of the shells – the catalog says Maple for brighter tone, Walnut for darker responses and a tighter volume range –  means that anywhere dynamics, tone and musicality matter, Adoro Worship Series drums deliver the acoustic sound of a well-balanced, amplified kit with perfect volume control. Volume-reduced drums. Intriguing, right?

How well do they do this? The catalog notes that readers of Germany’s Drumheads magazine voted the Worship Series Dream Drum Set of the Year . In America, where Adoro is known mainly by tone aficionados, music instrument retailers nominated it for the MMR Magazine Dealers Choice Award . (The firm’s City Lights drums has also won Dream Drum Set of the Year awards.) Like perfectionist auto makers Maserati and Porsche, Adoro’s design-driven strategy puts their drums in a class all their own.

So, in a world where excessive drum volume long ago became a serious challenge, there is finally an answer that doesn’t mute your dynamics, kill your tone or take the fun out of playing. With Stefan Korth’s volume reduction design, Adoro Worship Series drums let you play as you normally do, sound great, yet never be too damned loud. Beat that!

Wayne Blanchard

Wayne Blanchard is best known for his 24 years (1987-2010) with Sabian Cymbals, where his creative marketing strategies, design concepts and branding techniques shot that firm to world prominence. (Dave Weckl called him ‘Sabian’s marketing genius’.) Since 2010 he has been independent (www.waynebmarketing.com). He also writes for drum, guitar, style and music industry publications. Having resided in Germany, England, Scotland and Canada, and with interests ranging from fashion and architecture to socio-cultural matters and music, his perspective is more universal than most.

A drummer in an 8-piece pop-rock band with a horn section, Wayne is also well known as something of a musicologist who likes to share insight, information, opinions and ideas, which is what he does here.