Slingerland

The Slingerland Radio King is a snare drum that is from the 1950's. The drum is a 14" drum in diameter, although since I'm not a drum nerd I don't really know what kinds of materials the drum is made form. In fact, I'm primarily not a drummer but a recording engineer as I recently recorded this drum on a session where the drummer brought this in as his snare. I don't know what year his was from, but it's definitely a vintage model. He used the snare here and there on tracks on not on every song as we were recording ten songs in two days. The rest of the kit was also a Slingerland kit which was used on every song, but he switched between a few different snares including of course the Radio King. This was probably my favorite of the drum kits used on these sessions as it's got a great amount of crack and cuts through incredibly well. It seems to have been made extremely well as it has lasted all of these years, although I doubt as many of them are still around of course. The drum itself has a very impressive sound that's going to work well in a variety of situations, but for the rock/pop tracks that we were dealing with, it worked very well for the higher energy tunes. I don't know what the availability of the drum would be, but I would think that these are pretty few and far between at this point. The drummer from the sessions is a professional session drummer and a collector of old snares, and I feel like these are the only players that are going to have a snare like this. Regardless, if you're looking for an awesome snare drum on the vintage side and have some time and money to spend looking for one, the Radio King is a beautiful sounding snare that's hard to go wrong with in any situation.

The Slingerland Buddy Rich Kit is a five piece drum set that of course is designed to replicate famous jazz drummer Buddy Rich’s kit. A studio I used to work at had one of these on hand for rentals. The kit has a somewhat unique make up (or at least the one I’ve used did), as it featured a 24” kick drum, a 13” tom tom, and two 16” floor tom drums. This is where it’s really evident that it’s Buddy Rich’s kit with the two floor tom drums, as this isn’t something you’re going to find on too many standard drum kits. I don’t know if it comes in more than one color, but the one we had was a white marine style kit with ‘BR’ imprinted on the kick drum. While of course this drum set is going to be best for playing jazz, it’s definitely not limited to this application in my opinion. It’s not your average light jazz drum kit as it definitely packs a bit of punch, especially with the two floor toms. I really don’t know any backing information to the Slingerland Buddy Rich kit as it was a kit we had on hand and otherwise probably would never have gotten to use it. Drums are not my primary instrument as the capacity that I’ve used this kit in has been as a recording engineer. The session we used the drums on was actually for a light rock/folk kind of recording and this kit excelled incredibly well. Unfortunately the studio where I used this is no longer there but hopefully I’ll get to use this kit again the future as it’s really a blast to record with since it’s got such a sweet sound. Buddy Rich fans of course need to check this out, but it’s certainly useful for non-fans and for non-jazz purposes as well…