Slingerland Radio King

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.