Inside DW Drums: Custom Craft, Heritage Revival, and Drummer-First Innovation | A Brand Spotlight at The NAMM Show 2026 with Scott Donnell, Director of Brand Management of Drum Workshop, Inc.

0:00Here we are now in 2026 at EWDON-L and I'm with the acoustic brands over at Drum Workshop including DW Drums, DDP, Slingerlin, LP, that percussion as well as DWE which is our electronic side. What you see behind me here is a very small portion example of what we can make in our Custom Shop in California. Some great finishes from exotic to finished ply wraps, to beautiful lacquers, we have a great polyester, great durable lacquer finishes and incredible amount of colors. You can also mix and match, this is all chrome hardware but you can mix and match when you customize with any number of shell types, wood types, etc. and you can mix and match hardware colors. You can get these colors in gold, chrome, satin chrome, black, so there are some really really cool choices you can use to customize your kids.

1:04Check out DWDrums.com if you want to learn more about that. So let's move on to Slingerlin, this is a brand that we've resurrected. It's been around the gruff industry for decades but we're faithfully making producing some of the original radio king. We're faithfully reproducing some of the original radio king stuff. And this year we have these beautiful radio king series under solid maple shell drums and there are faithfully reproductions with the original three point throw off, again steam bent all maple shell and we're really really proud of it. It's got the original Slingerlin with these to call stick saverhoops. So very faithful reproduction, here's our radio king drums there, made in California. We've done a lot of work on making sure that we're true to the original lugs and these

2:11re-launched last year. Yeah these were really launched last year so we're really proud of this line and drummers seem to really love it. They're having a great time with it. Under the world of hand percussion and LP, this really cool looking stuff is from an artist named Tony Succar, Grammy Award winning artist who's a young percussionist, likes to mix that percussion along with modern music genres. You can see there's a full set of Konga, Tomba, matching bongos, mini tambali, this is a very very cool metallic finish that is very much in keeping with his brand. Tony Succar is phenomenal talent if you've not got a chance to see him go check him out on YouTube. Beautiful stuff. Yeah, this is a very cool unique finish for hand percussion and kind of taking LP into the future in a lot of ways. Over here, much more traditional lineup for LP here, these are top tuning Kongas, this

3:12beautiful copper hardware here, and this top tuning is able to be tuned from the top of the drum as opposed to traditional tuning. You're down here with your Konga wrench, you're able to tune this up top, use your little more torque, and top tuning is really an LP innovation, sitting on our cradles here. LP hardware is also known for being really stable with pro players, so some very cool new stuff to check out. And price point, symbolic is here with this really lightweight portable stand in part of our LP line as well. Moving on to PDP, Pacific drums and percussion, or Pacific drum companies it's known, who's the entry point in what DW is. We launched this a couple of decades ago with the idea that more drummers should be able to play the innovations we created drum workshops, and in the custom drum world, they're very, very expensive drums, so we wanted our way for drummers to enjoy the technologies

4:13like crew pitch tuning, you know, all different shell types, the things we do with the DW custom shop that maybe not everybody can afford. That acrylic kit is unique in a lot of ways, it's something we don't offer in DW, because it actually has acrylic counter moves too. So the sound of these drums is super, super bright, an attack from the acrylic, and you're also getting that with the counter moves, so it's pretty striking looking too, very cool. Our New Yorker line over here from PDP has been hugely successful. These are some of our portable entry level kits. We sell these a lot of major retailers globally, and this is a new finish, this twisted cherry finish, so check that out as well, and this is that Pacific drum's got drum. Over the world of DW, this is what's from the custom shop here, and this one is a beautiful

5:19rally straight kit that has matte and gloss lacquer. Again, when you order from the custom shop, you can order your specific shell type of wood you would like, et cetera, and the limits are almost endless. So you're not just customizing the look of the drums, you're also customizing the sonic fingerprint of that kit, you can create your own sound right behind you, this beautiful double bass kit, a Cher Walnut. We're doing a limited run, we can make about 100 kits of this, so every single ply is Walnut. Fourth American Walnut, it's very dense, it's a very dense wood, and yeah, so this is a beautiful drum set that beautiful graphic behind here, Josh Freese, who's with perfect circle and nine inch nails and a bunch of bands, playing this Walnut kit here, and so yeah, we're really proud of adding this to the line, and get them all you can because

6:21there's a limited amount of walnut available, right over here to your left, this is a line of drum that's coming up on our 10th anniversary of what we're calling TrueCast. This drum is a 5-millimeter shell, a sandcast specifically, which is more porous. The sound of this drum is phenomenal, this is our first piccolo 4x14, the hoops are also cast bronze, so cast bronze, cast bronze, the reason we're calling this DW manufacturing, like our DW manufacturing pedals is, everything on here is machined, this is all machined brass, nothing here is cast, and this is machined bronze, so this is really, and it comes with a scourge flight case that our good friends at Annville work with us on, there's only a hundred of these being made globally, and it's $4,000, it's not an expensive, it's an absolute collector's item, you get one to play in, one to keep, this is made to be played,

7:22this should be used in the studio, go check out YouTube and check out DWrooms.com because we just did a great video with Davy Litch and Abe Laborial Jr. with Paul McCartney playing this drum, and it sounds phenomenal, so last thing to show you on the DW side, we're on the back side here, we're up headed to the front, this is Chant Smith, one of his red hot chili peppers turquents, this particular kit, as you can see from inside the shells, it's maple mahogany, you can kind of see it, these are, these are what we call six inch erotic rooms, yeah he chatted, he used this on one of the chili peppers tours, he has several sets he's used on the tours, this will be at our DW museum after the show, it's really excited about, we have Neil Perts, Torquette there, we have Terry Bosio's Torquette there, and this is going to be added to the collection, and Chad kindly gave us this kit to put

8:25in our museum, at the same time we're going to be building them our new sonic fly drums to go on tour with the chili peppers on their next tour, so very very excited about working with Chad on what he's up to next, and thrilled that he was kind enough to allow us to have this beauty here at the dance show, and then back at our factory in California, amazing stuff, so cool, tell me about, once you stand over here, so talk to me about the role of innovation, I mean something as tactical as a drum, right, rooted in wood, the thing that we do at DW I think innovation wise that is stands out from other drum companies is that we're slingerland, we just showed you Gretz, Rodgers, Ludwig, their classic names in the drum industry, we really are a modern drum company, we've been around 50 years, what we brought to the industry is allowing drummers to pick their sonic footprint, so the

9:27level of customization you can get with DW is unsurpassed, we've innovated on the drum hardware side, whether it's our tuning systems, we've innovated with our Tom mounting systems and how we were able to mount the drums and let them resonate, we've innovated with not only the species of wood that we use for drum making, but the way that those species are laid up in terms of the shell orientation, the grain orientation, so grain orientation technology is something that was never considered in drum making them, we've innovated with stamping a note in each drum shell, right, which we call timber matching, right, and timber matching a drum allows you to have a drum set, this drum set you see behind me that was Chad's, went through the manufacturing process as a family of drums, it was not separate drums made at different times and put together at the end of the process, when we make a drum set is a family of drums, and what does that allow you, that allows you better tuning your shells

10:30are meant to go together, you're never going to have an orphaned drum within your kit that you can't tune, so we place a lot of importance on what solves problems for drummers, and we place a lot of importance on what makes drummers and techs in front of house technicians and their lives easier, and that's really what's helped us, they often get forgotten, they often get forgotten techs, yeah, exactly, that's right, so yeah we're very proud of that, and you know what DW is, we're very open about, there's nothing we hide, we're very open about how we innovate, how we do it, when you come visit the DW Custom Shop and take a tour, you're welcome to take pictures of things, there's nothing we're very open on YouTube and other places about how we make our drums, and we're known for this innovation, and you know we're proud to share with the world, I love it, it's got great chat with you, I really appreciate it, I'm going to come on to this side of the camera and hopefully take that off, hopefully we get a nice shot

11:31here, yeah, a blast with the drums, I appreciate it my friend, thank you very much, thank you, thank you,