THE BLUE AGATE SLINGERLANDS

This has been my latest Percussion Restoration Project.  It all began on eBay one day when I came across an old neglected 13" Slingerland tom-tom with Blue Agate wrap.  The seller was asking a very reasonable price, which is rather rare on eBay these days.  It seems now everyone is a "vintage" drum dealer and is looking to make a fortune off of junk drums.

But this person was being sane and a bit generous, so I managed to win the tom at a bottom basement price.  I had no intentions with this drum other than to clean it up, give it new heads, replace the rusty tension rods and find a bottom rim to complete it.  It was just another small project to further develop my cleaning and polishing skills.

Then just by happenstance I came across another Blue Agate tom!  This one was a matching 12" and I knew I had to have it in order to bring these two drums together.  This twelve was in even better shape than the thirteen, and only required a little touch-up polishing in addition to new heads.  This got me thinking that if I were to track down a snare, a kick drum and perhaps a floor tom, I would have another beautiful vintage kit to knock around on.  The blue agate wrap is rather retro and funky-looking, as these drums were made back in 1968.

Well, as you can imagine, eventually I came across a matching snare drum that cost me a fortune to secure.  Snare drums are the most expensive vintage drums you can buy because of their importance to the overall kit and the high demand for ones that match the rest of the set you are building.  So I paid more for the snare drum than the rest of the drums combined, but that is how it goes in the vintage drum market.

Next I found a 14x20" bass drum, but it wasn't an "exact" match.  Yes, it has the blue agate wrap and it is a Slingerland, but it is an earlier style.  Instead of two sets of lugs spaced around the circumference of the drum (like the two tom-toms), the bass drum has a single row of lugs mounted around its equator with longer tension rods running into either end of them.  It also had the "rail console" mounting system on it which I promptly removed since I would not be using it to mount my toms.

Pulling cymbals off of my other kits, I completed my new Blue Agate setup with an 18" ride, some 10" sock-hats, a 6" splash and a variety of small crashes.  Much to my surprise, I was BLOWN AWAY by how good these drums sound!  I had been primarily focused on the appealing look of these drums and did not have any expectations as to how they would play.  Wow.  They are absolutely wonderful and so much fun to play, I went ahead and packed the Tamas back up to get them out of the way for a while.  I'm going to be playing these for now.

Maybe for a long while.

I have not found a matching floor tom at this point and I'm not sure I need one, but I've always got my eyes open just in case.