Industry Insights – Drum Workshop's Don Lombardi

The name “Drum Workshop, Inc.” is not exactly a household word among drummers. But those who play or have heard DW drums are prone to say, “They’re built the way they built them in the good old days.” Yet in the same breath they’ll mention some of the innovative new features incorporated into DW drumsets. This merging of the best elements of past and present technology is largely due to the personal influence of DW president Don Lombardi. Don is not your average music-industry executive. You wouldn’t expect to find the president of a drum company out in the shop adjusting spring tension on bass drum pedals. But that’s exactly where he was when I interviewed him at the factory where DW drums are made. Don is basically a casual person, and not what you ‘d consider outspoken. But he believes intensely in what he and his partners are doing, and waxed eloquent on the subject nearest to his heart: the instrument created at DW.
 
RVH: How and when did Drum Workshop get started?
DL: We’re celebrating our tenth anniversary this year, in that it was ten years ago that I actually legally started operating as the Drum Workshop. It operated as a drum teaching studio for about a year. Then I became partners with Fred Gruber, who was a very important part of DW at that time. It’s amazing that Fred is not more well-known; he’s the most in-demand drum teacher around when people are aware of what he’s doing. When we got into manufacturing I needed help, so John Good became involved with the company, in ’73 or ’74. At that point it was still part-time. I was still playing actively, still doing some travelling, and John was working at keeping the doors open when I wasn’t around. The first thing we were making was an adjustable trap-case seat. At nights we’d close up the teaching studio and pack all the drums away and bring out tables and make drum seats. About 1977 the opportunity came up to purchase the Camco dies and molds. How that came about was that I was teaching the son of the owner of Camco (Tom Beckman) when Camco was brought out here to Los Angeles. Tom was interested in marketing the seat with his Roland Keyboard line, and also with the Camco drum products. A few years went by, and the opportunity came up—when he decided to sell the Camco company—for him to sell the trade name only, and then to sell everything that was physically involved with the making of Camco drums separately. So the sale of the company was split into two parts. At that point, I went to a long-time friend, Paul Real, who was a drummer and also sings very well. I had actually been employed by him on and off through the years as a drummer with groups playing in town. We thought it was a very good opportunity for us to get into what we eventually wanted to do in terms of manufacturing a complete drum line. We bought everything that it took to make the stands, the hi-hats, the pedals, the drums, the lug molds; even some rim-rolling equipment that dated back to Oaklawn Illinois, which Tom Beckman hadn’t even used. At that point we pretty much went into business, from a standpoint of manufacturing, renting a building, having a front office, employees and what have you. Paul handles all of the sales end of the operation. As far as the actual manufacturing and the nuts and bolts, we’ve diversified so that I’m doing that. At this point, it’s more than a full-time job for both of us. That brings us up to the present. We originally started out four years ago with just the pedal and did that for a couple of years.
RVH: You’ve referred often to Camco. I know that you purchased the Camco pedal patent, and their dies and molds. In what other way is your corporate heritage from the Camco company?
DL: The heritage of the actual drum itself doesn’t go really past the lug. The round lug was always the symbol of the Camco drum. That had a subconscious feeling about it that went hand in hand with quality, which was always synonomous with Camco drums. The thing that makes our drums very much identical to the early Camcos is just our intention of keeping those two things together. I was always a Camco lover. True, I grew up and slept with my Ludwig catalog, as every kid did, but then when I got to playing more professionally, I had Camco drums. I always used a Camco pedal; I never dreamt I’d ever be making it. The heritage is really a matter of us wanting to continue something which, whether it’s called Camco or Drum Workshop or whatever, is the idea that there’s a small company of drummers making something they believe in, and are very proud of. That’s where Camco and the others were in the beginning. There was a person, as you’re standing here talking to me, who’s name was Slingerland; who’s name was Gretsch; and those were real people who were making their drums at one point in their lives years ago.
The way we came about getting to the point where we could make drums like we are now was kind of a fluke. In fact, it would be economically almost impossible in today’s times for someone to embark upon this from scratch. We were able to buy all these twenty or thirty-year-old dies, which don’t really get old, at a discounted price. If you were to go out today and purchase even the mold to make a lug on a drum, you would be years and years downstream before you’d see a return just on that investment, much less getting into anything else. And the same is true with the bass drum pedal. We have upgraded all of the tooling and molds—you can rework those things so that parts keep coming out nicely—but to start from scratch and do it today is out of the question.
RVH: Is there now a Camco brand of drums being manufactured somewhere else?
DL: To my knowledge, not at this point. For a while there was, since the people who produce Tama drums bought the trade name of Camco. A year or so after the sale was consummated they did come onto the marketplace again with Camco drums, with heavy duty hardware. For whatever reason, it seems that they have discontinued marketing. The name is used on the bass drum pedal which they have duplicated similar to the size and dimensions of the original mold of the Camco pedal which we make. It’s a Camco pedal which they have also done with a chain and sprocket on it. That’s the only place that I’m aware of that the name is out into the marketplace.
RVH: Your shells are your big selling point. What’s special about them?
DL: The thing that we feel the strongest about in terms of the construction of the shell is that it’s thin; it’s a six-ply shell. The shell itself, unlike an eight- or nine- or twelve-ply shell, will allow you to play the drum lightly or heavily and still get a response out of it. From my personal experience, if you play on drums with thicker shells, it seems you have to hit them harder in order to really hear the “drum” sound, otherwise you get a “drum head” sound; you don’t get as much life. With this drum, the louder you play it the more projection you’re going to get, but you have the option to play it lightly and still get a true drum sound. I think it goes back to the era of the older drum shells which were made similar to this; guys were playing jazz on them.
The counterhoops which we put on the tops and the bottoms of the shells are again a six-ply, solid maple counterhoop, so you actually have twelve plies at the top and the bottom of the shells. That keeps the concentricity of the drum, and the strength that you need. I think a lot of the drum sound problems in recent years (and by that I’m going back fifteen years, anyway), is the advent of the mylar head over the calf head, where it has a certain inherent sound quality to itself. If you tighten it up it doesn’t have the “give” that the calf head has. In other words, there is almost an exact place for the bearing edge to rest on a mylar drum head, whereas with a calf head, if it’s oversize you’re just going to pull it that much tighter and create your own bearing edge as you stretch the skin. With a mylar head, you want the tuck of where the bearing edge should rest on the mylar to be exactly where the bearing edge is on your drum shell. And when you tighten that up, you don’t want your shell to collapse in at all. With a six-ply shell as thin as ours, with out the counterhoops you don’t have a very strong shell. You don’t want the strength to come from the thickness of the shell; I feel you want the strength to come from the counterhoop. You want the thinness of the shell so it will resonate and give body to the sound of the drum.
We feel the key factors in the sound of our drums are the shell construction and the way in which we make the drums: the fact that they’re made one at a time; the bearing edges are hand trued; we have the bearing edge shaped so that it fits perfectly within the cup of a mylar drum head hoop; having the counterhoops at the top and bottom to give that extra strength. It’s important for the smaller drums where you have the head tension the tightest. It’s also important on the larger drums, not so much from the sound of the drum standpoint, but from the standpoint of strength: a sixteen- inch six-ply shell gets real floppy. In recent years it’s become fashionable (and more economically feasible) for larger drum companies to make drum shells without counterhoops. It’s more cost-effective to make an eight-ply shell where you get the strength of the drum without putting counterhoops in. There’s much less labor and fewer operations involved.
RVH: You have a very limited shell-size range, but the sizes you have are unique. Your deep shells were out before the current “power tom” movement. Why those sizes?
DL: I wish I had twenty pages of scientific information to back up the reasons for which we did that, but again it’s a personal preference after doing experimenting and talking to people. There had been some information I had read on various shell sizes. They seemed to me the most natural differences in the ranges of the drums: 9×10, 10×12, 11×13, 12 x 14; we just added a 14×14 floor tom and a 20″ bass drum which we had been missing. For toms to move up one inch in depth as they go down the line (10, 12, 13 and 14) just seemed to be the easiest and most natural difference in tuning range. I had heard all kinds of reasons why you had 8x 12’s, 9x 13’s, l0 x 14’s, and don’t know factually if they’re true, but they go back to the idea that you’re working with a 4′ x 8′ piece of plywood, and you want to be as cost-effective as possible and throw away as little as possible. It was an interesting problem for us in making the drums, in that when we approached a couple of different mills to make shells for us, they were all set up to make longer sizes and then go back and chop them up, which is what they do for other companies. By getting two inches longer in our shell length, it really clobbered us in the cost department, because there was more leftover from each long shell tube. We had to do a convincing job with the people who make the raw shells for us to get them to make it exactly the way I wanted it made. I had to keep saying, “No, this is the way. Can you do it?” The gentleman actually came out here from New Hampshire, which is where the shell comes from, and I showed him exactly what we wanted and convinced him that we were talking about a very limited production; pretty much a custom-ordered item. If we have a place in the marketplace at all, it’s going to be as a result of making the drums the way we make them.
Our shell is a very close duplicate of the original Camco drum shell. It’s an exact duplicate in terms of shell construction, counterhoop thickness and dimensions. The outside diameter is slightly larger than what the original Camco shells were because we don’t account for using a plastic or synthetic to cover the shell. Personally, I think that’s going to inhibit the sound of the drum; natural wooden-shell drums without the plastic on them will give a little truer sound. When you talk about sounds, you’re talking about something that cannot be graphed, measured or equated on a machine. You can do that up to a certain degree; some drums have more ring than others, some have more highs. But when you talk about the warmth in the sound of the drums, or the body in the drum, or the bottom, or the way the drum sounds when you’re actually playing it— who cares about all the rest of it? That’s all that counts. Then you get into a subjective area where it’s a combination of a lot of things that add up to that. We have a lot of little unique features about our drums, like the nylon lock in the receiver so the tension rods won’t come out, things like that. Well, that’s not going to convince someone to buy a drumset who wasn’t inter ested in the sound or the quality of the shell itself in the first place.
RVH: But if somebody is going to look at your drums, they should be aware of the foam-packed lug casing, and the nylon lock, all of these various details. They need to appreciate your philosophy on the shell, because otherwise it looks like another drum but isn’t priced like another drum and they might be scared off.
DL: People who are thinking about getting other brands of drumsets—and this is nothing negative about any of the other drum companies because they’re very, very important—probably haven’t gotten to a point in their playing where they’re more interested in getting a particular drum sound or quality. On the other hand, if they are looking for that quality they have to pay a little bit more for that. It’s very important for there to be as inexpensive a drumset as possible out there for kids to buy. And there almost is no gap in between, which has been a real problem in the drum market. You’re either going to buy as inexpensive a drumset as you can which does the job (at that point you’re buying a product you’re going to be able to play drums on), or you’re going to get to a point where you’re looking for an instrument, and then that puts you in a little different ball park. The semantics might seem like I’m being real picky, but there’s a difference to me between a product and an instrument. I feel like we really make an instrument. I feel like there are a lot of products out there which look the same because they’re round and you put heads on them and you hit them and you can play them. But when you’re talking about professional players, or even younger players who are becoming more and more astute as to the quality and the sound they have to get out of their instrument, I think there’s a definite void, and that’s what we are anticipating being able to fill for drummers. To give them an option of upgrading what they have to what we produce.
RVH: Why can’t they get that “optional” high quality from every drum company?
DL: When you’re mass-producing things it’s nobody’s fault. The thing that happened was that you had small, independent drum companies, and then suddenly drums became big business. I’d think we’re looking at 1961, ’62. Drum sales just went crazy during that period. The Beatles; rock ‘n’ roll music; four bands on every street. At that point it became not only an instrument which was being produced for drummers, it became a product which had to be produced for a lot of consumers. And the small, independent drum companies got swallowed up by these corporations. The money the big companies could make by purchasing the name and then manufacturing the drums themselves was just too appealing. The drum industry got into the hands of corporate giants, and has been since then. They’re not in the business of making drums, they’re in the business of making money. They sell products in order to make money. And there’s a very important place for this, because it can be done at a reasonable cost, and it can function like a drum. Again, I’m not negative against any of the other drum companies or what they’re doing. They had to make a lot of drums during those peak years, and you can only get to a certain point before you have to sacrifice somewhere. Quality control is a good word to use for what we’re talking about now. I don’t use that in terms of our company because we’re at a size at which quality control is not a problem. I am quality control, and if something goes wrong I’m the guy who’s going to get nailed for it.
RVH: Getting back to DW drums, do you incorporate the Gary Gauger RIMS system for all your tom-tom mounting or is it optional? Do you mount any traditional brackets at all?
DL: No. The hardware war is one I don’t anticipate us ever preceding into. I see no necessity for it, although I have some ideas and I hear almost daily from players who have ideas about tom-mounting situations. I always am open to sit down and see what they have in mind; different ways to build things which meet their particular needs. Most are not marketable, because to make it for one guy is one thing, but to make it and try and sell it through distributors and retailers would price it way out of the ballpark. I almost push the idea down someone’s throat who purchases our drums to use the Gary Gauger RIMS principle, because it’s so important to the sound of our drums.
RVH: The drums and the RIMS system are a complementary arrangement, then?
DL: Very much. If you have a drum with a thin shell which speaks and has a musical quality unto itself and you inhibit that by putting a mounting system on it, you’ve just choked the shell off. If you’re holding the drum by the side of the drum, then it doesn’t make any difference whether you have a six-ply shell or a twelve-ply, because you’re killing the resonance of the shell itself. The mount that they would ultimately use with the RIMS system is up to them; the system is universal to anybody’s tom mount.
RVH: What’s the difference between putting a piece of hardware in the center of the shell versus putting a piece of hardware on the outer rims of the shell? You’re still holding onto the shell aren’t you?
DL: At this point the knowledge I have to draw from is that of a drummer; I don’t have the scientific answers. Gary would, probably, because he’s really methodical and a perfectionist in the quality of the product that he has. The only way to appreciate the difference is really to try it on the drum. If you mount one of our shells conventionally on a tom mount and play on it, and then you mount it on a RIMS system, or even if you mount it conventionally and play on it and then take it off the mount and just hold the rim in your hand and hit the drum, you’re going to hear a tremendous difference.
Of course, you are to some degree restricting the shell because you even put lugs on it. We put our lugs on with torque wrenches set so they’re barely tight. If you tighten the heck out of them, or use self-tapping screws where you’re just literally cramming the shell in between the screw and the lug, then you are going to restrict that portion of the shell from resonating. It’s interesting, though, that if the lugs are put on right, and you don’t have any rattle problems with your lugs (springs are packed and the like), it actually adds more mass to the drum. If something is permanently affixed to the drum, it will resonate with the drum. You’ll have more mass involved with the shell to resonate, as long as it is a permanent part of the shell.
Aside from the fact that drilling holes in the shell is a negative mounting system, putting anything inside the shell is even worse. A tom mount which actually protrudes into the shell will work almost as a tuning fork. It’s going to change the sound that you get out of your drums.
RVH: Most of the major companies mount that way.
DL: They do it, and it works; it holds up the drum and it’s fine. Why then am I so averse to somebody putting that type of a mount on one of our drums? It gets down to the sound that the drummer is looking for and how much it is called upon him to get a certain sound out of the drums. If you are the first and last say as to what you want your drums to sound like, then the way you muffle them, the way you mute them, is totally a personal thing. But if you’ve got engineers telling you that they want your drums to sound like this, or you’re playing in live circumstances and you’ve got bands telling you they want that, you want your drums musically to project and allow you to fulfill the needs of everybody around you.
RVH: Some of the current set-up systems allow a great deal of arrangement flexibility, which might not be possible with the RIMS method. That flexibility might have to be as important a consideration to the player as the drum sound, especially at the club level.
DL: It’s a problem at every level. Some of the biggest-name studio drummers here in town have problems with drum booth size. Nick Ceroli, who uses our drums, can’t get a 22″ bass drum on the riser for the Merv Griffin show, so he’s got to have a 20″. You’re always working within the confines of what somebody is giving you. I can agree that the way a drummer is used to having his drums mounted is going to be something that he has to deal with every night. Hopefully, he wouldn’t necessarily have to sacrifice the sound of the drum for a set-up which might be as comfortable. The most requests I get as far as helping drummers out with products is mounting stands, racks, etc. Individualy, they don’t care if it takes a half hour to put it together; once you’re working a club and you set it up it’s there, or if you’re on the road you’ve got somebody doing it for you, so forget that aspect of it. But it’s very hard to market something which is not easily torn down or set up.
RVH: It also has to be useful to the general consumer, right?
DL: Exactly. A statistic I read recently states that the median age of the drum consumer is seventeen or eighteen years old. That’s why most of the major companies who are mass-producing products have to gear them to somebody who is just starting out, who has not made the commitment or thought about going to the next step where maybe he’s going to be playing professionally or maybe getting involved in recording. I don’t have a double-tom mount which solves all the problems, but to my knowledge the Gauger RIMS can be used with any hardware. What it might do is have your drums a little further apart than you might have on a standard tom set-up.
RVH: Do you manufacture hardware at all?
DL: The extent of the hardware made here is the DW-5000 and some accessory items: speed keys, bass drum practice pads, etc. The hi-hat and cymbal stands we have discontinued. The decision was made to pretty much offer drums and drum shells and allow the drummer to have his selection of whosever hardware he might like. The reality is 99% of the people who are purchasing our drums have existing hardware they’re happy with. They got their drumset, then they upgraded their hardware, and now they’re up grading their drums. The hi-hat is an exception in that although we’ve taken it out of the catalogue, we have a lot of requests for it, and so when we have a little leftover production time we’ll jump in and make some hi-hats.
RVH: Your hi-hat is smaller than most others on the market.
DL: Our hi-hat is a spin-off on the original Camco dies and molds, with some improvements. The size stock that we use was used for years, up until the heavy-duty stands became popular. It works, and it holds up and it’s never a problem, but the plating cost alone is only about three dollars less than a complete imported hi-hat, so it’s impossible to be competitive.
RVH: There’s something special about your rims. What is that?
DL: We have a major problem—it’s held up our drum production—in that in order to make a heavy-gauge steel rim as we do, there are a phenomenal number of steps involved. The way that the imported rims are made is an entirely different mechanical principle and you can mass-produce them rapidly at a very low cost. We also have the problem of other American manufacturers: to my knowledge none of them are doing their own plating, and every time you go outside your own shop you’re talking more and more money. The major difference is that we’re using a heavier gauge steel to fabricate the rim. Also the way that we punch the ears on the rim: instead of being flat, it rounds over the side. The look is similar to a die-cast rim. I feel that a well-made steel rim gives you the best of both worlds. The advantage to a die-cast rim is that you have more tensile strength; if you take the rim and try to bend it over your knee it won’t flex as much. The disadvantage is (and this is a personal preference), a rimshot sound from a die-cast rim doesn’t seem to give as much body as from a good steel rim. From the manufacturing standpoint, a die-cast rim is molten zinc, poured into a mold. That mold is a very large, thin circle; it’s real hard to bring the rim out and not have it warp slightly. And if it ever does warp, it’s warped—you can’t bend it, and it’s not going to conform to the drum head when you tighten it up because it’s much stronger in tensile strength. It’s weaker in crush strength; if you take a hammer and hit a die-cast rim you’ll crack the rim. If you hit a steel rim you might put a little dent in it. If you make a good, old-fashioned metal rim, with sensitivity as to the roundness and the fact that it has to be level, and you make it really well, I think you’ve got something. But when you get into making them for all the various sizes, it becomes a very costly operation. Dollar for dollar, I can buy an imported rim complete for almost the same price it costs me to plate one of our rims, and there are thirteen separate steps we have to go through to make a drum rim. We have a machine which turns the rim into round, but there’s a tremendous human element involved. I can show you stacks of rims which we have made for production. I can also show you stacks of them which I’m not going to use because they didn’t come out exactly right.
RVH: Let’s talk about the background of the DW-5000 chain-drive pedal.
DL: The adaptation of the chain and sprocket to a bass drum pedal was originally done by the Professional Percussion drum shop in New York. That pedal was around for many years before we bought the Camco dies and molds. The [chain-drive] patent was owned by two individuals: Frank Ippolito, the owner of the shop, and the person who worked at his shop at the time the invention was made, Al Duffy. Al got the idea of adapting a chain and sprocket to a bass drum pedal while fooling with the chain tuning on a tympani. Elvin Jones worked with it for a while and loved it, and it became kind of the underground bass drum pedal; it felt really good. The Camco pedal was the natural one to do it because it felt really good anyway, so if you can improve that, you’ve really got something. At the point at which we were making the [standard strap-drive] pedal, we knew that people weren’t aware of the chain design because no one was manufacturing and marketing it. Very suddenly came Frank Ippolito’s untimely death, before we were able to negotiate anything with him in writing. At that point, we were in the position as a new young company where it was very important for us to have a product which was different. That way, you’re not competing dollar for dollar in the advertising market with the majors. We had a pedal which had always sold, because the professional players were aware of the way it felt. That was the pedal they’d always used. So we had problems in the marketplace making enough pedals. We did not have the capital to go into drum production at this time, and we knew the chain and sprocket adaptation would give us something which would eventually stabilize our cash position and allow us to get into drums. We had met, almost through a fluke, Al Duffy, and became aware of the fact that he was a co-inventor. Al, being very astute in the mechanics of the pedal, really liked the changes we had made when we originally bought it. It had been in the hands of non-drummer manufacturers and it was made for several years from the standpoint of being the most cost-effective. That’s a nice big word for “make it as cheaply as you can so that you can make as much money as you can.” We took it back to the original way it was made and made several improvements. Al liked what we had done, and within a couple of weeks we purchased his interest in the chain-drive patent, which gave us the rights to market it. Meanwhile, Jayne Ippolito, with her half of the rights, had negotiated with Tama and sold her rights to them.
Earlier we were talking about attention to detail, and the idea of putting felt into the pedal spring is something that I like to talk about in reference to that. It’s something that only a drummer would ever think about. It’s not a big selling point—someone isn’t going to be knocked out because this one has felt in it. But it’s the attention to detail: “Look, they even put felt in the spring to cut down noise.”
RVH: Now the big question: When the Ludwigs and Slingerlands are being swallowed by corporate giants, why now for Drum Workshop as an independent?
DL: I don’t feel like I’m in competition with any of those companies (not to sound superior to them; we do make the same product), even Camco in its heyday had only two or three percent of the marketplace. But you can’t live on custom orders the rest of your career. What you have to do is draw a very definite line as to what your production can be, and keep all of your expenses in line to that. We are an unbelievably small company. It’s hard for people to realize that the people who work here on a daily basis are Paul, myself, my wife—who answers the phone and does all the books— John Good—who’s pretty much the shop foreman—and a half dozen guys working in the shop. That’s the Drum Workshop. From a standpoint of drum production we’re barely into the marketplace; it is a special-order item. A drumset order will come in and I’ll go back and pick out the shells. But we’ll reach a point where it’ll be impossible for me to do that. At that point you have to surround yourself with people who you have the utmost confidence in; who will do the job as well as you would do it. We do plan to increase the amount of drums that we sell, but we have to do that very slowly, because as you know, there are not a lot of drums being sold. I think what we have is a viable alternative which gives a drummer an option to get what you hear guys talk about: “I want an old Camco set; I want an old Gretsch set.” You hear this guy’s got a ’57 Rogers set and wow, what a sound that drum gets.
RVH: Contemporary rock ‘n’ rollers rave about their classic Leedy snare or Slingerland Radio King. If everybody’s talking “older is better,” there must have been something going on then that isn’t going on now.
DL: What was going on then was that there was a guy who had pride in the drums he was making. He was a small drum company and he didn’t worry about competition because he could sell as many drums as he could make. When I say we’re not in competition with the majors, what I mean is the fact that they make drums and sell them doesn’t have anything to do with the degree that I think my company is going to grow or the number of drums we’re going to make and sell. It’s so miniscule in terms of what you would normally think of as volume in the drum industry.
I said a couple of years ago in your magazine [Dec 80/Jan 81 MD] that I could see small drum companies popping up in future years again. It can’t be done at this time because of the amount of money you’d have to put into tooling. If we had paid for tooling brand-new, we’d have to be selling fifteen to twenty times more drums than we’re selling right now just to keep the doors open and pay costs. If there were five or six Drum Workshops right now, that would be great, because at least ten times as many people out there would be able to purchase a drum.
RVH: What are your plans for the immediate future?
DL: Something we’re going to be embarking on is more of an active clinic program. That’s something I’ve always wanted to do, but never had the time with all of the other functions of the business. So David Levine is going to help with setting up the clinics with such artists as Nick Ceroli, John Hernandez, Colin Bailey, John Ferarro and Burley Drummond.
And then by January we expect to have established our network of dealers so that our drums will be available at music stores throughout the country. Drums are available now through special order, but with our new location, we should be able to service dealers much better in the future.
A new product we will be coming out with is a functional double bass drum pedal. We’ve been working on it for about two years, and have had various different versions of it. Guys would take them out on the road, but there were always problems with them. But now we’ve come up with one that we’re really satisfied with. With this pedal, it would be possible to use the pedal you already have, and add the auxiliary one to it with the linkage connection. Along with the product, we are going to put out some fact sheets to educate drummers about different ways to use it. So we’re really excited about the product itself, and about the idea of expanding the horizons of what drummers can do.