From the DW Custom Shop to the revived Slingerland Radio King, from LP's top-tuning congas to a sand-cast piccolo built one hundred units at a time, Drum Workshop uses The NAMM Show 2026 to walk through what a modern drum company looks like when craft, heritage, and engineering share the same floor. Scott Donnell, Director of Brand Management at Drum Workshop, Inc., explains how grain orientation, timbre matching, and fifty years of innovation add up to a kit a drummer can actually live with on tour.
At The NAMM Show 2026, Drum Workshop turned its booth into a walk-through of what a modern drum company looks like when craft, heritage, and engineering share the same floor. Scott Donnell, Director of Brand Management at Drum Workshop, Inc., guided us through a lineup that spans the DW Custom Shop, the revived Slingerland Radio King line, Latin Percussion, Pacific Drums and Percussion, and the brand's new DW Manufacturing series.
The DW Custom Shop stand is a visible argument for customization as a sonic decision, not just a cosmetic one. Chrome, gold, satin chrome, and black hardware. Polyester sprays, three durable lacquers, exotic plies, and ply wraps. When a drummer specifies wood species, ply count, and grain orientation, they are designing the drum's voice from the inside out.
The Slingerland revival gets the faithful-reproduction treatment. Radio King studio kits on display are solid, steam-bent maple shells with the original three-point throw-off and stick saver hoops, built in California. Scott Donnell speaks about the line the way a curator talks about a restoration: get the details right, honor what drummers remember, and let the sound do the rest.
Donnell frames DW's innovation as a stack of deliberate decisions rather than a single breakthrough. DW stamps a note into each shell through a process called timbre matching, which ensures the kit is manufactured as a family. Pair that with grain orientation technology, True Pitch tuning, and resonance-focused tom mounting systems, and drummers never end up with an orphan drum in their kit.
Marking the tenth anniversary of True Cast, the new DW Manufacturing four by 14 piccolo features a five millimeter sand-cast shell, cast bronze hoops, and fully machined brass and bronze hardware. Only one hundred are being made globally, each arriving in an Anvil flight case. A recent DW video features Dave Elitch and Abe Laboriel Jr. playing the drum with Paul McCartney.
The conversation closes on a Red Hot Chili Peppers tour kit gifted to the DW museum by Chad Smith, which will join Neil Peart's and Terry Bozzio's tour kits on display while DW builds Chad new Sonic flight drums for the band's next tour. Pacific Drums and Percussion, LP's top-tuning congas, Tony Escapa's signature hand percussion series, and DWE round out the booth. Drum Workshop is not hiding how the drums get made. Take the tour, take the pictures, watch the videos, and the innovation speaks for itself.
This is a Brand Spotlight. A Brand Spotlight is a ~15 minute conversation designed to explore the guest, their company, and what makes their approach unique. Learn more: https://www.studioc60.com/creation#spotlight
GUEST
Scott Donnell, Director of Brand Management, Drum Workshop, Inc. (DW Drums)
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/scott-donnell-2964a129/
RESOURCES
DW Drums: https://www.dwdrums.com
Pacific Drums and Percussion: https://www.pacificdrums.com
DW Music Foundation: https://www.dwmf.org
The NAMM Show: https://www.namm.org
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KEYWORDS
Scott Donnell, Drum Workshop, DW Drums, Sean Martin, brand story, brand marketing, marketing podcast, brand spotlight, NAMM Show 2026, NAMM 2026, Slingerland, Radio King, Latin Percussion, LP, Pacific Drums and Percussion, PDP, DW Manufacturing, True Cast, custom drums, drum innovation, timbre matching, grain orientation, Chad Smith, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Josh Freese, Tony Escapa, Abe Laboriel Jr, Dave Elitch
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.
[00:00:08] Scott Donnell: Alright, here we are now 2026. DW Scott Donnell and I'm with the acoustic brands over at Drum Workshop, including DW Drums, PDP, Slingerland, LP, Latin Percussion, as well as DWE, which is our electronic side. What you see behind me here is a very small portion, an example of what we can make in our custom shop in California. Some great finishes from exotic, to finish ply wraps to beautiful lacquers. We spray polyester, three durable lacquer finishes, and an 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, et cetera. And you can mix and match hardware colors. You can get these colors in gold, chrome, satin chrome, black. So there's some really, really cool choices you can do, used to customize your kit. Check out dwdrums.com if you want to learn more about that. Let's move on to Slingerland, which is a brand that we've resurrected.
[00:01:08] Scott Donnell: It's been around in the drum industry for decades, but we're faithfully reproducing some of the original Radio King stuff. And this year we have these beautiful Radio King studio kits that are solid maple shell drums. And they're faithful reproductions with the original three point throw off, against steam bent all maple shell. And we're really, really proud of it. It's got the original Slingerland, what they used to call stick saver hoops. 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.
[00:02:08] Scott Donnell: Lugs and these relaunched last year, right? Yeah, these were relaunched 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. Onto the world of hand percussion and LP. This really cool looking stuff is from an artist named Tony Escapa, Grammy Award-winning artist. He's a young percussionist, likes to mix Latin percussion along with modern music genres. You can see there's a full set of conga, matching bongos, mini timbales. This very, very cool metallic finish that is very much in keeping with his brand. Tony Escapa is a phenomenal talent. If you've not gotten a chance to see him, go check him out on YouTube. Beautiful stuff. This is a very cool, unique hand percussion and kind of taking LP into the future in a lot of ways, right?
[00:03:08] Scott Donnell: Over here, much more traditional lineup for LP here. These are top tuning congas, this beautiful copper hardware here, and this top tuning is able to be tuned from the top of the drum as opposed to traditional tuning. So you're down here with your conga wrench. This up top gives you a 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. Some price point timbales here with these really lightweight portable stands, part of our LP line as well. Moving on to PDP, Pacific Drums and Percussion, or Pacific Drum Company as it's known, is the entry point to what DW is. We launched this a couple decades ago, with the idea that more drummers should be able to play the innovations we created at Drum Workshop, and in the custom drum world, they're very, very expensive drums.
[00:04:08] Scott Donnell: So we wanted a way for drummers to enjoy the technologies like True Pitch tuning, all different shell types, the things we do at the DW Custom Shop that maybe not everybody can afford. That acrylic kit is unique in a lot of ways, and something we don't offer in DW because it actually has acrylic counter hoops too.
[00:04:30] Scott Donnell: The sound of these drums is super, super bright at attack from the acrylic. Also getting that with the counter hoop. 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 at a lot of major retailers, globally. And this is a new finish. This twisted cherry finish. So, check that out as well at pacificdrums.com.
[00:05:11] Sean Martin: Over to the world of DW.
[00:05:12] Scott Donnell: The maze here, this is what's from the custom shop here. And this one is a beautiful rally stripe kit that has matte and gloss lacquer. Again, when you order from the custom shop, you can order your specific shell type, the 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 is pure walnut. We're doing a limited run. We can make about a hundred kits of this. So every single ply is walnut, North American walnut. It's very dense. It's a very dense wood. And yeah, so this is a beautiful drum set.
[00:06:08] Scott Donnell: Beautiful graphic behind here. Josh Freese, who's with A 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 while you can, because there's a limited amount of walnut available. Right over here to your left. And this is a line of drums that we're coming up on our 10th anniversary of what we're calling True Cast. This drum is a five millimeter shell cast. Sand cast specifically, which is more porous. The sound of this drum is phenomenal. This is our first piccolo, four by 14. 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 machine brass. Nothing here is cast. And this is machine bronze.
[00:07:08] Scott Donnell: So this is really, and it comes with this gorgeous flight case that our good friends at Anvil worked with us on. There's only a hundred of these being made globally and it's $4,000. It's not inexpensive. It's an absolute collector item.
[00:07:25] Sean Martin: So you get one to play and one to keep.
[00:07:27] Scott Donnell: One to keep. Yeah. This is made to be played. This should be used in the studio. Go check out YouTube and check out dwdrums.com because we just did a great video with Dave Elitch and Abe Laboriel Jr. with Paul McCartney playing this drum, and it sounds phenomenal. So last thing to show you on the DW side here, we're on the backside here, we're headed to the front. This is Chad Smith's, one of his Red Hot Chili Peppers tour kits. This particular kit, as you can see from inside the shells, is maple mahogany. You can kind of see it. These are what we call six inch rack drums. Chad used this on one of the Chili Peppers tours. He has several sets he's used on the tours.
[00:08:08] Scott Donnell: This will be at our DW museum after the show, which we're really excited about. We have Neil Peart's tour kit there. We have Terry Bozzio's tour kit there. And this is going to be added to the collection. Chad kindly gave us this kit to put in our museum. At the same time, we're going to be building in our new Sonic flight 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 NAMM show and then back at our factory in California.
[00:08:45] Sean Martin: Amazing stuff. It's cool. Tell me about, why don't you stand over here. And so talk to me about the role of innovation. I mean, something as tactical as a drum, right, rooted in wood.
[00:09:00] Scott Donnell: The thing that we do at DW I think innovation-wise that stands out from other drum companies is that whereas Slingerland, we just showed you, Rogers, Ludwig, they're classic names in the drum industry. We really are a modern drum company, even though we've been around 50 years. What we brought to the industry is allowing drummers to pick their sonic footprint. So the level 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 are 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 was something that was never discussed in drum making. We've innovated with stamping a note in each drum shell, which we call timbre matching. And timbre 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.
[00:10:08] Scott Donnell: It was not separate drums made at different times and put together at the end of the process. When we make a drum set, it is a family of drums. And what does that allow you? That allows you better tuning. Your shells are meant to go together. You're never going to have an orphan 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 and front of house and technicians their lives easier. And that's really what's helped us.
[00:10:40] Sean Martin: They often get forgotten. Techs.
[00:10:43] Scott Donnell: Yeah, exactly.
[00:10:45] Sean Martin: Stage hands.
[00:10:46] Scott Donnell: That's right. So yeah, we're very proud of that. And DW, we're very open about it. 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. 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 it with the world.
[00:11:20] Sean Martin: I love it, Scott. Great chatting with you. Really appreciate it.
[00:11:25] Scott Donnell: Great, great.
[00:11:26] Sean Martin: I'm going to come on this side to the camera and hopefully take that off. Alright. Hopefully we get a nice shot here of us with the drums. Appreciate it, my friend. Thank you very much.
[00:11:36] Scott Donnell: 2026. Thank you.
[00:11:37] Sean Martin: Thank you, Sean.