We’re thrilled to bring you a new era of Noble & Cooley - an era in which we have our first signature snare drum.
Introducing: The ‘U’ Snare, a collaboration between us and Ulysses Owens Jr, a three-time Grammy Award winning drummer and Juilliard educator.
The story of how it came to be is pretty simple. We’ve been working with Ulysses for over three and a half years now as a snare drum artist. He’s a wonderful person to work with and he’s the perfect fit for us as a company. We appreciate artists like him that understand what it means to be a boutique custom drum shop in an industry where it’s tough to compete with the artist programs of the behemoths. Couple that appreciation with our shared desire to favor ‘sound above all else’ when it comes to the instruments we choose to play, and you have a match made in heaven. Now back to the story - Ulysses approached us one day to see if we were interested in collaborating with him to make a signature snare. Within days we were on a Zoom call together hashing out what we’d all be excited to achieve with this project, and by the end of the call there was strong consensus on how to move forward.
The vision for the U Snare was pretty straight forward - create a drum that is:
Great sounding and versatile
Well made using quality parts & craftsmanship
Accessible to both professionals and aspiring professionals at the collegiate-level.
Now we have to admit that the third part of that vision was the most challenging for us. In the instrument world, the term ‘accessible’ is easily a synonym for ‘affordable’, and we’re very aware that our drums are not known for being the most affordable snares on the shelves at your local drum shop. This is by design. We want to make great drums, we want to use high quality parts, and we want to make them right here in our factory in Granville, Massachusetts. We don’t think of a price point and then make drums to fit that price point. We do the opposite. We make amazing instruments and then calculate a price that allows us to continue to be an operational business. The prices that we sell our drums for allow us to continue to be a company governed by principles.
So we challenged ourselves to think of all the ways we could achieve a level of accessibility. After all, this snare doesn’t need to be the most accessible snare drum out there. It just needs to be a more accessible Noble & Cooley snare drum.
There were a few things we first played around with, such as less parts and a simple finish. Those were small levers to play with, but levers nonetheless. So we worked on an 8-lug design, chose a Woodburn logo over badges (less materials), and gave it a natural satin finish. Those moves were a good start, but we needed something more profound to significantly alter the price. And that’s when we turned to the manufacturing process in general.
Those of you that know Noble & Cooley well know that every drum we make is to order. Meaning, we don’t have drums sitting on shelves. We make each drum one at a time based on a customer’s order. This approach is great in the sense that we allow customers to customize almost every part of their drum, but it’s a more time-consuming process that ultimately gets factored into our costs.
So the answer became clear: in order to achieve a higher-level of accessibility, we had to batch process this drum. We had to make them in bulk doing each step for the batch all at once throughout every part of the process. This probably doesn’t seem like a novel idea if you have images in your mind of a Henry Ford-style factory assembly line, but for a boutique drum company, this is a completely novel thing for us to do. There’s 4 drum makers here and upwards of 80+ stations they could be working at on any given day. So doing one step over and over is completely out of rhythm (pun-intended) for how we normally build drums.
The key to doing a batched process approach for us was in the planning. We had to decide a specific number: 30 drums for the first batch - 25 for customers and 5 for promotional purposes. We had to acquire any parts we needed up front. And then we had to schedule when each step would happen without compromising our flow of making custom drums (yes… we still had to make many other drums during this process). So we chose a month-long window, averaging 2-3 steps in the process per week. Here is a glimpse of what the process looked like, condensed into a nice short and palatable video for you.
And of course, the result is one of our most accessible snare drums available without a single principle compromised. We invite you to reach out to your dealer to pick up one today.