Here is an incredible piece! An original Billy Gladstone snare drum! This drum comes to use from the original owner, Bill Laverack, who is a spritely 88 years young! Bill was a student at Juilliard and also sudied with Billy. He bought this drum from Billy in 1956 and has cared for it lovingly since then. Contact Steve at vintagedrums@aol.com for pricing. Specifics:

The drum is 7x14 and has the Gladstone 3 way tuning, Gladstone muffler and also has original gut snares.

The finish is traditonal Gladstone black lacquer, with chrome plated hardware. As is the case with almost all of these drums, the chrome on the original double flange rims has worn away. This was very common due to the fact that the chrome didn't adhere well to the metal used for the rims.

The interior of the shell is also lacquered in black, which was a process Billy used in order to perfect the air flow and purity of tone within the sonic chamber of the shell.

The heads are more recent plastic, but when this drum was built calf was still in use (since plastic heads didn't begin to surface until about 1958).

Sonically, this drum is superb as an orchestral instrument, but also works superbly with a drum set. Even with the gut snares, this drum has all the sensitivity needed for drum set use. And, if you took the gut snares off and replaced them with wire, this would be a world class drum set snare. (I've done this in the past with other Gladstone snares, and believe me, I'd love to do that for fun here, but we're leaving the drum set up as shown, because this is how the original owner kept the drum. The new owner can decide if he/she would like to swap out the snares.