This is something I truly treasure. I have always been a huge Louie Bellson fan as many of you know, and I have had sets that belonged to Louie in the past (two Rogers sets, one with chrome dyna and one with gold plated dyna, and one Remo set). Of course, to me, the ability to own one of Louie's WMP wood dynas would be the ultimate, but that hasn't been the case until now.

Thanks to a very good friend, I was recently able to acquire a mid 60s era Roger's set of Louie's and this one will likely remain as a permanent part of my museum collection because this one has the wood Dyna. 

The set just arrived, but earlier I had the snare drum sent via overnight Fedex to my home because I couldn't wait for Fedex Ground!

Some background on Louie's Rogers drums:

Louie didn't want tone controls in his drums (neither did Buddy), so almost all of his Rogers sets were made without tone controls in the toms and without the batter side tone control in the snare drum. The typical panel for the tone control is the panel to the left of the strainer. So, when you look at a typical 60s era Dyna the tone control is in the panel to the immediate left of the strainer, and the venthole/badge is in the panel to the immediate right of the strainer. However, when you look at Louie's Dyna you will see that it was never drilled for the tone control.  

Here is a video clip of Louie in 1967. The video is grainy, but you can see that there is no tone control on the snare drum. HERE. Take a look at about the 6:46 mark. Louie would have the snare with the strainer to his left. Normally, the tone control would be in the next panel over towards the 9x13 tom, but you can see that there is nothing in that panel on the snare. And, check it out again at 12:34 and you get a shot of the badge on the snare. If you count over, the strainer is to the left of the badge and then a tone control would be to the left of the strainer, but there is no tone control. My set may or may not be the set from this video, but the purpose here is to show you the snare drum configuration. The set coming to me has a very cool back story but that's for later!

Of course, the drum sounds truly amazing! Since the set just arrived I added a few more pics of the entire kit. Check these out below the snare pics. There's a reason this kit only has one bass drum. It originally had both bass drums, but one got separated long ago.  Steve