Playing Allegra Drums
Ghost of Allegra - New Year’s Eve - December 2004
photo by Kurt Deutscher
A few years ago I had the good fortune to discover Allegra Drums.
I’m a wood guy; my ears like to hear wood, not the ringing overtones of all the cast-metal parts of the kit. So one day a friend of mine, Mel Brown, has me sit in with his band to try out his new Allegra kit. Up to this point I’m still thinking drums are drums. But while I’m playing his kit with this totally acoustic jazz trio, I could hear all these notes from the drums, all this wood tone and they had tone no matter how soft I played.
Well I went to visit the shop where they build Allegra in Portland and just fell in love. I ordered my new five piece jazz kit and they had it built two weeks ahead of schedule and that kit was 100% from day one!
I had ordered wood hoops on just the snare because I was skeptical about how wood hoops would sound/play. A year later I took all the toms back in and had the hoops changed over to wood too. The tone I get with those wood hoops is the sound I spent 20 years looking/listening for but could never find.
I take this kit into living rooms and play as soft as ED Thigpen, then the next night I’m out pumping up a 20 member big band outdoors, and all I do is tune up the snare a little tighter and these drums sing, sing, sing. I get warm wood tone and beautiful clear sound from these drums at any dynamic.
Did I mention that the aluminum lugs and wood rims also took say ~ maybe 20% of the weight off my drums? These drums are so easy to cart around. After all those years of schlepping my kits to 200 performances and rehearsals a year, I can really appreciate the lighter load.
A year ago I got rid of my Gretch and DW kits and got a second Allegra set. Now I have one kit set up for heavy hitting, and one set up for smaller rooms.
Let me put it this way, if you are at the point in life that you deserve to be just a little spoiled, then its time for your first Allegra kit.