Whitney Drums are Amazingly Lightweight

	Nesting Penguin 16 (in soft bags)	Nesting Penguin 18 (in soft bags)	Custom Maple 18 (in soft bags)
Trap/Stand Bag	51.8	51.5	62
Bass/Kick	12.9	14.3	24.5
Snare + Two Toms	18.7	19.7	27.4
Seat/Throne Top	6.6	6.6	5.4
Total packed weight	90 lbs	92.1 lbs	119.3 lbs

During my tenure as a full-time professional drummer, I was schlepping my drum kit to over 250 rehearsals and/or performances a year. Most of the time, that meant moving them up a flight of stairs from some basement and into my vehicle before the music-making, and back out of the vehicle and down into the basement upon my return home. That’s over 250 round trips with about 150 pounds (68kg for my friends across the pond) of gear.

Then there’s the load-in at the event venue that can involve, narrow parking spaces, winter weather, slippery kitchen floors, tricky doors, stairs, elevators, escalators, steep ramps, people dining in a packed venue (where you lift the gear over your head to get in between the tables), and carrying the gear 100s of steps from vehicle to stage. On the bandstand, there can be more obstacles that you have to lift your gear over. Keep doing this every year for a few decades and at some point, you will start dreaming of lighter weight gear; hopefully before your back or major joints start to complain.

The table above illustrates the nearly 30 lb (13.6 kb) reduction in packed weight between the custom maple, four-piece drum set I’d used for acoustic jazz gigs for the previous 20 years and my two lighter-weight Whitney drum sets I use now.

The custom maple kit listed above had 6-ply shells, aluminum lugs, and wood rims and weighed a little less than the four-piece DW and Gretch kits I owned before it. The Whitney drums have 3-ply, birch, 1/8” (3mm) thick shells, no lugs, and wood rims making them the lightest-weight, professional, handcrafted, two-headed, wood-shelled drums I’ve ever played.

All weights listed include the soft/padded cases/bags I transport them in. The fully-packed trap/stand bag weights all include one bass drum pedal, snare stand, hi-hat stand, boom/arm-stands for three or four cymbals, tom-mounts, a fully-loaded stick bag, and both Whitney kits include the Quickstand base too.

I take a different mix of cymbals with me depending on the room, the sound the bandleader is going for, and the instrumentation, so I didn’t include them in the table.