LaBB Report

Influencing the industry with innovative and creative ideas. My rant on big industry's "innovative" concepts of drumsticks.

I hope this finds you all well and in high spirits! For those of you that have made orders this past year, you have probably noticed that I write this in some form on nearly every order. Why? Because I genuinely care about your well being as musicians and humans. This has been an exceptionally trying year for everyone, especially musicians that make a living playing music. Having played music professionally for 30+ years, and now a provider to the music industry, I can sincerely feel what everyone has been going through. This has affected me as well. I have purposefully kept sticks at the holiday sale price in attempt to offer some sort of support to all of you. I love to see and hear what you all do!

Alas, my attempts to avoid a wood shortage have... well... fallen short. I have tried to keep ahead of this, however, I am at the mercy of my suppliers and I do not want to make an inferior product than the one we have all come to enjoy. Rest assured, I am not sitting around twiddling my thumbs. I am actually utilizing the wait time to do some upgrades to the finishing side of stick making, along with some machine maintenance. The past few days I have been making yet another sander revision and the coming week will see development...

For those that do not know and have not considered the processes that go into making a drumstick, I wanted to share a bullet list of the process in the one man, one machine (lathe) shop. These processes are what makes it difficult to make very small batches of a drumstick and limit the ability for "one off" custom product. Find a wood distributor select boards for grain structure and minimum imperfections load, transport lumber and unload lumber at shop cut boards down to rough stock length- called "books" (while inspecting yet again) stack boards to acclimate MC (moisture content)...

Through the past few years of operating LA BackBeat, I have experienced many ups and downs and extreme learning curves. From the onset, I figured I could make a stick that would be comparable to the leading manufacturers products. I never imagined that my quality control and my knowledge of wood could yield a far more durable product. Although I am still working out some of the finer details of LABB drumsticks, I am continuously surprised at the life span. When I first started this endeavor, I knew it was going to require a lot of processes to yield a...