David Crocker (BS ’77) spent his career building the machines that produce more than half of the world’s drumsticks. His quest for precision had two distinct players in mind: the high-end studio drummer and “Susie,” the fifth-grade neophyte.
As the longtime chief engineer at percussion giant Vic Firth, he knew that both of these users needed a precisely matched pair, equal in weight and tone. For the high-end drummer: “Maybe he’s out in Hollywood, he’s making a soundtrack for a movie,” says Crocker. “The killer is walking into the room and he’s going”—Crocker raises a hand, miming a drum hit—”‘tick, tick, tick, tick, tick.’ Well, you can’t go, ‘tok.’ They both have to make the same sound.” For fifth-grade Susie, when she hits the same spot on a cymbal and gets two different tones, he says, she thinks she is doing something wrong. “No, [if] you have a pair of drumsticks that aren’t matched,” Crocker says, “it doesn’t matter what you do, they’ll never produce the same tone.” There is a third market, too—though he concedes this population is a bit less discerning: “The green-haired guy in the garage. But he has no idea that these sticks have been so carefully and lovingly made and paired,” he says. “So we made them for Susie, we made them for the high-end guy, and everybody else got ‘em, too, whether they wanted it or not.”
After Vic Firth, a legendary timpanist with the Boston Symphony Orchestra, eventually acquired the wood-turning company, Crocker took on a new engineering crucible: tone pairing. At the time, pairing drumsticks was a manual, labor-intensive process that involved workers sitting in front of microphones, tapping sticks, and sorting them into cubby holes. “We said, ‘Well, that’s expensive,'” Crocker says, noting that—at its peak—the shop was creating 100,000 to 120,000 pairs of drumsticks a week. His solution was to automate the ear, building a machine that marched sticks down a conveyor, struck them, and analyzed their base resonant frequency to make pairs.
Crocker retired in 2019, but he’s kept busy. He completely rebuilt his home (having built his two previous homes) and is taking a college-level class in digital photography. “Me and nine 20-ish art majors,” he says. “Just trying to keep my brain alive and do something interesting.”
“Charlie Watts has got his drumstick with his name on it, made to his specifications, and I
designed the tooling for that. It was interesting, and it was nice to be a part of that, but I don’t have that musical connection. It was more about the process. I got to build interesting machines.”
He remains modest about his legacy. “Making drumsticks in Maine doesn’t seem like it compares with curing cancer or developing AI,” he says. “We just paid attention to all the details all the way through the process, and we made a better drumstick.”
Besides, he was never in it for the glamour—or the proximity to it. He never even played the drums. “I am probably the least musical person you’re ever going to meet,” he says, chuckling. His Boston-area colleagues were the “musical people,” he says, always trumpeting the boldfaced names using their product. “Charlie Watts has got his drumstick with his name on it, made to his specifications, and I designed the tooling for that. I did the artwork that went under the stick,” he says. “Okay, that’s nice. But I really don’t care. It was interesting, and it was nice to be a part of that, but I don’t have that musical connection. It was more about the process. I got to build interesting machines.”
The impact on the local community mattered, too. “We provided a lot of good jobs for a lot of people over the years. I know some cases of three generations of people that worked there,” says Crocker. “That’s probably the most fulfilling part.”