This is where the music plays

Matthias Strack, who used to be an avid drummer himself, could really bang on the drums. Instead, however, in his job at Sonor, he prefers a quieter approach: When the 54-year-old turns on the light on his magnifying glass, it makes only a very soft “click.”

Strack sits at a workbench in a glass-enclosed corner office. He can look directly into the raw materials warehouse, where more than 3,500 purchased parts are stored on shelves. They come from suppliers in 13 countries, including Germany, the U.S., Mexico, China, Thailand, Italy, Poland, and the Czech Republic. Every screw, clamp, bracket, every piece of wood veneer and drumhead, every cymbal stand base—Strack scrutinizes everything before it’s allowed to be used in production. As head of quality assurance, he is responsible for ensuring that all components of a Sonor drum set meet the required standards. And those standards are high.

In Bad Berleburg, North Rhine-Westphalia—a town of 20,000 residents located about 40 kilometers northeast of Siegen—musical instruments that are in international demand have been manufactured since 1946. Sonor, founded in 1875 in Weißenfels an der Saale, moved to western Germany after World War II. Just behind the factory grounds rise the rolling hills of the Rothaar Mountains. And anyone looking at the small gray houses with their slate facades would never guess that this is a place of longing for heavy metal drummers, jazz avant-gardists, and folk musicians alike. “We have a discerning clientele, including many professionals”, says Sonor’s commercial director, Rainer Dreisbach. A big name in the scene like Jost Nickel, drummer for Jan Delay, is among them. Just like the drummers from Rammstein, Iron Maiden, Silbermond, the Kastelruther Spatzen, and the German Armed Forces Big Band. “We don’t favor any particular genre of music,” says Dreisbach, “the only thing that matters is: We must always deliver optimal quality. Sound, functionality, appearance—everything has to be 100 percent right. After all, we’re building the Rolls-Royce of drum kits here.”

A legendary trademark in RATHGEBER quality

Matthias Strack, his magnifying glass, and his digital caliper also play a key role. The quality manager is currently examining a component of a particularly rare snare drum: It’s a rectangular aluminum tag bearing, among other things, the words “One of a Kind.” The letters are slightly raised above the base of the emblem; if you run your finger over it, you can clearly feel the fine embossing: “With metal, we work in the range of tenths of a millimeter,” says Strack, “but we also have a few parts that have to be accurate to the hundredth of a millimeter.”" As he sets the caliper aside again, he says with satisfaction: "If all suppliers worked this way, we wouldn’t have any problems at all."

The acclaimed plaque comes from RATHGEBER. Sonor has been a customer of the labeling specialist from Oberhaching for years. RATHGEBER supplies Sonor with around 30 different items, including signs, emblems, and even the eyelets that frame the circular hole in each drum shell through which the sound escapes. Ever since Strack took over quality assurance—that is, for about twelve years now—he has kept a sample of nearly every emblem in his drawer: “The badges are kind of my pet project,” he says, “I collect them.”

The logo featuring the two drumsticks is also quite remarkable: The Sonor logo was developed in the early 1960s by the legendary designer Otl Aicher, who also created, for example, the graphics and layouts for the 1972 Olympic Games in Munich and the Lufthansa crane. On the emblem—about the size of a matchbox—which quality inspector Strack is now placing back on his workbench, the two drumsticks are made of beautifully grained wood: Using laser technology, they were cut from a single slab at RATHGEBER in a delicate, millimeter-precise process and then mounted onto the aluminum emblem. The wood used is the same type as that used for the drums. A lot of effort for an emblem—but at Sonor, details like these matter. “We prefer to work with suppliers on a long-term basis. RATHGEBER is a good example of this. The quality is excellent, and the proximity makes many things easier: When we need a sample, everything is handled quickly, flexibly, and reliably.”

75 employees build about 1,500 drum sets per year

The instrument makers from Bad Berleburg are always coming up with something new: For the Canadian market, they once crafted a drum from 13 different types of maple wood—this produced a wonderful sound and also symbolized Canada’s 13 provinces. On another occasion, a series of drums was crafted from the hollowed-out trunk of a single Japanese cherry tree—without any glue whatsoever. And then, in the 1990s, there was the “Jet Set,” which sold for around 30,000 German marks: it featured maple drums as well as cymbal stands and drum tensioners coated in 24-karat gold. One of these instruments—of which only five were ever built—is on display in the small company museum on the factory grounds in Bad Berleburg.

Since 1991, Sonor has been part of another long-established German company: Hohner, based in Trossingen in the Black Forest, famous for its harmonicas, accordions, and recorders. Since 1997, Hohner and Sonor have been majority-owned by a Taiwanese investor group; since 2014, they have been 100 percent owned by it. When Dreisbach began his apprenticeship as an industrial clerk at Sonor in 1986, the founder’s grandson was still running the company. However, his descendants did not want to take over the company—thus ending the era of the purely family-owned business. The tradition lives on, though—thanks in part to employees like Dreisbach, who is celebrating his 30th anniversary with the company in August, and Strack, who has been working here for 35 years. “The collaboration with the Taiwanese works well, even on a personal level,” says Dreisbach, “this investor is no vulture. We’ve been working together constructively for almost 20 years now.”

The day-to-day work of the approximately 75 employees at Sonor’s headquarters consists of manufacturing drum sets for Sonor’s current top-of-the-line SQ² and Prolite series. “We can’t produce entry-level sets for 500 euros here,” says Dreisbach. The more affordable product lines are manufactured in Asia. Approximately 1,500 high-end drum sets leave the production facility in Bad Berleburg each year, in addition to Orff instruments such as timpani, xylophones, glockenspiels, as well as cajons and tambourines. “We’re more of a craft workshop and manufacturer here than a traditional industrial plant,” says Dreisbach.

The first thing you notice in the factory halls is the smell of wood—which is particularly strong, of course, in the storage room behind Strack’s corner office. There, at 60 to 70 percent humidity, lie the mostly 2.1-millimeter-thin sheets of the most important raw material: plywood made from Canadian maple, Scandinavian birch, and local beech. In addition, there is a huge variety of block and natural veneers. With the SQ² drum series, customers have the option to customize their own drum set. The choices start with the diameter and depth of the drums and go far beyond just the type of wood.

Discerning drummers like to mix and match: For example, the tiger-skin-like “Tigerfinish” veneer is often used on the inside of the drum shell, while “American Walnut” is preferred on the outside. For each order, an employee then selects the appropriate wood panels in the correct sizes—and delivers the goods to the drum shell builders.

One of them, woodworker Horst Treude, has been with the company since 1980. He coats the various plywood and veneer panels with hot glue and then places them in a press sized to fit the desired dimensions. At around 100 degrees, the wood remains in the mold for about twelve minutes—and emerges as a drum kettle with the pieces firmly bonded together.

In the next step, the painters next door take care of the wood finishing: for example, Kai Becker, whose Borussia Dortmund tattoo on his forearm doesn’t quite seem to go with the Kastelruther Spatzen poster on the wall. “The high-gloss finishes are the most labor-intensive,” explains the expert. Time and again, he has to apply a coat of lacquer, let it dry, and apply another coat. Layer by layer. It takes about 15 workdays to complete a bass drum until everything is perfect and ready for polishing. Nevertheless, Sonor manages to produce a complete drum set within twelve weeks.

In the final step before packaging, the lacquered drum shells are then sent to the realm of Thorsten Schmidt, the master craftsman in the assembly hall. Shells in all colors and sizes wait here to be transformed into drum sets. All that’s missing are the holes for attaching metal parts like tension rods and brackets, as well as the heads, which are mounted at another workstation.

The RATHGEBER emblems are also laid out on a workbench in the assembly hall, neatly sorted into compartments. One of the final steps is to screw the emblem corresponding to the model onto the outer shell of a drum. They’re certainly not the most important components for an instrument’s sound. But they’re not entirely unimportant either: “In the world of drums, it’s always about the look too,” says Schmidt, “we have to be perfect down to the last detail. Our logo and the nameplates are part of that.”