The Drum Beat

Five years ago, we launched Olympic Drums and Percussion (ODP) with a website offering a small number of products for the sheer fun of sharing our passion for vintage drums and percussion.  During these years, we’ve talked with percussionists from all over the country and all over the world. We’re amazed by the enthusiasm of drummers everywhere. As we’ve grown, our website’s functionality wasn’t able to grow with us. 

So, it is with great excitement that we launch our new site, which not only features a new look and feel, but, more importantly, also adds functionality we hope improves your experience.  We think you’ll...

Both of the partners in Olympic Drums & Percussion – Scott Colner and Bill Wanser – were “Hinger students.”  As a student at Yale University and Manhattan School of Music, Scott studied tympani and percussion with Fred D. Hinger.  Bill studied with Mr. Hinger at the Manhattan School of Music, where he earned his master’s degree in percussion performance.  Both men have a continuing deep admiration and respect for the musical concepts taught by this extraordinary gentleman and percussionist.  They are honored to collaborate with Bill Hinger, Fred Hinger’s son, to offer for sale the collection of percussion instruments owned and...

Through his entire career Fred Hinger was never satisfied with commercially produced percussion products and spent much time creating his own drumsticks and tympani mallets while he was in the Philadelphia Orchestra. He found that tympani handles made of bamboo produced a much larger sound than the traditional wood handles found on virtually all commercially produced tympani mallets. People started asking him to make the same mallets for them, and as time went on he started selling these hand sewn tympani mallets to students and other professionals. In the early 1960’s, he began to experiment with other handle materials and found that...

In the mid-1970’s, the Hingers developed the Space-Tone snare drum. There are several conflicting stories on the Internet about how this came about, who developed it, and how it was developed. Most of these stories are completely wrong. The design and development of the Space-Tone snare drum was more of a discovery, that happened by accident, rather than a designed invention.

In the early 1970’s when Bill’s children were very young, they would frequently go to dinner on Sunday afternoon at Fred's house in Leonia, New Jersey. Bill and Fred would almost always find their way down to the studio in his home where they would talk...

The development of the Hinger Touch-Tone tympani were the result of many years of a wish list of things that Fred Hinger always wanted to incorporate into tympani for himself. In his entire career he never used plastic heads but played exclusively on calf heads. This of course presented many problems associated with humidity and weather, which became difficult to solve. On very damp days he found it much better to be able to play on the backbone of the animal skin, but on very dry days it was much better to play on the belly of the skin, which produced a much better sound in each of these conditions. The tympani bowl rotation design was a...