Article index

• A quick Remo introduction
  
• The Remo factory video
  
• The Remo factory photo tour
  
• A short Remo history
  
• The original 'R. D. BELLI ET AL DRUM HEAD' patent, as filed in 1957 (pdf download)

Since Remo Inc. company started in 1957, Remo drumheads are the most used drumheads in music, in the studio and in live settings. The list of drummers playing Remo drumheads is endless. From Dave Grohl to Dave Weckl and from Aaron Spears to Buddy Rich, or even the off-beat kid in your street that just started playing. The diversity in music of all these drummers tells a lot. Here you get to learn why these drummers choose Remo and all about the company's ongoing process in perfecting their drum sound for every drummer in the world.

At Remo, creating the best sounds in music is the dedication that has been the sole goal of the company for many decades now. From drumheads to conga heads and all the other heads the company makes for timpani, marching, banjos or any percussion instrument, the Remo-sound is still the most appealing to the majority of musicians, producers and engineers. That must have something to do with the product.

Everybody gets the same drumhead
Remo products are not only about production: they are about maintaining the highest standards in sound for each drumhead - or any other product the company makes - and to give it the best possible sound. Wheter it is a drumset, conga or bongo head, pre-tuned or not, everybody in the world, including the most famous drum artists, they all get the same guaranteed quality and sound.

There is no special treatment on quality at Remo. This also goes for the entire drum industry: every major drum company that orders with Remo gets the same specs and quality. Unless, when someone wants something different! Because at Remo, they still love a good challenge in design and manufacturing.

Directly below the video is the time index with all topics covered during the factory tour. Then you find the same tour in photos at the Remo factory, a short Remo History, including a history of the Mylar drumhead and a download of the original patent.

How Remo Drumheads are made - the Full Factory Tour
Your host is Herbie May, Director of Engineering and R&D at Remo. He explains all the stages of how Remo drumheads are made. And with Herbie, you get a tour that exceeds the manufacturing process.
In order of appearance, here are the Remo artists that are in this video*: Thomas Lang, Aaron Spears, Mark Schulman, Remo Belli himself (founder of Remo Inc.), Jeff Hamilton, Ray Luzier, Russ Miller, Matt Garstka, Nikki Glaspie, Zack Danziger and Benny Greb.


*All artist footage in this video are recorded by Drummerszone on different locations in the world.

Video Index - How Remo Drumheads are made

• 00:00 Rolling the flesh hoops
  
• 00:53 Welding the hoops
  
• 01:36 Cleaning the hoops
  
• 02:13 The Mylar
  
• 03:05 Cutting the drumheads
  
• 03:48 Punch pressing the films
  
• 04:04 The famous Remo Step
  
• 05:02 Pressing The Step
  
• 05:49 Glueing the drumheads
  
• 05:49 The coating process
  
• 07:42 Visual inspection
  
• 08:12 DW (Drum Workshop) Vented heads
  
• 08:29 More Remo heads
  Including conga and bongo heads, timpani, Banjo and the re-introduced 'flat tire' shaped Vox Telstar by Sakae.
  
• 10:16 Stamping the logos
  
• 11:07 Boxing & shipping

Remo Factory photo tour

Rolling the flesh hoops

The Flesh Hoops are the rings where the Mylar (the drumhead) falls into. In a few stages this machine rolls the aluminum into the form that makes the ring of the drumhead.

Welding the hoops

After the rings are cut to the right size, the hoops (the aluminum rings) are welded. Any drumhead size in the Remo catalogue is made here. Remo is also specialized in off-the-scale sized drumheads. Companies like Disney, Cirque du Soleil and Universal Studios place special orders that go way beyond standard drumhead sizes.

Cleaning the hoops

Any residue inside the aluminum hoops has to be cleaned. This washer machine clears the raw aluminum hoops of anything that might prevent the resin (the glue) from sticking.

The Remo Mylar

The magic since 1957 and one of Remo's best kept secrets: the type of Mylar the company uses for their different drumheads. Herbie May reveals that Remo laminates the Mylar for some of their drumheads like the Fiberskyn - because it sounds better.

Cutting the drumheads

With 50 tons of leverage the mould cuts through the Mylar in a fragment of a second. These are the films that you play on your drumhead. Remo produces around 15,000 drumheads a day at the California factory. The scrap of the material is re-used or recycled, just like virtually everything in the Remo instrument making processes.

Punch pressing the films

One of our favorite stages! The details that make a product great.
This is how the tacking in the early days was solved. The glue, or resin, flows through these punch holes to make it stick better inside the aluminum hoop.

The famous Remo Step

The Step is how Remo levels the drumhead to the flesh hoop. Herbie May explains the importance of the Step in the video around the 4th minute. Below you will find the original patent that Remo filed for the construction of a drum head. The technique for The Step came a few years later.
Here you can see the little holes from the punch pressing stage very well.

Pressing the Step

Fully digitalized, for each drumhead the specs of pressing are narrowed down to the millisecond. The operator knows exactly where every drumhead is, and where and how to prepare it for the next stage in the process.

Glueing the drumheads

The glue is called resin. Even at Remo, only a few know what this glue is made of. It is a chemical construction that quickly dries so the heads can be stacked at the end of each conveyer. When fully dried, it can easily hold the severe beatings of Ray Luzier, Mike Mangini and even you.


Here we see Remo Colortones on the conveyer. Almost dry enough to stack for the next stage in the production process.

Coating the drumheads

A delicate but precise process. Each Remo drumhead with coating goes through the same conveyer and gets exactly the same treatment.
Before Remo figured out their first coating process in 1958, they used to sandblast the drumheads for a better brush-feel. The machine was not running when we visited the company, but here is Herbie May explaining the coating process. Watch the video to see how this is done.

Visual inspection

A stage in the process for every drumhead made. Where you would expect a robot to do this work, at Remo the drumheads are inspected visually. Because of the high level of production at Remo the error margin is nearly zero. The few heads that don't pass the test are fully recycled.

More Remo heads
Remo's catalogue not only covers drumheads for drum kits. The company also makes heads for timpani, world percussion instruments like congas and bongos, but also for Banjos and the 'flat tire' shaped Vox Telstar (an old design by Trixon), as you can see in the video.


Remo Conga heads: Tucked and Crimplock Symmetry. Herbie explaines the difference between the heads in detail in the video. After the introduction of 'Acousticon' in 1981, Remo gradually started making more percussion drumheads for their own percussion instruments, but also to be used on instruments from companies like Pearl, Latin Percussion, Gon Bops, Toca and Meinl percussion.


Remo Timpani heads. An entirely different type of production. Timpani heads have stronger hoops because the tuning points are further away from each other.


Remo also makes the oddly shaped Vox Telstar heads. A drum design re-introduced at the 2020 NAMM show. It is called the flat tire because of its shape. A specialty in production, because the front and back are not interchangeable: you can't put the front on the back of the same drum.

Stamping the logos

Done in an almost classic way. Remo also makes drumheads for most of the drum brands on the planet. This employee is skilled in placing every logo at the same spot on each drumhead.

Boxing & shipping

The final stage before shipping to distributors, retail stores and eventually the consumer. Depending on the type of drumhead, an order from anyone around the globe is packed here and fulfilled. Can you guess which drumhead you see here?


A short Remo drumheads history
After taking exit 173 on Interstate 5 North to Valencia, California, and when the red traffic lights make you wait for green, you see a building on the right that says REMO. When driving up the Remo parking lot, you get even more impressed. The size of this company covers your entire view, wondering how far it goes. Turns out that it is 210,000 square feet. Here we are visiting the company that made Rock and Roll happen faster, all because of that one guy that foresaw a future in music with synthetic drumheads produced in a way he thought would be best.

Remo Belli built this company on a single goal: to produce steady and sturdy drumheads that would last a while when drummers hit the road or went into the studio for recordings. On the third of May in 1960, his patent for this newly produced drumhead with unknown materials at that time, hit the right note in getting several things right: the material (Mylar), the production (the patent, and later in combination with the famous Step), and the sound (consistency).

As history goes with patents, designs and claims, there are always more sides to the same story. Where Marconi is known as the inventor of the radio, he was inspired by Nicolai Tesla and his work on frequency electricity. Just like where Tony Williams played his music, Vinnie Colaiuta studied him closely and perfected his own sound and skills by understanding what his hero was doing.

As a drummer himself, Remo Belli translated the sound a drummer's job requires to a drumhead that would fulfill all the needs to do the job. Up to this day, very little has changed in the basics of that design. Of course, production is still adjusted here and there to improve the manufacturing process. Still, the basics remain the same, as Herbie May shares in the video above.

Until the 1950s, drumheads were made from calfskin, most of which came from the Chicago slaughterhouses, which was one of the reasons that such drum companies as Ludwig and Slingerland were located in Chicago. Calfskin drumheads were greatly affected by humidity or lack thereof. Damp weather would stretch the calfskin and when the head dried out there was the risk it could split. And of course: calfskin heads would break if you struck them too hard.

The Weather King drumhead debuted in 1957 at the Chicago NAMM show. Remo landed orders for more than 10,000 heads. On June 1, 1957, Remo Inc. was created to market the aluminum-channel drumheads. The original partners were Remo Belli, Sid Gerwin, Sam Muchnick, and Roy Harte.

During the 1950s, Remo Belli came in contact with many people experimenting with Mylar films used for drumheads. Bud Slingerland was one of the first who showed Remo this new plastic made by DuPont.

From Mylar to drumhead

Polyester film was invented in England in the 1940s at Imperial Chemical Industries, (ICI), as a substitute for the cellulose film used by reconnaissance aircraft doing wartime surveillance work. The cellulose film was prone to breaking, which would negate the effort of the mission. After the war, the DuPont Chemical Company bought patent rights to manufacture polyester film in the United States. Their product, called Mylar, was used extensively as a packaging material, for recording tape, and as insulation for electric motors.

Jim Erwin, a chemical engineer for 3M was the first to use Mylar as a drumhead.

"I used to go to New York to see my jazz trumpeter brother play in the nightclubs there. It was around 1952 or 53, and he was leading a band at the Cafe Metropole. Duke Ellington's former drummer, Sonny Greer broke a drumhead that night, and later I went up to him and told him that I thought I could make a head for him that wouldn't break.
I had been working with polyester film at 3M for about eight years and thought it might work as a head material. I went back to Minnesota and made one up by serrating the edge of a piece of Mylar so it could be bent around and attached to the flesh hoop of a calfskin head. I took it back to Sonny in New York, and he used it and said that it was the best head he'd ever played on. He was really impressed with its uniformity."

In 1956, Marion I. "Chick" Evans completed a Mylar version drumhead that consisted of a drilled outer hoop that tacked a Mylar head to a smaller, inner hoop. Remo visited Chick's basement factory but never made it to the basement where he made these heads. Remo was not interested in buying his business after seeing things firsthand.

However, Drum City, Remo's drum shop, did distribute these Evans heads for a while. Roy Hart (Remo's partner) used them on session gigs and the young business partners learned that these heads didn't hold and could not withstand the tensioning and rigors of being played with sticks. The Mylar would tear from the hoops and the film would dent badly.

During those days, Remo Belli met a chemist named Sam Muchnick. Together they developed an aluminum channel design filled with resin to anchor the Mylar. Remo Inc. applied for a patent on that aluminum channel drumhead. The company outgrew the first Remo factory within a year and moved to a 1,000-square-foot space located on Santa Monica Blvd. near Vine.

At the time, DuPont was making a number of thin films, and only three thicknesses of Mylar film were suitable for drumheads: 7.5 mil, 5 mil, and 3 mil. The original Weather King drumhead was made from the 7.5-mil thickness. Later renamed to the Diplomat.

The 3 mil thickness became Remo's Snare Side Ambassador head. The original Ambassador and Emperor heads had two plies mounted together: 7.5 + 3 mil for the Ambassador, and 7.5 + 7.5 mil for the Emperor.

Until Remo developed a chemical coating in 1958, drumheads were sandblasted for better use with brushes. The newly developed coating gave a much better sound and feel to the drumheads.

In the history of the design, rights, patents, and of course the claim on the first idea for the production of Remo drumheads, many stories are still told. And the drum market hasn't changed much since then, with brands patenting and claiming to be the first with ideas all the time.

The Original Patent
Still, it was Remo Inc. that got the patent for the design of the bestselling drumheads the world has seen so far.

When filing patent no. 2,934,989 on August 15, 1957, Remo D. Belli (et all) set a new tone in music history. The patent got approved on May 3, 1960. Since then, Remo has been producing drumheads this way, with only few adjustments over time. Where science grows, companies like Remo adjust and make changes in production. And that is just what Remo does. Not only in their drumhead production, but also on all possible environmental issues they encounter as a company.


Click here to download the pdf of the original Remo patent no. 2,934,989.

The first paragraph of patent no. 2,934,989
As filed by Remo D. Belli, Sam Muchnick and their attorney in 1957.

This invention relates to drum heads and methods of making the same.

In the past, drum heads have commonly been made of animal skins disposed or stretched across a ring, which is in turn clamped over the cylindrical body of the drum.

Modern plastics offer superior substitutes for animal skins in many cases, but the satisfactory securement of such plastics to the drum ring has been somewhat of a problem.

It is an object of this invention to provide an improved drum head and method of making same which is adaptable to the use of modern tough and strong plastics to replace the conventional animal skins.

Sources for this short history on Remo Inc.

• remo.com
  
• pas.org (Remo Belli was one of the founders of the Percussive Arts Society.
  
• drummerszone.com
  
• google.com & uspto.gov

The artists featured in the video use these brands
Thomas Lang uses: Audix, Cympad, DW (Drum Workshop), DrumTags, Jefferson Eyewear, Meinl Cymbals, QSC, Remo drumheads, Revolution Drum, Roland, Vic Firth Thomas Lang Signature Series

Aaron Spears uses: Clear Tune Monitors (CTM), KickPort, Reflexx, Remo drumheads, Sonor Drums, Zildjian Cymbals, Zildjian Artists series drumsticks

Mark Schulman uses: Apogee, Big Fat Snare Drum, Gibraltar, Gretsch, Jefferson Eyewear, Percussion Dynamics, Protection Racket, Remo, Remo drumheads, Roland, Sabian, Sennheiser, SledgePad, Toca, Vic Firth

Jeff Hamilton uses: Gator Cases, Remo Drums, Crescent Cymbals, Mapex, Regal Tip, Remo drumheads

Ray Luzier uses: DW (Drum Workshop) hardware, LP (Latin Percussion), Meinl Percussion, Pearl Drums, Porter & Davies, Protection Racket, Remo drumheads, Sabian, Vic Firth, Yamaha

Russ Miller uses: Cympad, DW (Drum Workshop), Hercules Stands, Mapex, Meinl Percussion, NFUZD Audio, Porter & Davies, Prologix Percussion, Randall May, Remo drumheads, SKB Cases, Vic Firth, Zildjian Cymbals, Zoom

Matt Garstka uses: Meinl Cymbals, Reflexx, Remo drumheads, Tama, Vic Firth

Nikki Glaspie uses: ESP Guitars, Remo drumheads, Vater Percussion, Yamaha, Zildjian Cymbals

Zack Danziger uses: Ableton Live, Apple Inc., Audio-Technica, Novation, Roland, Sennheiser, Yamaha, DW (Drum Workshop), Gretsch, Reflexx, Remo drumheads, Vic Firth, Zildjian Cymbals

Benny Greb uses: Meinl Cymbals, Meinl Percussion, Porter & Davies, Remo drumheads, Sonor Drums, Vic Firth