Rogers Drums, initially founded in Covington, Ohio in 1849, made their return at Winter NAMM 2007 in Anaheim, California. It was the drum company\'s first showing at NAMM in decades. However, the drums on display were essentially starter kits. Hopefully Rogers will expand their range with upper and top class models within the near future to add to the brand\'s legacy.\"People asked where I did my research, and I\'d say, \'In the nightclubs. Where else do you see drummers?\' I used to watch their trials and tribulations. Drummers would say, \'I don\'t know why my bass drum creeps, I\'ve got an anchor.\' I saw that every time they accented the bass drum, the front would lift up and the drum anchor became useless. I\'d go back to the plant and meet with chief engineer Joe Thompson, and we\'d try to figure out what to do. We came up with a foot pedal with spurs on it. The more you accented, the more the spurs dug in, and the drum wouldn\'t move.
While we were at it, we made the pedal adjustable to how high a person sat. I\'d see a drummer in a club and he\'d tell me he couldn\'t get used to our pedal. I\'d watch him play and see that he didn\'t have the footboard angle set to compensate for the way he was sitting. I\'d sit him down and ask him to put his foot flat on the floor. Then I\'d have him raise his toe and tell me when his calf tightened. This was the point at which he needed to angle the footboard. We could also swivel the footboard left or right, and raise the beater assembly to adjust to different size bass drums without changing the length of the stroke. This was all available on the Swiv-O-Matic foot pedal.\"
In the mid 1970s, Rogers came out with the MemriLoc hardware, which keeps its mark in all modern drum sets until today. The MemriLoc replaced the hexagonal rods with 1-inch-diameter round tubes. To prevent the slipping of the round tubes, the MemriLoc introduced drum key adjustable clamps. These clamps had the wanted effect of locking how far a rod could be inserted, therefore enabling an easy duplication of a prior setup. Thus the memory lock, a feature quite ubiquitous in modern drum kits, was born.
Former Rogers endorsing artists
The most celebrated Rogers endorsees were Buddy Rich, Louie Bellson and Cozy Cole. In addition, other jazz luminaries like Ed Shaughnessy, Roy Burns, and Bobby Rosengarden have played Rogers kits at some time in their careers, as well as Mickey Hart of the Grateful Dead and Glenn Evans of Nuclear Assault.
Yamaha pick up Rogers Drum
In 2006 Yamaha, already producing an electronic and acoustic drum line under their own name, acquired the intellectual property rights to the Rogers Drum Company at a bankruptcy court-ordered auction. Tom Sumner, vice president and general manager, Pro Audio & Combo Division, Yamaha Corporation of America, stated:
\"Opportunities to acquire a well-respected brand that is so treasured by players do not come along everyday. We will use our expertise to improve on the Rogers legacy.\"
