For their 50th Anniversary, Yamaha Drums introduced the Limited-Edition 50th Anniversary drum set to commemorate half a century of manufacturing drums. At NAMM 2017 two stunning drum kits were shown at the booth, each costing $12,000. Yamaha first began manufacturing drums in a small workshop within the Niitsu factory in Hamamatsu, Japan in 1967. Five decades later, production now takes place in a multimillion-dollar facility in Xiaoshan, China. Below are all the videos about and related to the 50th Anniversary kits, including a demo by Gorden Campbell and a rundown of the Yamaha Absolute Hybrid Maple that the drums are made of.
The Yamaha Limited-Edition 50th Anniversary drum sets
The anniversary kits are based on the in 2014 released Absolute Hybrid Maple series. Built with two maple woods, the sets are created in a Birdseye Maple in an Amber Sunburst finish, and a Curly Maple in an Antique Natural finish. The gold lugs refer to the first Yamaha Maple Custom drum sets, introduced in 1991.
Yamaha Fine Technologies
Yamaha's woodworking techniques are also asked for outside the drum market. For instance, specialized wood work that you find in Lexus cars, are also made by Yamaha - by Yamaha Fine Technologies (YFT), a division of the Yamaha Corporation, to be precise. The high profile laser techniques the company uses were used to create the 50th anniversary badge on the drums. The difference with Yamaha's work for Lexus is that the badge, created with the secret Laser Cutting Ornamentation technique, is glued on aluminum, whereas the sharp metal accents in the Lexus cars' woodworks become visible because a thin aluminum sheet is pressed between two layers of wood.
So, everything on the badge is engraved with laser, resulting in a badge with spectacular details. The special anniversary logo on the bass drum head, and the fact that each bass drum shell has been marked with a number in the order it was produced, makes these drums even more special and unique. The price for one of the 50 available kits is set on $12,000. At the Winter NAMM Show 2017, they were already almost sold out.
