I was active as a drummer for a long time in the 1980s. I have played on TAMA, Ludwig, Remo and Pearl Drums “Jeff Porcaro Edition”. I was already a SONOR fan at that time. I was also impressed by the great Tama Woods drums. But SONOR was always in a different league. The foot pedals and high hats as well as tom tom also sounded super rich and the drums were very stable. SONOR are drums for all styles, especially jazz & rock, heavy metal or pop. Big bands often played on SONOR drums.
SONOR is the oldest drum manufacturer in the world
The company is from the Rothaar Mountains and has now written 145 years of company history. Karl Heinz Menzel, former managing director of SONOR, says: ...“The desire and urge for the best possible quality” “driven and drives the German company”.
It is thanks to this penchant for quality that the Sonor Signature series was developed in the 80s. It was Horst Link, the managing director at the time, who gave his development team the order: "We are building the best drum kit in the world. Money doesn't play a role." Now one may argue about whether SONOR actually succeeded in this. One thing is certain: we were definitely close to our goal.
One of the absolute favorites of countless drummers is the Horst-Link snare, of which around 200 were produced. The 15 kilogram cast bronze Horst-Link snare was only introduced in 1987. This makes it one of the less legendary drums that does not have its origins in the “golden days of jazz” of the 60s or 70s. The Horst-Link Signature is jokingly nicknamed “The German Tank”.
This attribute applies to no other instrument from the Signature series as much as to the HLD590 model. The HLD590 snares were cast like a bell. The casting process results in the metal mixture being evenly distributed throughout the entire boiler structure. This construction results in an enormous weight, which gives the boiler, with its wall thickness of three millimeters and the two millimeter thick reinforcement rings, an extremely high level of bending rigidity. This in turn ensures that every hit is transmitted from the resonance head.
Anyone who has ever played such a drum knows how sensitively this snare reacts and with what intensity it responds.
For many drummers, the HLD-590 is nothing less than the “holy grail” of snare drums. There is no other way to explain the fact that when it was launched on the market in 1987 the price was already 2,300 DM and that such a snare now changes hands for 3,000 to 4,000 euros.
