Back when I was in the middle school band, every kid had a silver Acrolite. It was really weird when a kid would walk in with anything else.I think the music store employees snagged 'em all and they were replaced with the much cheaper CB700's and the like. My brother is starting to hoard the good ones in the store. He knows their worth, and is tired of seeing them get ruined by kids. He's slowly rotating them out of service and replacing them with newer, cheaper "student" drums.:p
Hmm....I bet if the kids had those good sounding drums, they'd be more into learning to play though....that was Ludwig's theory anyway....
I know what you mean by "the look"......my first snare was a MIJ blue sparkle Stewart (I think...maybe it was a champion or an ideal...it had a fake oval slingy type badge on it anyway) and when I brought that thing into "band" oh the looks I got. Everyone else's parents just bought the Acrolite kits through the school, so I was the oddball. My dad was a drummer and he was so proud of me the day I wanted to take lessons, so he got me a snare from a buddy of his, this lowly MIJ blue sparkle snare. Man did it sound horrible. It was a 6-lugger and had that horrible zoom-matic knock-off strainer on it that never worked. It sounded better when we replaced the cheapie original heads on it with real heads from remo, but still it was no prize. I think I remember it having reinforcement rings inside it, so maybe it was made by what would become Tama?
Anyway, point is, I never had the acrolite when I was taking lessons. If I had, I'm sure I'd still have it to this day. BTW...at the time, I quit taking snare drum lessons in school by 6th grade.....I wanted to learn the kit, and they weren't teaching that. So the old man taught me a few things and I did take private lessons....the rest is history as they say....flower
