Noble & Cooley is an American musical instruments manufacturing company based out of Granville, Massachusetts. Having been established in 1854, it is the oldest drum company in the United States and is one of the oldest in the world. Having manufactured toy drums at the beginning, Noble & Cooley soon entered the professional drum market. Noble & Cooley has specialized in snare drums, although the company also manufactures whole drum kits. The company is still a family business, with a Cooley's descendant presiding it.

History

Silas Noble, a farmer, had started producing toy drums in his kitchen to give as Christmas presents. He soon joined his friend James Cooley to build marching snare drums for the Union Army during the Civil War. In the company's first year, 631 toy drums were built. They were simple instruments made of plain wood and painted. By 1873, the company produced 100,000 drums a year. After the Civil War, the N&C factory employed 17 people who produced 80,000 drums annually. Noble & Cooley also made toy drum sets for children through most of the 1900s. In the early 1980s, company vice-president Jay Jones (Great-great-great grandson of James Cooley) decided to enter the professional drum arena, effectively starting the custom drum shop movement in the US. He worked closely with designer Bob Gatzen and pulled out of retirement a steam bending machine that was old enough to have survived a fire in 1889. Noble & Cooley first offered its SS Classic solid shell snare drums in 1983. The SS Classic series was the first one ply construction snare drum of the modern era. The company briefly tried to manufacture complete solid shell kits and were able to produce some, most notably used by Denny Carmassi in Heart. The cost and daunting nature of constructing larger shell sizes led the company to abandon complete kits and focus primarily on the snare drums. Since that time, the company has created many other professional wood and metal snare drums and different lines of complete drum sets. In 1989, Noble & Cooley teamed up with the Avedis Zildjian Company to create snare drums made out of the Zildjian cymbal alloy. These drums were made in limited quantities and primarily to professional drummers. After suffering some financial setbacks pertaining to globalization of their toy business, the company scaled back its innovation and production efforts and built snare drums and drum sets on demand for the better part of a decade. They partnered with business executive, drummer and long time Noble & Cooley player John Keane to reinvigorate the brand. A key result of this partnership was the re-introduction of Horizon and Solid Shell Series Kits in 2016. The company also purchased the Witt drum company in 2015. The first release from this acquisition is the highly touted Walnut snare drum line.

Manufacturing process

Noble & Cooley's introduced some innovations in the manufacturing of drums, such as the ply steam bent for snares, the hybrid (more than one type of wood in a ply shell) drum set, the nodal point lug mounting, a technique of mounting drum lugs at the point on the shell where it vibrates the least, allowing the drum to resonate, the symmetrical Venting (a technique of creating vent hole to allow maximum tone in each drum); sharp bearing edges (45° degree angle narrow cut, minimizing drum head contact for maximum sustain); staggered ply construction –choosing ply numbers and thickness to optimize tone independently and in between drums–; suspension mounting (a technique of isolating each shell from the rest of the kit even while mounted, maximizing sustain); cool mounts (a tom mount system providing quick and easy set-up and breakdown, also allowing for quick change-out of drums in the recording studio)

Products line

Endorsers

Some of the musicians that use/have used N&C drums include Phil Collins, Bill Stevenson (Descendents, Black Flag), Nick Buda (Taylor Swift, Dolly Parton), Jack Ryan (Marcus King Band), Bill Kreutzmann (Grateful Dead, Dead and Company, Wesley Bourque (Logan Crosby, Thompson Square), Christiano Micalizzi (Eros Ramazzotti) Dave Joyal (Silent Drive), Bob Mahoney (Bane), and Mike Pedicone (The Bled). Other artists are known to have used Noble and Cooley even though they are not official endorsers. Herman Rarebell (Scorpions), Alex Van Halen (Van Halen), Dave Krusen (Pearl Jam), Nick Mason (Pink Floyd), and Steve White (Session legend) have used Noble & Cooley snare drums in their setup, even though the rest of their kit is from a different manufacturer. Tre Cool of Green Day calls the 7x14 SS Classic his most prized and "still go-to" snare which he purchased for $600 before recording Dookie in 1993. Jon Fishman of Phish also uses a set made up of almost entirely Noble and Cooley drums, with the exception of his bass drum. Other endorsers are Denny Carmassi (Heart, Cinderella, Coverdale/Page, Whitesnake) and Chris Whitten (Dire Straits, Paul McCartney)