Bill Allen went from geophysicist and geologist to owner and operator of a small drum company out of Cambridge, Vermont mostly on a whim and a love of building drums.  Green Mountain Drums was incorporated in 2007. Ever since, Allen has been quietly and effectively building drums for drummers all over the world from his small shop tucked behind the Cambridge Village Market on Main Street in the small town.  He started out building 13 snare drums and giving them away — against the advice of those around him — to get feedback on his work. And after lots of positive feedback, he has been building ever since.

What famous/recognizable musicians play your drums?

The biggest in-state endorser I have is Matt Burr from Grace Potter and the Nocturnals.  Matt signed with us the first year we were incorporated.

What is your favorite part about what you do?

The whole thing.  I don’t get bored because if I’m building, and I’ve always loved to do that and it gets that craft side, if I’m doing design work it gets my engineering background side into it.  I even like some of the more mundane things about running the business too.  Definitely if I get bored I can go out and do some of the advertising side, can do some accounting side, or whatever.  And I get to have my own schedule.  If I want to work in the middle of the night, I can put some music on and work in the middle of the night.

What other involvement do you have in music?

I still do some studio work on occasion and some sub work [playing drums].  Vermont’s not the easiest place to gig, so usually it’s because they don’t want to play a gig that’s three hours away.

In order to get custom drums made, what is the process someone must go through?

I don’t sell through a dealer network. I sell direct to the artist.  I really like working with somebody new, coming up with what sizes, colors, different aspects of the build that make it very unique for a particular drummer.  Once we get that down, once we decide what we’re going to build it’s pretty much a 60 to 90 day process depending on how involved the build is.

What type of material/wood do you use?  What ply?

Almost exclusively Vermont maple and I try my best to source a lot of of my maple. All the hoop maple in particular, I get five minutes from the shop.  I really like that.  I can go choose it. I can pick it and work directly from something that’s really local.  Pretty much exclusively maple, but I will work in other woods if someone asks for it.  Having played my whole life and listened to a lot of stuff it’s not just a bias because it comes from down the street but hard maple is the wood to use really.  You can play in any situation with a maple kit.  It’s very open to a lot of different genres and styles of music.  It’s what I play personally.
I like 6 ply: our base line is 6 ply.  For maple it’s really proven.  I do 5 ply for a lot of jazz guys, but it lacks the upper end for playing really loud music, so it’s not as versatile.  And I do more. I’ve done 8 ply, 10 ply, I’ve done odd plys, 7 ply, 9 ply depending on what the customer wants.

What type of hardware do you use?

I designed all of my own hardware and we have Vermont maple hoops so we use a lug and clip system, like a tube lug with clips.  I designed it all. It’s all made of high polished stainless steel and I do about 25% of the total machining of the clips and the lugs here.  I do 100% of the rods, so it’s quite a bit of in-house metal work, and that’s something that I do as well.

What kind of finish(es) do you use/prefer?

We do high grade, like furniture grade stains with clear coat and we do hot rod finishes so we’ll do solid colors, we’ll do fades, we do pearls and real, 60s, hot-rod flake, shot in clear, which is kind of neat.  All the industries have gotten away from it and you don’t get that look in any other way.  Definitely not in plastic wrap and we don’t do wraps at all.

How did you learn to build drums?

It stemmed from my father buying me my first set of drums, me breaking it, and him saying, “Okay, fix it. I’m not going to buy you new gear.” What really led me into it was I would start to fix what I had and then realize that I could kind of tweak things and make them better, and then I started hating what  other people made.  I’d have to rip it apart, and have to change it and modify it.  I think by the time I was 17 that was the norm, and I would build stuff, and people would like it and they would want to buy it.  My dad was really handy, and he did all kinds of stuff, so he taught me some metal working and he taught me a lot of woodworking, a little bit of everything.

Are there any special tools needed?

I’m always making my own tools.  I make my own molds and I made my own vacuum tank for when I do my glue-ups. They go in a vacuum tank to get all the air out of the glue and it makes really great glue joints.

Are there any innovations or special things no one else does that you do with your drums?

One hundred percent stainless hardware. I even use use stainless fasteners. I use stainless set screws.  It’s my choice of material.  Recording studios [who were using the snares Bill had built in the beginning and gave away] said we’re not sure what’s going on here but there’s something different, there’s something unique and something special.  And then I had to listen to all those things they were saying were special, and they said, “Well, we can tune them up, and we can tune them down. There’s such a wide range of tunings.” The biggest thing was they had to use very little gaff-tape, or none at all, in recording, and I had to figure out why that was.  I didn’t design it for that. It wasn’t on my radar when I designed it.  I knew it would sound different because of the material-choice I used, and I choose stainless steel because it was something I was comfortable with. I knew I could high polish it, make it look like chrome, but it wouldn’t chip, or pit or rust.  But there’s this whole other side of stainless, where stainless is an alloy and the nickel in the stainless makes it not dead. So the drums aren’t dead; they are very live-sounding but they don’t vibrate in the musical frequencies like plain steel does.  I had to reverse engineer that.  I had to go to a sound lab with multiple drums and then take other drum companies’ drums and say, “Okay, what is the difference?”  I, by complete accident, came up with my best selling feature of my drums.

How varied are your customers?

Extremely, and they’re from all over the world.  I’m always amazed when I get another email from Germany, or Bahrain or Peru, and I wonder where are they coming across me. So that’s something I always ask now. I’m a terrible businessman.  I’m really kind of against traditional advertisement. I think you have to make so much more product to pay for that.  I like people to find me.  They’re already a part of the deal if they’re calling.  If they spent the time to find my shop and knock on the door, then they already get me and know where I’m coming from and that’s not so much a sale as it’s already a partnership.

What is the strangest request you’ve had for a custom drum?

Giant air holes in snare drums.  I think somewhere in the end of the 90s and early 2000s with a couple of bigger name drummers out there that were in the punk-pop scene, I guess. They wanted big air holes in their snare drums, and there was this fad for a while of putting 2-inch or bigger holes in a snare drum, and it starts to get to the point where there’s less shell there than there is just air hole, and you put a big hole in a drum and it just sounds like gun fire.