Like the best Les Paul or custom J-200 acoustic or even a brand new Jaguar, it's the finish that distinguishes the individual instrument. They not only sound great, they look special. It's as true for drums as guitars and cars-especially Slingerland drums. And sometimes the elements of wood, stains, lacquer and craftsmanship can become art.

Following is an edited interview with Slingerland's finish artist, Pat Foley. The original article first appeared in 1996 in the now out-of-print Talking Drum magazine. Foley has built and finished drums for Jonathan Moffet (Michael Jackson), Myron Grombacher (Pat Benatar), Mario Calire (The Wallflowers) and Tre' Cool (Green Day).

TD: How long does it take to do a standard Radio King snare?
Foley: Any drum that we make is basically seven working days in process, but most of that is lacquer time. It takes six times through the booth to be lacquered.

On a Monday morning we'll pull production which will be finished the following week. I'll look at the orders we have and decide on the kits we're gonna make, and we'll pull the shells out of stock and line them up.

Then our woodworker will grab them and on a router cut the inside bearing edge. He'll level them first on that disk sander and then do that interior cut. Then they get interior sanded and sent over to be masked before they get exterior sanded. Then over to the finish department where I put a stain on it. It gets two coats of lacquer but no sealer, which is one of the reasons why our drums have more light in their color. We don't want to hide the grain of the wood. All that's done on the first day.

Sealer by nature is high builds, high solids and they tend to be cloudy. I thin down the first coats of lacquer, so they penetrate but don't build up, and let that sit overnight.

The next day the drum goes for its fir scuffing--just quick surface sanding--and then I'll do two heavy coats a day on it. It goes into the curing room for about 20 minutes between those two coats, and after the second time through it's heavy enough that you have sufficient build on it that you can start to level it. Basically it then goes back and forth for five days, getting a coat of lacquer and then being sanded level. It's all done with a disk sander and 600 grit paper.

This is a catalyzed polyurethane, which you can build up pretty thick. I experimented with materials and decided it was time to make the transition from lacquer to polyurethane. Lacquer will crack--that's our guarantee there! (laughs) Nothing's going to stop the drum from chipping when a cymbal stand falls on it, but short of that, polyurethane finishes are very tough.

And nowadays, as you know, standards for drum finishes have become very high.

Between lacquer steps four and five, the shells would get drilled on the index drilling machine. After all the holes are drilled, they get scuffed again, and then I'll put the last coats on them.

Every drum gets finished by hand so the edges feel like a baby's butt. I think personally the attention to detail we give them is why very, very few of them have tuning problems.

The snare bed is cut by hand. The Radio King shells are steam bent for us. The first thing we would do is turn them down on a lathe until they're dead round. They start out almost a half-inch thick, and we cut them down until they're 3/8 inches.

We have a high quality product because there's a lot of attention to detail, and it's all hands-on-work--we don't have any elaborate equipment, as you can see in the buffing area. In my illustrious paint mixing room (laughs) I work with generic dyes. We don't buy standard stains; I mix all the colors a gallon at a time. I've got my own color mixes, and a couple of teaspoons of these dyes mixed properly in a gallon of methanol creates my stain.

TD: So you're the Baskin Robbins of the drum world?
Foley: Absolutely, but I've got more than 31 flavors. (laughs) They bought me this really elaborate mixing system with 30 stirring rods, all these radiant dyes, and a microfiche file for all these different colors, and I've never used any of it. (laughs) I do what I've always done: a little bit of this, a little bit of that, oh that's too dark, I'll add some of this.

There are a lot of colors that go into making these shades. Coastal Coral has about seven different colors in it, including blue. People are surprised when they realize what actually goes into that. It's a weird thing--making colors is a weird thing. And I usually come up with an interesting color when I'm trying to make something else. We have a color called Raven Blue that came about when I had stained something a real nice turquoise blue and I wiped black over top of it just to see what would happen. It gave it this eerie sort of luminescence. The areas here the grain absorbed more of the color became dark, almost black, and on the other areas remained a lighter blue.

We liked it so much we decided to offer it as a regular color, but it was originally for a country player called Greg Stockey. It was supposed to be blue, and I started screwing with the black and I called him to take a look at it, and he liked it better than regular blue.

I also have done as a custom color what I call King Crimson Red. It's the same type of operation, but wiping the black over red. I've also tried mixing the red and black together before applying it, and that gives you a different effect altogether. So all of these colors are mixed a gallon at a time.

TD: So you can reproduce any given stain with your formula?
Foley: I've got it down to where I know how many grams of whatever to use--but I mix it up in small batches and the colors do evolve. If you looked at the early Maple Frost drum sets, they were very, very bright green and that always bothered me. I slowly got them to a darker shade, and now I'm real pleased with that color. I had a lot of reservations about it when we first did it, but I think it's evolved over time, which could potentially be a problem, but if they can send us one of their drums, we can always match it.

The solid colors are not as much of an issue-the Gulf Coast Greens and Coastal Corals-because I've got a formula for those that I've worked out so I can repeat them continually.

But even if I mixed up a hundred gallons of green stain, every drum I stain with it is not going to be the same color because if the wood has a little more yellow to it, it's going to make that drum look darker.

I have to be actively involved in it because you have to make judgment calls all the time. That's why we do all the kits together as a drum set; we've never been able to get to a place where we could make just 12-inch toms this week and all 14's next week. We do match up the drums when we're pulling shells; we try to get comparable grain and you do want the shells to match up, both for looks and sound. Certain shell are more lively than others, and we do try to match them up and complete them as a kit.