Noble & Cooley

Noble & Cooley is a drum manufacturing company based out of Granville, Massachusetts, known for manufacturing boutique, custom drums used by professional drummers.

As the oldest drum company in the United States, Noble & Cooley has been in operation since 1854, when Silas Noble and James Cooley starting building marching snare drums for the Union Army. The company 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 quality and tone of the drum was so much better than other drums at the time that it has been used on countless recordings and used by most professional drummers at some point in their careers. 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. After suffering some financial setbacks pertaining to globalization of the 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. Tired of watching the commoditization of the drum manufacturing business, in 2015, they decided to refocus their efforts on bringing innovation to the custom drum world. They partnered with business executive, drummer and long time Noble & Cooley player John Keane to reinvigorate the brand. They are currently experiencing a renaissance, bringing the Noble & Cooley sound to the next generation of drummers and developing products to again move the needle on drum quality. 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.

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