Tom Holders

Tom Holders Matter!

Whether you have one Rack Tom in front, or surround yourself with them like the late, great Neil Peart, Tom holders are a very important part of mounting your drums. Perhaps you can’t stand the idea of a piece of metal tubing poking through your Bass Drum and resonating all over the place or maybe you want to swap your boring factory-standard Tom holders for something better designed?

Whatever your requirements, there’s a huge choice of options out there. Maybe you are a single Rack Tom guy and refuse to mount your Tom on anything other than a Snare Drum stand, just like out very own Albie’s lad! But if you don’t fancy the life sucked out of your one and only Rack Tom by a Snare cradle, then you will definitely need to look for an alternative Tom mount.

Types of Tom Holders

Rack Toms come with one of two types of holder; the ‘L’ arm design or a long tubular/hexagonal arm which on 1980s drums, often protruded into the inside of the drum shell. That’s now something you wouldn’t see today thanks to the ‘Pure Resonance Police’ who shamed drum manufacturers into redesigning their invasive holders to much shorter affairs. Nowadays, every mounting system which started out life as an arm protruding into the shell has been revamped so it stops just millimetres short of the shell surface.

Things have certainly come a long way since the days of Pearl, Sonor and Yamaha’s chunks of steel tunnelling into the side of your beloved 12” x 8”!

Adjustment Factors

Drummers today expect a lot more freedom and versatility from their hardware, allowing them to reach angles and positions unheard of the 1960s when ‘one size fits all’ was often the order of the day, with clunky and restricting Tom mounting systems.