About
Sound familiar? You’re practicing your drums, eyes closed. Playing up a storm. Then, suddenly, something no longer feels right. You glance down and discover that with each tap of your foot, the top cymbal of your Hi-Hat slides helplessly in an upward direction along its pull rod. Argh! Clutch has come loose. Again! What could be worse?
This… You’re on stage. An important gig! (Aren’t they all?) You’re playing your heart out, giving your band and the audience everything you’ve got. But then, you roll out of your most awesomely executed fill ever only to reach for a crash cymbal that… Argh… is no longer there because the boom arm you were relying upon to support it has collapsed!
“Seems like finger tightening doesn’t always cut it. Right?”
These are but two of the many scenarios related to drum hardware integrity and dependability that have plagued drummers since the invention of the drum kit and its plethora of wingnuts. Seems like finger tightening doesn’t always cut it. Right? You want a way to properly secure those potential “failure points,” especially before live performances. To take reliability “to eleven,” so to speak. Because you know that to do your very best playing, you must be confident that the sound sources will be where you need them, when you need them, regardless of how much punishment you give them.
“Wing Thing is the world’s first practical, dependable wingnut adjustment tool made especially for drummers.”
In Spring of 2019, my friend and drummer compadre Jim Mooradian arrived in Pittsburgh to hang with me at a Winger show. After sound check, we grabbed dinner at a local Thai restaurant and begin catching up as old friends do. Between mouthfuls of Gaeng Keow Wan Gai, our conversation turned to drummers’ challenges. I mentioned an idea I had long been pondering: a practical hand tool concept to solve this pesky wingnut issue. More than anything, I personally am tired of having to use parallel drumsticks (I have actually hit myself in the face using this clumsy method)—or worse, my bare knuckles—to secure my own myriad wingnut settings before sitting down to play. I tell Jim I want, no, I intend, to develop a proper solution for this age-old annoyance once and for all. And not just for this drummer, but all drummers! That’s when, out of nowhere, I blurted out, “We should start a business to do this.” Jim’s enthusiastic response was immediate. “Hell, yeah, I’m down!” he said. And there and then, before we got up from the table, Morgenstein Tool and The Wing Thing™ were born!
So, how difficult could it be to manufacture a simple hand tool? Piece of cake. Walk in the park, right? Wrong! We discovered early that our journey was going to be long and hard if we were going to stay true to our goal of making the very best tool possible to address the problem we perceived, and frankly, couldn’t believe hadn’t already been solved. But we persevered through the steep learning curve, many missteps, wrong turns, mistakes, and, well, downright abject failures—not to mention, a pandemic. Nothing was going to stop us.
Fast forward to April 2023. We believe we have designed, prototyped, tested, and are now producing one of the most beautiful and useful tools ever created for drummers. We know it scratches our own itch. So, now we are ready to bring it to you. Check it out when it arrives at your favorite drum shop or other music retailer. And when you do, let us know what you think!
Say hello to the Wing Thing…
