Our Story

Hey Everybody,

Rod here.  Welcome to our website!

My compadre and partner Jim Mooradian and I co-founded Morgenstein Tool in 2019 hellbent on solving two challenges we as drummers ourselves had long endured in the shop, studio, and on stage.

I had forever longed for a quick, easy, and comfortable way to tighten and loosen the plethora of wingnuts around my drum kit.  The simple hand tool I had in mind would extend my reach around the drumset from a seated position, get me into tight places fast, prevent collapsing stands and tilters, hi-hat clutch creep, and other hardware failures during performance, while protecting my wrists, hands, thumbs, knuckles, and fingers.

Jim dreamt of a better, faster, more convenient way to change and tune drumheads without fumbling his drum key, and to access and secure the endless array of square nuts around his drum kit.  The hand tool he was thinking of would remove, reinsert, and finger-tighten tension rods fast, then tune any drum in a hurry.  This implement would also extend the drummer’s reach to cymbal tilters, kick pedals, and the litany of clamps, mounts, and memory locks in between—all from the drum throne.

So, off we went 5 years ago, drummers turned entrepreneurs, to “scratch our own itch” and perhaps also help others who bang on things for a living—or just for fun.  How hard could it be, we thought, to fix these age-old problems for ourselves and for every other drummer out there?  After all, between us we had something like 120 years cumulative experience with all things drums and drumming.  So we dug in and went to work.

But it was hard.  Damn hard.  From the start we were told it would be impossible to make hand tools in America.  We’d have to go offshore.  And we should forget about manufacturing premium-quality products engineered to near perfection that would last forever and so could carry a lifetime warranty.  Musicians—particularly drummers—would not care about superior design, durability, and dependability, let alone the fact that we were operating with as little negative impact on the environment as possible. To survive as a business, we’d have to make rubbish overseas, ship it home in containers, and sell it in large quantities at the very lowest price.  That was the way of the modern world.

But we didn’t believe that.  Besides, we didn’t want to own tools like that ourselves, and didn’t think you would either.  So we decided to stick to our guns and follow these core principles:

  • Craft our products exclusively in the USA.

  • Use only the highest quality materials sourced, whenever possible, from within the USA.

  • Offer a simple, no nonsense, unlimited lifetime guarantee: If it breaks while being used properly, we will replace it at no cost.  Period.  Whether the customer requesting the exchange is the original owner, or not.  And finally…

  • Manufacture our products in as responsibly and “clean” a way as possible, with the utmost respect for our environment and concerns about climate change; and handle and distribute those products using zero disposable plastics and an absolute minimum of biodegradable packaging.

Well, so far our focus on delivering value to our customers, adherence to the core principles above, attention to detail, and our dogged persistence, has paid off.  Our maiden innovation, The Wing Thing, debuted in May 2023, and we have been selling them ever since just as fast as we can produce them.

Our newest creation, The Rod Driver, which we promise will improve your relationship with the quarter-inch square nut, is scheduled to begin shipping in early 2025.

We hope you will check out our products and let us know what you think.  We genuinely want to hear from you!

Meanwhile, the Morgenstein Tool team, Nancy, Eric, Kris, Sammy, Wyatt, Jim, and I will keep working to develop other innovative solutions to help you do better, more comfortably, enjoyably, and confidently, whatever you do behind a drumset or percussion workstation, or in a technical role to support us as artists.

Rock on—