Modern Plastic Drumheads

Founder Remo Belli began drumming at the age of 12, becoming a professional at just 16. After serving in the US Navy during World War II he moved to California to continue with his music career, playing jazz and swing with artists such as Anita O'Day and Betty Hutton. As an offshoot of his passion for the drums Remo and fellow drummer Roy Harte opened a store, "Drum City" in 1952 on Santa Monica Boulevard, Hollywood.

During the mid 1950s, Remo came across a polyester film, "mylar", made by the DuPont company. Mylar had originally been developed during the war as a heat resistant film for night-time reconnaissance flights, but Remo saw other potential uses for it and quickly did a few experiments, lapping it over an old wooden drum hoop. This would have far reaching effects. The animal skin heads of that period sounded great when in the right temperate conditions, but if the atmosphere got damp or too hot the drums tuning could go haywire. Mylar, being weather resistant, would offer a much more consistent drumhead offering stable tuning in all conditions.

Remo teamed up with chemist Sam Muchnick who devised a way of attaching the mylar film to aluminium hoops. The Remo Factory was thus started in 1957. These drumheads were white opaque so they didn't look too different to the animal skins of the time, and were called "Weather King" (due to being weather proof), available in 3 thicknesses - Diplomat, Ambassador, and Emperor. The more conservative jazz drummers of the age took a bit of convincing that plastic could sound as good as calfskin, but the emerging rock and roll drummers welcomed these revolutionary new drumheads with open arms... they stayed in tune and were extremely durable and hard wearing, ideal for rock music.

Through the next few decades, Remo continued to experiment, looking for new sounds to suit drummers of all musical genres. Drum Kit players loved the weather king heads, and they began to find favour with orchestral and marching band percussionists too. Top drummers of the time such as Buddy Rich and Louis Bellson were favouring Remo drumheads. Remo developed new coatings and laminations for drumheads and released some very famous drumhead lines, such as the Remo Pinstripe (a double ply head offering a deeper, dampened tone), Controlled Sound (single ply with a black sound controlling dot in the centre of the head) and the incredible Remo FiberSkyn (a laminated head giving the appearance and warm tone of calfskin heads). He offered drumheads in different finishes, originally white and then clear, and in time black and even mirror chrome. The FiberSkyn head technology was also used to devise a series of heads for Congas, Bongos and other ethnic drums, thus giving these instruments the stability and tone that he had given drumset players back in the 1950s. The increase in popularity of these world-percussion instruments led Remo to develop a huge range of drums and percussion instruments, using his FiberSkyn and NuSkyn heads along with his Acousticon shells.

To the present day, Remo continue to be innovators of quality drumheads, drums, and percussion instruments, due to the huge amount of musical styles globally, each requiring its own sound. Renaissance heads for the orchestral Percussion market, Falams for the high tension drumcorps market, Emperor heads for the rock drummers etc, the list goes on and on. Remo have even teamed up with top tattoo artist Corey Miller to produce a series of Tattoo Skyns, drumheads with unique graphics. The Remo factory today is a 217,000 sq ft facility in Valencia, California, and they remain the largest supplier of drumheads in the world, as well as being the most popular heads among today's top drummers such as Travis Barker, Steve Gadd, Lars Ulrich, Dave Weckl etc.