ZBTs suck to begin with Tory, you can't use an acid cleaning solvent on the brilliant finish...

I hate any Innovative percussion stick, or mallet...

I'm certified with pro-mark, we play with Vic Firth here at MGCCC and i've used Vater on drum set...

And you hate IP because???

Getting certified with Pro-Mark isn't that difficult. It's a simple little test that anyone can take. Once you pass the test you get a shirt.

Well, this is a strange question because if I don't like a stick, I ignore it and find something that I do like.

In college, we used Cooperman's #29 hand made sticks, and while they weren't very consistant from pair to pair, I loved the feel, weight, and length of those sticks.

In my early drum corps days, we used a Silver Fox snare stick with a black bead that I really hated - they were so thick. I'm a short guy and our section leader at the time was extrememly tall and had monster sized hands. The sticks were chosen for his comfort, not mine. Some other Silver Fox's I have recently are pretty good but not my favorites by any stretch.

I used some ProMark in the distant past and was never impressed; warped sticks, poor tone and weight match, color variation, and this was not only from pair to pair but sticks sold as matched pairs.

I just recently picked up a couple pairs of Innovative Percussion sticks, namely the Paul Rennick signiture sticks.
The origional sticks have been very consistant and well matched. However, the FSPR2s I bought were so mismatched tone wise that I went back to Lonestar Percussion and broke apart an entire brick of sticks to find two acceptably matched sticks and couldn't find any. I settled for the least 'off' ones I could find.

In general, I've had good luck and have been happy with the large percentage of any Vic Firth sticks I've gotten, especially any pairs that are sealed/colored/painted except for the Ralph Hardimons. The early variations of that stick in the late '80 were great but something changed with them at some point and now I don't use them anymore.

The hardest thing for me to get over is that I find a stick that I like, but taping it changes everything. I wish manuafacturers and artists would design their signiture marching sticks based on how the specs would change by adding one layer of stick tape.

Probably the Silver Fox C/S. (Does the attachment look familiar?)

They're probably not as thick as you remember -- they're actually a little thinner than a Hardimon. But those Silver Foxes are short (16") and barely have any taper. Not what you'd choose for a legato approach.

They're also made of a funky plywood that can rebound differently depending on how the plies are oriented. (Maybe the stick develops cracks between plies?)

The Cavaliers used them in the early 90s.

what about Hardimond sticks

Never heard of them

I think that's them. I hadn't had a lot of experience with field drum sticks at the time and I just remember them being very large for my hands. Now that you mention it, yea, the silver fox sticks were the only ones I remember having that plywood look. The year after I left the Railmen, they started using a smaller Silver Fox stick that was a red ply. They called them cinnamon sticks.

The early Silver Fox stuff was, indeed, a layered 'plywood' type construction. The ditched that after a couple of years. The Silver Fox sticks my HS line used for the '90 marching season were "plywood" , but the same models were solid wood in the '91 marching season.

Currently, I think SF just needs to clean out their marching sticks -- many of the older models catered to the need to pull sound out of the early, stiff KevlarŪ heads. I've found 4 SF snare sticks I really like: SF-3S, SF-1001, SF-CS, SF-1005. SF-1003 is OK, but I don't care for it myself.

IMO, the SF Competition mallets have the best wooden shafts of any tenor mallets available -- now if they'd just update the darned cookie to the more modern 1 1/4"-1 3/8" x3/8" they'd be great.

<getting off the soapbox>

"We now return you to your previously scheduled topic."