Maker
Sonor
German drum maker, building since 1875
Founded by Johannes Link in Weissenfels and rebuilt at Bad Berleburg after the war, Sonor is the oldest drum company still making drums. Its reputation rests on dense, thin beech and maple shells and on hardware heavy enough to be a running joke among drummers who move their own gear. The SQ2 system lets a buyer specify shell timber, thickness, and bearing edge drum by drum.
Models
View all (14)-
Sonor Perfect Balance
Drum hardware · Germany
Designed with Jojo Mayer, the Perfect Balance is deliberately light and minimal — a long flat footboard, a single chain, and no adjustment the player does not need — and it folds nearly flat for travel.
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Sonor 600 Series Hardware
Drum hardware · Germany
The 600 series is Sonor's deliberately light hardware line: single-braced legs and small footprints, for drummers who carry their own gear and do not need a stand that could hold a gong.
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Sonor Signature HLD 590
Percussion · Germany
The HLD 590 is a 14×8 ferromanganese-shelled snare from Sonor's Signature era, heavy enough to be almost unusable at low volume and the reason a generation of engineers asked for "the Sonor". Clean examples trade for multiples of their original price.
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Sonor ProLite
Drum kit · Germany
ProLite used thin beech shells with cross-laminated construction and Sonor's Tune-Safe lugs, and was the company's flagship production kit before the SQ line consolidated the top of the range.
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Sonor Artist Series Snare
Percussion · Germany
The Artist Series is Sonor's à la carte snare catalogue: maple, beech, birch, and vintage-spec shells alongside bronze and brass, all built in Germany to the same hardware specification.
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Sonor Vintage Series
Drum kit · Germany
The Vintage Series revives Sonor's 1950s and 1960s specification: thin German beech shells, rounded bearing edges, and the teardrop lug, in the small sizes those kits were actually built in.
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Sonor Delite
Drum kit · Germany
Delite paired very thin maple shells with minimal hardware mass, aiming at maximum shell resonance. It sat between the imported lines and the German flagship for most of its production life.
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Sonor Martini
Drum kit
The Martini is a genuinely small kit — a 14" bass drum, 8" and 13" toms, and a 10" snare — built for cafés, buskers, and drummers who have to carry the thing up stairs.
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Sonor SQ1
Drum kit · Germany
The SQ1 takes the SQ2's German birch shells and thin-shell philosophy and fixes the configurations and finishes, which brings a Bad Berleburg kit within reach of drummers who do not need a bespoke build.
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Sonor AQ2
Drum kit
AQ2 puts thin maple shells, low-mass lugs, and Sonor's SmartMount tom suspension into an imported kit, and is the line most often recommended when a drummer wants the Sonor shell profile without the German price.
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Sonor Kompressor
Percussion
The Kompressor line is a set of seamless spun shells — aluminium, brass, and steel — in the same sizes, which makes it one of the cleanest ways to hear what a snare shell's metal actually does.
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Sonor Phonic
Drum kit · Germany
Phonic is the Sonor most drummers picture: dense beech shells, chrome-heavy hardware, and a low, controlled tone that made the kits fixtures in European studios. Original Phonic drums are collected as seriously as any American vintage kit.
Categories
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Snare Drums
Snare drums and snare drum model families, including metal-shell and wood-shell snares.
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Concert Percussion
The percussion section's non-pitched instruments: concert snare and bass drums, tambourines, triangles, crotales, tubular bells, and the stands that hold them.
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Drum Hardware
The steel between the drummer and the drums. Bass drum pedals and hi-hat stands are considered purchases in their own right, and a throne outlasts several kits.
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Drum Kits
Acoustic and hybrid drum kit model families, shell packs, and related drum sets.
Representative model
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Sonor SQ2
Drum kit · Germany
The SQ2 is less a kit than an order form: shell timber, thickness, bearing edge, hardware, and finish are chosen drum by drum, with maple, beech, birch, and American walnut all offered in more than one thickness. Every SQ2 is made in Bad Berleburg and takes months.