A DW piccolo snare drum owned and played by late Rush drummer, Neil Peart is for sale with an asking price of £73,480/$125,870 CAD.
The listing — which is advertised by Soul Drums in Toronto, Canada via Reverb — states that the drum was used by The Professor during multiple recording sessions for Rush's Test for Echo and live shows between the mid-’90s and early ’00s including Rush’s Vapor Trails tour. The drum is also featured in Peart’s own DVD: A Work in Progress, which documents the recording of Rush’s Test For Echo album.
The drum itself is a DW 13”x3” piccolo with a 10-ply maple shell (stamped with a pitch of Bb) carrying the serial number 022022 on its badge, and finished in Red Sparkle Lacquer. It’s got 8 lugs and brass-plated, triple-flanged hoops/tension rods. Meanwhile, this being a shallow-depth drum, the lugs are DW’s mini-Round Lug design, and the throw-off/butt plate are chrome.
The listing shows that it’s fitted with a Remo Controlled Sound Clear batter head, and the snare side is home to a Remo Ambassador Snare head, as well as 13-strand snare wires.
Also included in the listing are multiple documents of provenance, including an appraisal by Vintage Drum Centre, Iowa and a certificate of authenticity from Toronto’s TRS Custom Drums founder Seppo Saliminen, who acquired the snare along with other Peart-owned gear in the early 2000s.
Piccolo snare drums — often tightly-cranked — were a strong and distinctive fixture of ’90s drum sounds, with the shallow depth offering a heavy attack and fast decay.
Their popularity both as main snares or as second, ‘auxiliary’ drums has waned since, but more recently tighter, higher-pitched snare sounds have begun to become more popular again in the form of smaller-diameter, but deeper-shelled snares offering greater body to their sound.
