Steve Ferrone Opens His Six-Decade Drum Collection to Modern Drummer

Steve Ferrone never threw a drum away. Across six decades of sessions and tours with Michael Jackson, Eric Clapton, George Harrison, Stevie Nicks, Phil Collins, Rick James, Al Jarreau, Mick Jagger, Chaka Khan, the Bee Gees, and Johnny Cash, plus full-time stints with the Average White Band and Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, he kept nearly everything. Modern Drummer got access to the full inventory this spring, meeting Ferrone and his tech Andy Greenburg at the private warehouse where the collection is housed.

Writer Donn Bennett's piece, part interview and part photo essay, documents instruments spanning Ludwig, Pearl, DW, Gretsch, and Rogers. Mixed among the production kits are custom-built pieces and rare prototypes that never reached commercial release, the kind of one-offs that only accumulate when a drummer has enough standing to receive them directly from manufacturers. Greenburg oversees maintenance and preservation, keeping the instruments playable rather than simply shelved.

The collection's weight comes from its context. When the Average White Band, Duran Duran, Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, and Aerosmith each needed to fill their drum seat, they called Ferrone. That depth of trust, repeated across four separate bands across four separate eras, makes his tonal preferences a working reference rather than a collector's indulgence.

Three pieces in particular translate directly for drummers working with standard setups. The Pearl SF1465, his 14x6.5" tube-lug brass signature snare, delivers a dark, cutting crack that sits inside a mix rather than on top of it. The tube lug construction reduces extraneous overtones without deadening the shell response. That character is accessible in any quality brass snare at 6.5" depth: the shell dimensions do more acoustic work than the model designation.

His Gretsch Broadkaster in Cadillac Green Silver Duco reflects a long-standing preference for large shells. The configuration runs a 14x24" kick drum alongside 16x16" and 16x18" floor toms, with a 6.5x14" Steve Ferrone Signature Snare and a Bell Brass as a secondary option. A 24" bass drum pushes low-end into a room without heavy processing, which matters when a kick needs to cut through a dense arrangement at full volume. Scaling floor tom sizes proportionally upward from a 22" kick, rather than defaulting to standard 14x14" sizing, achieves much of the same projection without a full kit replacement.

At the early end of the timeline sit the Rogers drums, representing Ferrone's professional roots in the mid-1970s. Rogers kits from that period remain available through vintage dealers at prices well below comparable new wood, and their bearing edge geometry yields a warmth that newer production shells frequently spend considerable processing time trying to replicate.

The collection is less a museum than a compressed record of how instrument choices respond to musical demands. Every kit in that warehouse earned its place by doing something specific that nothing else in the room was doing at the time.