Ron Vallejo

Drumming never really left

I played in the 1980s for a short stretch as a teenager, then put my sticks down for a long time. But drumming never left me — I tapped on everything for decades after. It was always in there. In 2017 I started playing again, purely for the love of it, making up for lost time.

Coming back to it as an adult, I started really looking at older drums — and I began to appreciate the methods the old makers used compared to the way instruments are built today. That's where everything I'd done with my hands over the years started to line up.

Where the skill comes from

I've always been mechanical. I spent years detailing in the automotive field — preserving and protecting metal surfaces, learning how finishes behave and how to bring a surface back without destroying what makes it original. I had wood shop in high school, and that stayed with me too.

Brass, nickel, chrome, cast aluminum, steel, wood — a vintage snare drum is all of those things at once. The automotive metalwork, the woodworking, the patience: it all came together to make these older drums play again, and look as good as they honestly can.

The objective is not to erase the passage of time, but to stabilize and protect it.

How I approach a drum

My work is conservation-minded. What can be preserved is preserved — original plating, original hardware, original markings stay wherever they can. What genuinely has to be renewed is renewed honestly, and the drum is documented so its story stays intact. A restored drum should tell a consistent, credible story: construction, markings, and condition all in agreement. That's what gives an instrument both its character and its value.

I work on brass, cast aluminum, steel, and wood-shell snares, with a specialty in pre-WWII American instruments — though I take on later classics too, from Ludwig and Pearl to Yamaha and Tama.

Writing & the vintage drum community

Beyond the bench, I research and write about vintage drum history — the makers, the methods, and the instruments themselves. I'm a contributor to Not So Modern Drummer, the long-running publication devoted to vintage and collectible drums, and I share case files and restoration write-ups here in the Journal as the work comes across the bench.

Reflections of Chicagoland Drum Co. is based in Aurora, Illinois, serving the greater Chicagoland area and drummers nationwide who ship their drums in.