Vic Firth came up with the idea of making a better drumstick while playing timpani for the Boston Symphony Orchestra. The sticks he could buy commercially didn’t measure up to the job, so he began making and selling drumsticks from his basement at home. Then one day he dropped a bunch of sticks on the floor and heard all the different pitches. That’s when he began to match up sticks by moisture content, weight, density, and pitch so they were identical pairs. The result became his product’s tag line: “the perfect pair.” Today, Vic Firth’s factory turns out more than 85,000 drumsticks a day and
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