The waiting is the hardest part……
I started collecting and learning about vintage Ludwig drums in the summer of 1990 right after I finished high school. I have always had an interest in history and things that came before my time. I would spend many pre-internet hours researching vintage drums where I could, looking through classified ads, going to yard sales and finding out about nearby auctions. I would even talk to people on breaks at my gigs that would ask about the age of the set I was using in the hopes that they either had or knew of an old Ludwig set left for someone like me to come along and restore to it’s former glory. Sometimes I would get leads on old drums and many times the trail would end in frustration. The one thing I quickly learned was to have patience and understand that the wait could take forever, as most people aren’t in a rush to part with something collecting dust in the attic or basement. There are also many people that hold great attachment to things of their past even if it is something they can no longer use. The drum set in this article is one such set that I wanted that took over 25 years to make a reality.
I went to high school with the person that had this set and was told about it years ago when I saw his band at a practice in the mid 90’s. He was playing an 80’s white Rocker Ludwig set and on a break we started chatting about the Rocker set. He told me that the Rocker set was his gigging set but he had an older Ludwig set stashed away that hadn’t been used in a while, because it needed work. I asked him what color it was and the response was something of a mix of orange and green. At that time I had only heard of the color Citrus Mod and while this sure sounded like Citrus, I knew I would need to see them in person. Unfortunately this was in the days before cell phones so we both had regular land lines and I could never get in touch with him. Over the years I would see him on rare occasions and joke about the set and even ask if the set was out of the light or not sitting in a puddle somewhere. Finally about two years ago I reached out to him via Facebook to seriously inquire about the set, as I never stopped thinking about it. I got a response but was told the set needed a lot of work and was not usable, because they had been sitting since the early 90’s in an attic. Again I mentioned how I would love to see it and one day out of the blue, he sent me pictures. They weren’t the best pictures but I was able to 100% confirm that the color was Citrus Mod. It took two years of working around schedules to make it happen but I was finally able to acquire the set.
The set was missing spurs and front bass drum claws, had the wrong hoops on the bass drum, the seams were lifting on the bass and floor tom, all the hardware was dingy looking, the wrap was dirty and the heads were well worn. I was able to get a set of 70’s bass drum hoops with the channels cut and I added bumwrap vintage citrus mod. Bumwrap scans original drum wraps to recreate them with a computer and they are an exact match. I also did a Novus polish on all the shells, soaked all the hardware in a blue Dawn bath, repainted the bass drum hoops, updated the double tom mount with Ludwig’s new version that has a memory lock and added a fresh set of heads. The set looks and sounds amazing now and is a perfect addition to my collection.
Ludwig first introduced Citrus Mod sometime in mid to late 1968 along with the finish Black Panther. When these two finishes were released, Ludwig was in between catalogs as catalog ‘67(printed in 1966) was the current catalog and it would be several years before catalog ’71 (printed in 1970) would be released. Citrus Mod was featured on the back of catalog ’71 but by the end of the year the color was discontinued and catalog ‘73 (printed in 1972) appeared and Citrus Mod was removed from the color options. This means is that unless a store had a set for display, a dealer had the color in a dealer swatch or you saw another drummer using a set in this finish, it was unlikely that it was known that the color even existed by most consumers when the finish first appeared. By 1968 the Beatles had gone natural when John and George sanded the finishes off of their guitars and Ringo took delivery of his maple finished Ludwig Hollywood set. A lot of musicians were starting to use instruments in a natural finish or a solid black, which happened to work well for longevity of Ludwig’s Black Panther finish. What did this mean for Citrus Mod? I think Ludwig knew they were sitting on a finish that was not selling well and as Ludwig never wasted anything, this meant something had to be done. I have seen factory pictures and heard that Ludwig would wrap shells in advance so that shells could be drilled and badged later. Because Ludwig was sitting on a lot of wrapped shells in Citrus Mod, it was decided by someone in 1970 to cover a lot of the existing shells over in Black Panther as that finish is very thin and adding that finish over the Citrus would still allow heads to properly fit. I also recently learned that Citrus Mod could be found under Standard shells using the Astro wraps, as that wrap is also very thin. A 14” Astro Standard floor tom was recently discovered with Citrus Mod underneath. It has also been suggested that Ludwig covered over drums with Psychedelic Red and Mod Orange wrap but I have yet to see anything but Citrus Mod under any covered drum.
The set I have is pretty rare as it has been a Citrus Mod set since the day it left the factory. The 8x12 is date stamped Feb 9 1971 and the bass drum is stamped Feb 10 1971. The finish is also deceptively cool in my opinion. From a distance the drums look mostly yellow but under close inspection there is a lot of green, red, orange and yellow that make up the whole pattern. The colors really remind me of fall as growing up in NH, fall is an amazing time of year. The other cool thing about Citrus Mod is that all of the colors in this finish are not colors that will typically fade from sun exposure. Psychedelic Red drums are notorious for losing the green pigment while Mod Orange tends to lose the color purple leaving light grey areas where the purple once was. While Citrus Mod does have green in the finish, it is a different shade of green than the green in Psychedelic Red and therefore does not seem to fade. I certainly have no intention of putting that notion to the test but as I removed the hardware on all the drums the color under the lugs looked exactly the same. I am excited to bring another really cool old rare set back from the dead. Whether popular or not this color represents an attempt on Ludwig’s behalf to stay on the cusp of the trends of the day. Clearly the public was not interested and Ludwig did what they had to do to spare a lot of waste. The result is that there are a handful of these cool sets left for collectors like me to enjoy. Don’t everyone go tearing apart Ludwig Black Panther and Ludwig standards in Astro finishes at once now! On the other hand you never know what could have been under there all these years.