Pearl Drums

Pearl was founded by Katsumi Yanagisawa, who began manufacturing music stands in Sumida, Tokyo on April 2, 1946. In 1950 Yanagisawa shifted his focus to the manufacturing of drums and named his company "Pearl Industry, Ltd."

By 1953, the company's name had been changed to "Pearl Musical Instrument Company," and manufacturing had expanded to include drum kits, marching drums, timpani, Latin percussion instruments, cymbals, stands, and accessories.

Yanagisawa's eldest son, Mitsuo, joined Pearl in 1957 and formed a division to export Pearl products worldwide. To meet increasing worldwide demand for drum kits following the advent of rock and roll music, in 1961 Pearl built a 15,000 sq ft (1,400 m²) factory in Chiba, Japan to produce inexpensive drum kits that bore the brand names of more than thirty distributors such as Maxwin, CB-700, Stewart, Werco, Ideal, Crest, Revelle, Revere, Lyra, Majestic, Whitehall, Apollo, Toreador, Roxy, and Coronet.

Pearl President Series

In 1966 Pearl introduced its first professional drum kit, the "President Series".

For a time in the early 1970s, Pearl was distributed in the U.S. by Norlin , the parent company of Gibson guitars at the time.

Today, Pearl's Taiwanese operation encompasses five factories whose output supplies nearly the entire worldwide market for Pearl products. The original Chiba factory now caters to the domestic Japanese market, producing drum kits, marching drums, timpani, and symphonic chimes.

Adams Musical Instruments are sold in the U.S. through Pearl dealers, Hughes and Kettner guitar and bass amplifiers are distributed through Pearl's main warehouse in Nashville, Tennessee and Sabian cymbals are distributed in Japan through Pearl dealers.

Pearl created several drum products, such as shells in the 70s that were made of a composite called "wood fibreglass." Additionally, Pearl combined roto-toms and these wood-fiber shells to create the Vari-Pitch line of drums. Other early innovations included shells that were slightly undersized, so that the drum head would extend over the edges, much like a gong drum. Pearl manufactured seamless, extruded acrylic shells that were different to the tabbed-and-seamed Vistalite shells used by Ludwig. Pearl also developed the hinged tube tom-arm: a design widely copied by many other drum manufacturers. 

[source : Wikipedia]