Find the closest pair
Drumstick equivalents: what to buy when your usual pair is gone
Your shop stopped stocking them. Or you like what you play, but you would like to try another brand. Either way the question is the same: which stick is closest to this one?
This article is that chart. For 30 popular pairs it lists the 3 closest models from other brands, picked mechanically out of the 1,800 drumset sticks (36 brands) on file.
The headline first: 14 of the 30 have a stick from another brand with an identical published diameter, length, tip shape and material. Same numbers, different logo.
1. How “closest” was decided
By the same single formula the search on this site uses when you sort by similarity. No special article-only maths. It adds up a distance; smaller means closer.
The weights are deliberate. Diameter dominates, tip shape comes next, and length earns only 0.1 per millimetre — lengths cluster around 16 inches anyway, and a few millimetres there matters less than a tenth of a millimetre of thickness (see choosing your first pair).
Unknowns are never penalised. If either stick's taper class cannot be read from the maker's wording, that term scores zero. Treating “not published” as “different” would punish exactly the brands that publish the least. A “tip —” in the list below is that “not judged” mark.
2. Which 30 sticks are the references
Hand-picking “30 classics” produces a chart that reflects whoever picked them. So the selection is a rule, start to finish:
- Only sticks carrying an industry-wide size name, and only the two most common ones, 5A and 5B (no house-specific names). Two names is also what caps each brand at two entries.
- For each brand-and-size pair, one representative, chosen mechanically: wooden, then not a signature model, then a tidy part number, then the shortest part number, then most drummers using it, then the shortest model name. The short part number does most of the work — it floats the plain version up and pushes treated, coated, painted and long variants down.
- That yields 63 sticks from 33 brands (32 in 5A, 31 in 5B). The top 30 by number of professional users, ties broken by how many models the brand has on file, make the chart. 16 brands ended up in it.
Two honest weaknesses. Professional-use counts favour brands that publish a roster, so the top of the list leans that way (see what the pros play). And a representative is not “that brand's most famous stick” — it is whatever the rule returned. If your own part number is not in the chart, do not use the row's “search from this” link; put your own stick into the search instead. That is what it is there for.
3. The 5A chart
Sorted by diameter. The yellow band is the reference and the 3 rows under it are the closest sticks from other makers — one per brand, so you never get three colourways of the same model.
4. The 5B chart
5. What the chart shows
One: somebody else already makes it. 14 of the 30 references sit at distance zero — another brand publishes the same diameter, length, tip shape and material. Widen that to 0.2 (a tenth of a millimetre or less) and it is 21. Even the loneliest reference is only 1.00 away.
Two: there is rarely just one twin. Counting every other-brand stick within 0.2, the median reference has 3 of them. The Meinl SB101 (⌀14.4 × 406 mm) has 24. The more popular the size, the more makers aim at exactly those numbers.
Three: the material usually survives. Of the 90 matches listed, 75 also share the material. Where it changes, what changes with it is weight: at the same dimensions maple runs about 10% lighter than hickory at the median (see the materials article, where published weights are compared side by side).
6. What this chart cannot tell you
Bluntly: it says the published numbers and categories are close, and nothing more. It does not claim two sticks feel the same in the hand or sound the same on a cymbal.
- Balance is not in it. Two sticks at ⌀14.5 × 406 mm can carry their weight very differently depending on the taper. Almost no maker publishes a balance figure.
- Taper wording is hard to compare at all. Of the 2,110 sticks on file, only 743 (35%, 16 brands) describe the taper in a way that reads as short, medium or long. The rest give a measurement, or nothing. That term only ever fires when both sides are readable, which is why 84 of the 90 matches could not be judged on it — and why the list above shows no taper column at all. It would be almost entirely blank. It is still in the score: the 6 matches where both sides are readable are still counted.
- Piece-to-piece variation is not in it. Wood varies. A published figure is the target for a model, not the stick in your hand.
- Durability is out of reach. No maker publishes a number for it, so neither do we.
What the chart is good for is narrowing thousands of sticks down to a handful. The last step is still your hands — everything before it can be done with numbers.
7. Moving a little, not sideways
If you want something near your usual pair rather than the same thing, here are the distances involved. All of them come from the data.
- Thicker or thinner — going 5A to 5B inside one brand adds a median of 0.9 mm of diameter (0.5–1.4 mm across 29 brands). Going down is the same move in reverse. The step is more than twice as large at some brands as at others, so move in millimetres, not in size names.
- Lighter — keep the dimensions and switch to maple: about 10% lighter at the median, brand for brand and size for size. It thins the stick out less than actually making it thinner does.
- Heavier — diameter first. Ten per cent more diameter is about twenty per cent more cross-section. If you would rather add it in the material, that means oak or hornbeam.
- More delicate — a smaller, rounder tip. Tip shape shows up on cymbals far more than on drums.
Search by the numbers on your own pair Why swapping by size name misses
About these numbers
- The candidate pool: of the 2,110 sticks on file, the 1,800 drumset sticks (36 brands) that publish both a diameter and a length. Marching, concert and timbale sticks (310 of them) were left out — they only muddy a swap chart.
- The similarity formula, identical to the site's “most similar” sort: |Δdiameter mm| × 2.0 + |Δlength mm| × 0.1 + 1.0 for a different tip shape + 0.7 for a different material + 0.5 for a different taper class (zero if either is unknown). Search, drummer pages and this article all call the same implementation.
- Picking the matches: the reference's own brand is excluded, then the closest sticks are taken one per brand until 3 are found. Ties break on part number so the chart does not reshuffle between builds.
- Not shown in the list: the taper class. It is still part of the distance, but so few brands publish it that the column would be almost empty, so it is left out of the display (see “What this chart cannot tell you”).
- Professional-use counts come from makers' own artist rosters, merged per person. The bias in them is laid out in the sixth article.
- Every figure here is recomputed each time the database is rebuilt. Last updated: 2026-08-27
Related guides
- Sizes, measuredWhy 5A is not a standardWe measured every drumstick in the database whose model name says 5A: 353 sticks from 32 brands, running from 12.7 to 15.1 mm in diameter. There is no 5A standard — here is what the numbers actually look like, including where 5A overlaps 5B and 7A.
- Materials, measuredWhat the wood really changesWhat the wood actually changes on a drumstick, measured across 2,110 sticks: the material breakdown, and published weights for hickory and maple sold under the same brand and size name. Diameter barely moves with the wood — weight does.
- Your first pairChoosing a first pair by the numbersStart in the middle: ⌀14.0–15.1 mm by 400–413 mm. That band holds 45% of the 1,800 drumset sticks on file and 43% of 2,311 documented professional choices. No specific model is recommended — here is why.
- Both ends of the dataThe extremes, and a slenderness ratioThe thinnest, thickest, longest, shortest, heaviest and lightest drumsticks in a 2,110-stick database, drawn to one scale. Plus a slenderness ratio (length ÷ diameter): the median is 27.8, and the top of the list reaches 49.9.
- Counting the rostersWhat the pros actually playCounted from makers' own artist rosters: 1,864 drummers, 2,316 stick choices, and the 20 most-used models. How professional use differs from the catalogue, what country and genre do and do not explain, and why 67% of the data comes from one roster.