Materials, measured

What does the wood change on a drumstick?

Last updated 2026-08-26 2 figures · 3 tables · about 8 min read

“Hickory or maple?” is one of the first questions every drummer asks. The stock answer is familiar too: hickory does everything, maple is light, oak is heavy and hard.

This article checks how much of that holds up against the STICK FINDER data. The short version: the wood does not change how thick a stick is. It changes how much that thickness weighs. Of the 2,110 sticks on file, 1,984 have a published material, and 75% of those are hickory. Meanwhile the median diameter moves by only 0.2 mm across the main woods.

The weight difference, on the other hand, shows up clearly — as long as you compare sticks that one maker sells under the same size name in both woods, with a published weight for each. Those pairs are rare, and they are the heart of this article.

1. What drumsticks are made of

1,984 sticks have a material published by the maker; the other 126 do not say. Hickory accounts for 1,485 of them, 75%, and hickory, maple and oak together make 89%. Everything that is not wood — carbon, aluminium and so on — comes to 119 sticks.

Count brands instead and a second picture appears. 33 brands offer hickory. Only 6 offer oak, 6 offer hornbeam and 1 offers carbon. Part of why “start with hickory” is the standard advice is simply that three quarters of the shelf is hickory.

2. The wood does not decide the thickness

Across the big three plus hornbeam, the median diameter sits between 14.5 mm and 14.75 mm — a spread of 0.2 mm, or two steps of the one-decimal figures the makers publish. For practical purposes the woods are the same thickness. The median length is within half a millimetre of 406 mm for all four.

In other words makers keep the dimensions and swap the wood. “Maple sticks are thinner” does not show up in the catalogue numbers. What the wood really changes is the weight of a given thickness.

3. Hickory against maple, at the same size name

There is an obstacle first: hardly anyone publishes weights. Of the 2,110 sticks here, only 154 (7%), from 7 brands, carry an official weight in grams.

So the comparison was extracted mechanically, on one condition: the same brand, the same size name and the same tip material, with a published weight for both the hickory and the maple version. 11 groups qualify (Kadence, Millenium).

Here is the cleanest single pair. Only one of the 11 groups has an identical published diameter on both sides. Millenium H2B (Hickory, ⌀16.0 mm × 407 mm, 58.0 g) against Millenium 2B (Maple, ⌀16.0 mm × 410 mm, 51.5 g). Same diameter, 3 mm apart in length, and 6.5 g (13%) apart in weight.

Hickory is the heavier stick in 9 of the 11 groups. Now the honest version. The 6 groups from Kadence come from a brand that publishes the same diameter (⌀12.7 mm) for every model it makes — the same “the published figure cannot tell the sizes apart” problem the first article ran into, which means we cannot confirm the two sticks are really the same size. Drop those and all 5 remaining groups have hickory heavier, by a median of 10%.

One more caution about reading a single number. Millenium's H5A exists in 11 colourways with identical dimensions (⌀14.0 mm × 410 mm), and their published weights run from 49.3 g to 54.3 g — a 5.0 g spread, 10% of the median. Wood varies piece to piece, so a published weight is the weight of that sample or that batch. Read “maple is x grams lighter” as a tendency of roughly ten percent, not as a promise about the pair in your hand.

This site also estimates a weight for models that do not publish one. Those estimates are not used here. They are computed as density × dimensions, with a density per material — so using them to show that maple is lighter would just restate the assumption. Only figures the makers actually published are compared above.

4. Wood and where the brand is from

Hickory and maple are everywhere: brands in every region offer both. The other two woods are another matter.

63 of the 78 oak sticks (81%) come from Japanese brands. Only 6 brands offer oak at all, and only 1 of them is not Japanese: PLAYWOOD 28, Promark 15, TAMA 13, Pearl 12, YAMAHA 9, PLAYTECH 1. No European brand here offers an oak stick. On top of that, 25 of these sticks name Japan in the material itself — 15 of Promark's Shira Kashi Oak, 10 of TAMA's Japanese Oak — so even the oak sold by a brand outside Japan is stated to be Japanese white oak.

85 of the 87 hornbeam sticks (98%) come from European brands — StarWood 47, Agner 16, Balbex 14, Rohema 6, CANOPUS 2, Pellwood 2 — and no North American brand here offers hornbeam.

That is as far as the data goes. Why the split exists — sourcing, tradition, something else — is not something we found a primary source for, so it is not claimed here. The practical consequence is worth stating though: choosing by wood also changes where you can buy.

5. Wooden tip or nylon tip

869 sticks state what the tip is made of, and 257 of them — 30% — are nylon; the other 1,234 say nothing. The brands with the most nylon-tipped models are Vater 66, Ahead 40, Vic Firth 32, Promark 24.

One thing the data settles: switching to a nylon tip does not change the stick. There are 29 pairs here whose model numbers differ only by a trailing N. 26 of them publish the same diameter and 24 match on length as well. The rest differ slightly in published figures — which is the sampling spread from the previous section, not a design change.

So a nylon tip keeps the grip and the swing exactly as they were and changes only what touches the cymbal. Brighter attack, a clearer stick sound, more difference on cymbals than on drums — every maker says something along those lines, but nobody publishes numbers, so this article does not turn it into a fact. Electronic kits are covered in the third article.

6. “Which wood breaks least?” is a question this article cannot answer

It is the other half of every wood discussion, and the honest answer is that we cannot answer it. Not one of the 38 brands on file publishes a durability or lifespan figure, and this site does not hold that data.

You can line the woods up by hardness and guess that oak outlasts hickory outlasts maple, but that is a guess, and how a stick breaks depends on where it is struck and how it is stored as much as on the wood. Where the data cannot back a claim, this site leaves the space empty.

7. So how should you use this?

Starting from the wood is an inefficient way to shop: three quarters of the catalogue is hickory, and the wood does not decide the thickness anyway. The other order works better.

1. Narrow by diameter and length first. That is what the swing is built on.
2. Then, to keep the same thickness but drop weight, go maple; to add weight, go oak or hornbeam. Hickory sits between them. That is what the wood is for.
3. Tip material can come last. It leaves the dimensions untouched, so it never changes how the stick swings.

Filter 2,110 sticks by material and size Find sticks like this one

About these numbers

• What was counted: the 2,110 drumsticks in STICK FINDER, from 38 brands. Materials are the makers' own wording (American Hickory, オーク and so on) normalised to this site's vocabulary; anything that could not be classified is left out of the statistics.
• The size columns count drumset sticks only. Marching and concert models are longer and thicker because of what they are for, not because of the wood.
• Weights are the makers' published figures only. The weight this site estimates from dimensions and material assumes a density per material, so it cannot be used to compare materials without arguing in a circle.
• A brand's region is where the brand is based, not where its sticks are made. The stick records carry no country field, so this one attribute comes from the project's own brand survey.
• Every figure here is recomputed each time the database is rebuilt. Last updated: 2026-08-26

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.
• 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.

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