Our Mission
GDM Online is a custom drum building resource for helping you design and make your own drum set. Our goal is to show you what's possible and how simple methods create professional results so that you can apply these techniques on your own creative adventures. We strive to develop distinctive and innovative tutorials that improve the quality and speed of your drum making while offering simplicity and flexibility.
About John Dutra & GDM
As the creator of Guerrilla Drum Making and once lead drum builder for Shine Custom Drums, John has has created over hundreds of drum sets for top performing drummers with national recognition, TV appearances, and Billboard chart placements. His DVD Guerrilla Drum Making has been a progressive force in the custom drum making industry with his simple methods and innovative building styles.
After a Shine Drums endorsement opportunity in 2006, John began working for the company. He started off "sweeping the shop" and soon moved into drum supply ordering, custom building, graphic design and finally, lead builder for the company. He left Shine in 2008 and released a DVD called Guerrilla Drum Making, based on simple methods that average drummers could use to build drums like the professional quality kits he was building at Shine.
Guerrilla Drum Making was the first custom drum making DVD ever made. The high quality video shots, vocal narration and easy building style quickly sparked worldwide interest. With thousands of drummers around the world actually using the DVD to create top notch quality drum kits, the DVD's success helped fuel the company's passion into filming and producing Guerrilla Drum Making 2, the follow up DVD (unreleased).
However the websites popular online presence and growing community of drum builders led to John abandoning the DVD format, and putting Guerrilla Drum Making online for instant viewing became a major priority. "A lot of our customers said they will take a laptop out into their garage, pop in our DVD, and start following along with the methods. I started thinking, "Well... even though that's cool, how can we make it even MORE helpful? What if the DVD was available for online viewing and they could ask questions on each vid, see the exact materials used, print out helpful downloads, and get involved in the community?" It just became obvious that having our tutorials online is more convenient, helpful, easy to update, easier to organize videos by topic, and easier to reach more people."
Every month, GDM Online will release the video tutorials from Guerrilla Drum Making 2 (unreleased), along with more innovative tutorials that will continue to help drummers worldwide. "Our customers who bought the DVD three years ago still use it to this day. What better way to give them the opportunity to be apart of something that is continually updated, refined, and improved? Just popping in a DVD and watching along is not even close to how helpful this will be for our community."
