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Founded in 1963 and headquartered in Boston, Massachusetts, the Vic Firth company bills itself as one of theworld's largest manufacturers of drumsticks and mallets, which were made in Newport, Maine. In 2010, the company merged with Avedis Zildjian Company.
The company began when Firth, who had been performing with the Boston Symphony Orchestra for 12 years, was asked to perform pieces which he felt required a higher-quality drumstick than those that were currently being manufactured. Firth decided to design a set of his own sticks. Firth hand-whittled the first sticks himself from bulkier sticks and sent these prototypes to a wood turner in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. The two prototypes that he sent would become the SD1 and SD2, the first two models of sticks manufactured by Vic Firth, Inc. The Vic Firth product line is built on a simple phrase: The Perfect Pair.