False alarm. Even though I bought it online, someone had already bought it in store. Damn. It was only $299

Hold on now. This gets interesting. I was not comfortable with the way this was handled so I did some investigating and found out that it was not sold IN STORE like the guy said, but was sold over the phone to someone AFTER I bought it online. They are going to have to ship it regardless. I am getting district manager's involved at this point because they lied to me and told me someone had just bought it in store and the drums had left the building. I'll keep you all updated. I love Guitar Center, but this stuff had happened to me before and I will not go down easy.

They made good on it and the drums are mine!!!!!Yippee Hurray!!!! So back to my original questions. It appears to be a black wrap with the tom mounting hardware removed. Non original hoops and a couple of replacement claws and trods. I bet these sound awesome. It is hard to see in this pic but two of the badges are drop g's. These will go in the rotation for my slop rock band. On second look, the bass drum hoops may be original. The 77 catalog shows a black wrap like this one with similar badges and metal bass drum hoops.

Thats a great setup for the price. Looks like a pearl mount was on there? Or is that the hole pattern for gretsches god awful uprights for those ball and socket things (which are also god awful)?

I believe it was ball and socket things. I'm stoked because the shells look to be in decent shape. I don't care about extra holes on a player kit.

I'd love to have that set. Prefer a 13", but that's just me.

Looks like silver painted hoops with black inlays like the old Anniversary Sparkle kits had. Those might be the original hoops. The metal hoops were only used for a couple of years in the early 70s before they went back to wood hoops. The drop G badges were used right around 1980ish so these should have wood hoops and would be from the tail end of that style of tom mounting hardware.

Looks like a pretty sweet deal. If they where mine I'd track down the correct base plate to cover the holes in the bass drum but probably wouldn't bother with the uprights as I doubt I'd ever actually use it to hold the tom.

Cool info. the 77 catalog showed metal hoops and that time frame correlates perfectly with the clunky tom mounting hardware. The only thing that is odd is the drop G badges. Is it possible they had a run of drop G badges around 77-79 or so? Here is a pic from the catalog.

Most of the sets shown in the 77 catalog have wood hoops, the exception being the big double bass set and the chrome set. You can't really judge these things entirely by the catalogs as these companies tended to use artwork and photos over and over again. They would not have re-shot something just because they were using different hoops now.

Gretsch themselves (on their website) say that the Drop G badge was unveiled in "late 1980". I don't have a terrific amount of faith in the complete accuracy of their timeline but this is certainly in the ballpark with other evidence.

In any case, whether those hoops are metal or wood you still got a great deal.