 Welcome to Drum History. I'm your host Bart Van Der Zee, and I'll be taking you on a trip through time to learn and discover as much as we can about the drums and drummers that came before us. Today, I'm speaking with Mark Patch, who is an expert on vintage MIJ or Maiden Japan drums. These are very unique drums that appeared on the market in the 1960s and 70s and hold a special place in many drummers' hearts. Not much is known about these drums, so it's a real treat to hear what Mark has to say about them. Let's get started. Hello and welcome to the Drum History podcast. I am joined today by Mark Patch, author of the book Vintage Stencil Drums Made in Japan. Mark, how are you? I'm doing good. Awesome. Well, thanks for being here today. I'm excited to learn a little bit more about stencil drums and what they're all about. So, I figured we would dive right in with the first question, which is, what is a stencil drum? Well, the stencil drums that we're talking about here were basically the copycat drums that came out in the late 50s, early 60s. And they copied mostly American drums and some of the European major manufacturers, only making them in higher volume, much cheaper. They cut back on some of the fancier things in order to compete, really compete in the American market and all over Europe. Gotcha. So, cutting back would be like say on like the hardware, the wood type, all kinds of stuff like that then, right? Yeah, wood is where they really cut back on. They would use luon and they would use the grain going up and down from head to head. I think to make it bend a lot easier. They could use less wood and they could do it a lot faster as opposed to, you know, the bending that they were having to do here in the United States. The big companies were, you know, it was a real chore and I think a little bit time consuming too. Well, that's interesting. OK, so then 50s and 60s they are copying drums, which is cool. Then why don't we go into a little bit about the people who were doing this, the major manufacturers. In your book, you discuss what we'll call the big three doing it, Hoshino, Pearl and Star. So, why don't we talk a little bit about each of those and discuss Hoshino first? Because that's one where it seems like they were a big player and then it's sort of, I don't know if they carried on the tradition and like little spoiler alert. Pearl and Star went on to become different brands. Pearl obviously stayed Pearl, but Star became Tama. So, yeah, why don't you run us through those a little bit, starting with Hoshino? Well, Hoshino is the one that most people don't know about. I mean, there's so little documentation on the actual company and when they started, when they stopped. All we have are there are a few ads and pictures of the actual drums that were labeled Hoshino. That is all we have basically to work with. No matter how much searching, I could not find more information than that. So, they're the least known about, but they were making a lot of drums. Very cool. We should note that, like you said, their brand was labeled on the badge as Hoshino, which a lot of these companies, the kicker and the cool thing about, and I think it's what really got you into this, is how they would have hundreds of different brands that would be labeled on these drums. So, that's kind of interesting. They would put their own name on there, and that didn't seem to be the norm. Okay, so then let's talk a little bit about Pearl. I think I noticed in your book that they are one of the oldest M.I.J. makers. They are one of the oldest companies. Well, they were the first, reportedly, that did stencil drums that were copying. They were making drums, you know, initially under their own name. And then, I think around, I believe it's 1960 that they started doing the stencil badges, different brand names. But I don't know that their drums were any different. You know, it was the same basic drums. They just put a different name on it. Kind of filling up the market more with, I mean, they're getting paid, so who cares if it's a different name on it. I saw in your book, you talk about how they had really nice hardware. And I noticed that you actually have really good pictures of all the different, the floor tom legs and the tom mounts. And it seemed more heavy-duty, and it would also include Pearl. Pearl would be labeled on the hardware. So they definitely took pride and actually created legitimate hardware that would replicate brands like Slingerland, like, as you mentioned, as like the stick saver rim. So that's pretty cool that they actually put some effort into the hardware. Oh, yeah. And Slingerland was the company. I think when all of the stencil brands came out, when all these manufacturers in Japan, they looked at Slingerland first. And from everything I've seen is every one of them used Slingerland-styled hardware. Pearl had their own twist on it. It was like more of inspired by Slingerland. And then the other brands did flat-out copies. And I know it would look a lot like it, but like, as you mentioned, once you look at the innards, the inside of the actual lug or something, they tended to not have quite as much attention to detail as like the real deal Slingerland hardware. Yeah, they are thinner. They are lighter. But they were pretty solid though. I mean, I don't know that I've had any of the Japanese, you know, lugs break on me. And I've used several of them. I've played very hard on drums. Yeah. You know, they pulled up. Okay, so then the third, once we had Hoshino, Pearl, and now we're up to Star, who later became Tama. I find it interesting, too, as an identifying factor that on their badge, you can typically see world's supreme quality on the badges. So that kind of, in this, the world of MIJ kits, there isn't a lot of documentation, like you said. So that's just kind of a nice way to be able to identify them. But yeah, why don't you tell us a little bit about what you know about Star? Star came in right after Pearl started doing it, started doing the stencil drums. They came in right after them, but they were right on top of Slingerland stuff. Especially they, I mean, they copied the outside of the lugs were completely identical. I mean, I told them upside by side and it's like, if you don't look inside, you can't tell the difference. So they were, they were really copycats. I'm sure Slingerland loved that their market being, you know, diminished like that. Well, that's cool. Okay. So you think Star has good quality stuff as well, because they are, if you do any research on stencil kits, they're definitely one of the biggest. I mean, they are like a sought after drum set. Yeah. They had lots of great finishes. I think that's kind of one of the big allures is they had a lot of different finishes going on. And I mean, all three of them had some good stuff, but I think they seem to have a little bit more than everyone else. And the good thing about Star is there is some documentation of their, their work, at least their hardware and, and their finishes and things like that through catalog and stuff that are online. There are a lot of fans out there that have, you know, put up websites devoted to this stuff. So it is out there. I think that's a good point, both about the, the fans and how it is a community of people who are, who love these drums. And I am one of them. You are one of these people. So the finishes are what kind of, I had an Olympian, or is it Olympic? I think it's Olympian kit that was blue sparkle. It was nothing, that's not a crazy finish, but in doing research, there are awesome. Like I would say some of my favorite drum finishes are found on these MIJ kits. So that is definitely a big draw. I know that there's a lot of people like the stencil snare drums. I think that's, that's something where you see it more and more and more as like a snare drum might go for $150, but then you tend to see the whole drum set going for around $300, $350. I have, I have a few that I've held on to. I bought one just like about a year ago. It was about 67-ish pearl and I bought it. I was going to fix it up, you know, repair it and then sell it. And then I tuned it up and it was like, this drum is amazing. Yeah. So it's staying with me. So we talked a little bit before on the phone and briefly, I don't think there's much knowledge about it, but the actual, what's interesting is the legality of this, where I think what we, we came to the conclusion that it's not worth slingerland and Rogers. It's not worth for them to go litigate to a company in Japan where you're just going to be throwing money at it and they're just probably going to keep on doing it. But there's definitely a gray area in how legal it is to have all of your, your parts and your drums copied and then distributed to America. Yeah, I think Star would have been the one to go after if they were to have. I don't know that, you know, they even considered it or if they even thought they were any kind of a threat. Because when they started Flingerland and Rogers and all those companies were in their prime, you know, they were really going great right then in the 60s. So they're, they probably didn't even think of them as a threat, I would suspect. Yeah. Now just you saying that kind of makes it pop into my head 1960s, we got Ringo and the Beatles coming out and everyone wanting to play the drums. So there must have been a big upswing in sales for people who couldn't afford the Ludwig kit. So that's got to be a factor in selling these drums. There had to be a huge boom in that in that 60s era. Oh yeah. And their pricing I think was not even half. Let's move on to the transition from Stencil to like companies like Pearl and Star who became Tama and Yamaha. Any information you might have on their transition from making these copy drums to getting into the world where Pearl and Tama and Yamaha are like, they're a major player in the drum business in the 1980s. Like I think of like Yamaha recording customs. I think part of the catalyst was the American companies were starting to decline. They couldn't, there wasn't the big market. I think the 70s, you know, when the economy started to go down, people weren't as willing to spend what American drums were worse. Yeah, absolutely. I think that, you know, Pearl and Tama saw that and said, well, you know, we can up our quality and we can really compete with these guys. And I think that's what put, I mean, in a very short period of time, you know, right there, we lost Slingerland and Rogers basically in the late 70s, early 80s, just because of that, I think. Yeah, and that's that is the era of being sold and bought in these companies just floating around and being bought by different people left and right, where it seems like in Japan, they had the resources to do this and had built the infrastructure. So it's kind of a big part of drum history that you don't exactly think of. I think of people sometimes think of Stencil and MIJ kits as being junky or cheap, but really it is what evolved into these major companies today. So backing up here a little bit, I think it's interesting and I want to talk about this a little bit about how this one example is how Rogers used a Japanese distributor. I'm not sure which one, but to make their own cheaper kit, the Rogers, correct me if I'm wrong, the R380 set, which was made for years. But so what's up with that? Like, what about why would they go and make a cheaper drum set and put their name on it even though they didn't make it? From what I understand, it was about 67 right when Yamaha came in and started making drums. They worked out a deal. I believe the lugs themselves were designed by Rogers people and I don't know if they were assembled. They may have even been assembled in the United States, but the drums were built by Yamaha over in Japan. It is something like that and I don't know the story for sure, but they were, you know, they worked together on it. It wasn't the typical Stencil deal where we'll order, you know, we need a thousand kits. It was, let's work together on this and you can basically save us a lot of money and we can have an entry level kit. And we'll put the Rogers name on it with, you know, this little 360 underneath it. And I think the first one was the R360 by Rogers. I'm not mistaken. So they have their name on it, but it wasn't really Rogers. Okay, that's interesting. R360, not 380. Yeah, it is 360 and 380. They made both of them. Okay, cool. Well, it's just funny because that is like super common now where like, let's say there's, let's take Pork Pie where they make their USA custom built drums and then they have drums made in Taiwan that they assemble. So now this seems like every drum company has their custom built USA stuff and then they build them overseas. So this isn't like some crazy, this never happened again kind of thing. It almost became the norm after that. Yeah, I think Pearl does the same thing still to this day. I think they have their own custom shop that there's American made stuff here. Yeah, there's a certain quality that comes from the American made drums, but it's not to say that anything made overseas isn't still a great drum. It just doesn't have that custom feel to it. Yeah. Which transitions us into talking about how MIJ drums evolved into what is happening today where they are made in Taiwan and China. So it's almost as if those two countries took over the market and Japan wanted to get out of it as much. So it's not exactly the term MIJ doesn't apply, which means made in Japan that doesn't apply to these drums today. But the spirit lives on of drum producers creating these drum sets that turn out to be CB and percussion plus and gammon and groove percussion. Where the way I understand it is they're just mass producing a lot of these drums and just putting different logos on it. Yeah, that's basically all it is. Now I'd say that the drums, the actual shells of those drums today are actually decent drums. I think they're probably as good as what was going on in the 70s. But they didn't do the finishes and the great lugs and the cool hardware and stuff that they didn't continue on in that spirit of it. But I don't think the shells themselves are like junk. I think they could be made, you know, you put some good hardware on them, they might be actually decent drums. But you know, they're just going to be plain. They're not special like the ones in the 60s and 70s. That's an interesting, interesting point. So if I were to go out right now and wanted to buy a 1960s, late 50s, early 70s and an early stencil kit, where would you recommend that I go out and do that? First, I would check, you know, locally, you know, basic, you know, newspapers if you have them there. Local, you know, even Facebook ads, things like that in the sea because that's where you're going to do your best buying local goods in the shipping. That's where you get bid on costs. But you may find something and you'll find it way cheaper at a garage sale, you know, then you are going to find it online. But if you do go online, I've always used eBay and there are always kits on eBay. Yeah. They're out there to be found. But, you know, there's Reverb and Craigslist. All of those are, you know, there's tons of places to look and just even getting on the groups. Yep. There's a great, that's how I found you is the MIJ stencil group on Facebook, which is an awesome resource to just post a picture and say, hey, I have this Royce early drum set. What's some information about it? And then guys like you who are extremely knowledgeable chime in and say, oh, that's this, and give you information on it. Yeah, those groups have lots of experts, too. There's a lot of people that specialize in, you know, one particular company. They may know everything about Sparrow or anything about Pearl or, you know, own catalogs and stuff. And people, you know, that are willing to like, hey, I'll go look that up and pass on this information. So there's a different type of dealing with a different group of people when you're dealing with the MIJ stencil people. They're very friendly. They're very, they want to help each other and they want to learn from each other. They're unique to just your average drummer and drummer group because I'm in tons of them. And they're the ones that stand out as being the most outstanding. Yeah, it's different than a Ludwig or a Rogers or Slingerlin group where it's, I almost think it's, I don't want to say less serious, but in a good way where it's more friendly. It's like there's just more of a, it seems like there's more of a community vibe. And I'm not saying at all that the other groups don't have community vibes, but it's, like you said, it's definitely different. It's very fun. It's kind of like, check out this crazy finish I had. And it seems like the old companies used to just mix and match parts and just get the drums out and done. So it's kind of fun to like track down what each piece comes from and help each other out, which is really cool. Oh yeah. It's cool too how you said, like you can find them on eBay, but you do find the best deals if you go, like, garage sales. Because you're not trying to like rip anyone off, but when I think of these 60s Japanese drums, it's like the, it's just the drum set you see at a garage sale in the corner and it's got $25 on it. You know what I mean? Like it might be missing some hardware, but that's my image in my head of these drums. Are people not knowing exactly what they have and you can get them and this, because they probably look it up and say, oh, I don't know what the hell this brand is. I don't know what Star is. It's not a major, it's not, you know, Pearl or, well, I guess Pearl is a bad example, but it's not like Ludwig or something. So that's where you can get really good deals on those versus Reverb where you're going to pay a lot in shipping. Yeah. Oh yeah. Cool. Well, so Mark, I wanted to give you an opportunity to tell people where they can find your book and your books. If you want to talk a little bit about the books that you have out and what you're up to and just a little bit about yourself, I think that'd be really interesting for everyone. Well, I have the two drum books. Actually, it was three. I started off the very first book I wrote. I was amassing a lot of information about all these different drum companies and so I thought, well, hey, I just put it into a book and, you know, give fundamental information only and just give citation where people could look further for information. And so I just named it after myself because it's my book. Yeah. And I called it Markpatch Drum Guide and so in 2017 I released it and I had over 700 brands of drums. And then right after I did that, I started working on the stencil book because I found so much stencil information and I found that I had, you know, plenty to work with. I thought, there are people that are really, the people that seem to be most interested were the stencil people. So I wrote a book basically for them and, you know, for myself to remember all this stuff because this is more information than I can just remember off the top of my head. So having it, you know, it was a way to kind of give the market because I've never seen a book devoted to stencils. So it's the first that I know about. But, you know, there may be some, I heard someone say that they were working on something in Europe at one point, but I've never actually seen another book. I do know that there was a stencil book for Japanese guitars that was someone said, you need to read this book too. I haven't read it yet. But there is, you know, somebody had gone down an avenue because the exact same thing that happened in the drum world was happening in the guitar world. Interesting. And so these are the same, you know, these companies are related to each other too. So eventually I'll, you know, study into them as well and see where the ties, because the names are the same. Just like there's a Kingston drum set, there's a Kingston guitar. Wow, I didn't know that at all. That's pretty cool. And so they have all the tons of stencil names. A lot of them overlap and, you know, they may have not been bought from the same, you know, from the same manufacturers. But, you know, some of these places did manufacture guitar space and drums and stuff from one place. And, you know, they could be tied to one another. Is there that, you know, like a source where they would come up with these names? Like these names that what I'm assuming would appeal to American buyers. But like there's so many different names like stewards and all this. Like, do you have any idea of where the source of these names came from? One story that I've read, there's a, the beginning of when Pearl started doing this. The first, one of the first one was Cooper and Mindy. The stories are online. And I think, so if you look those up in the book, there's actual links that you can, you know, find where the stories are. But they were named after, you know, like this guy who owned a shop. Either he named it after his daughter or something like that. He gave it a name. And then I think maybe eventually named it after himself. Gotcha. And, you know, for a year or two it was this name and for another year it was this name. I think a lot of them, it was just the name of the distributor themselves or even the music store's name. I don't think there were any rules at all as far as, you know, what some of them were obviously, you know, tried to capture, you know, an audience, a certain kind of an audience. Yeah. You know, like Astro. Yeah, exactly. That was a great thing for the space age. Yep. But they're, I think they're unlimited sources of where they got their names from. So I would basically have Bart's drum store. And then I would say, I'm going to distribute Bart's drums. And then I would say, I would talk to a Hoshino and then say, I want to distribute these drums. I need a thousand of them. Here's the name I want. Put it on a badge. I would get them and then I would be selling my drums that would be from my company, but just created in Japan, but they would have my logo on it. And then I would, I guess I would set the price and then make whatever profit I could on top of what it costs to make them basically, right? That's exactly how it worked, I think. All right, Mark. So I think that's, we've covered a lot of stuff today. So why don't you just tell people where they can find your book and go out and buy it and learn more about stencil kits? Just go to blurb.com and look for the title of vintage stenciled drums made in Japan. Or you can go to my website, markpatch.com, M-A-R-C-P-A-T-C-H. And you can find the link. It'll go right to blurb. The books are made to order. So when you order them, it takes a couple weeks, but it comes actually less than that. But that's how you get it. Cool. And it'd be very neat, like coffee table book. It's got a very, very cool cover with all the different badges and stuff on it. So yeah, that's a great addition to your drum book collection. So awesome, Mark. Well, thank you so much for taking the time to talk with us today. And I'm sure we'll see you around the forums and the Facebook groups for stencil kits. All right. Very cool. Awesome. Thank you, Mark. Have a great day. Thank you very much. I want to give a big thank you to Mark for talking with us today. Be sure to find him online and check out his book. If you like this podcast, find me on social media at Drum History and please share, rate and leave a review. And let me know topics that you would like to learn about in the future. Until next time, keep on learning. This is a Gwynn Sound podcast.