 Hello and welcome to the drum history podcast. Today, we are joined by Ben O'Brien-Smith from Sounds Like a Drum. Ben, how are you man? Doing excellent, thanks so much for having me here. Sure, sure, I'm excited to talk to you about the history of drum heads. Why don't you tell us a little bit about how you got into this and your background with drum heads? Absolutely, so I started working with DiDario and company owners of Evans drum heads back in 2010 and worked for them for a period of just over six and a half years. I was a product specialist there and did everything from brand management to product development, to managing their social channels and then actually went on to focus entirely on their digital marketing and social media strategy and community management towards the last year and a half or so that I was there. But I was responsible for developing products like the Evans UV-1, let's see, the Heavyweight, the Rezo 7, a variety of different very specific niche style drum heads that we added to the line over the course of time that I was there. Cool, cool. Well, it sounds like you're the right guy to talk to for this episode. I am so interested in this because I keep hearing the other experts I talk to talking about stretching out calf skin heads and drawing them on the roofs of the factories and when it actually switched to the Mylar and yeah. So I'll let you take it away, man. Let's just go back as far as you can and learn about drum heads. As far as we know, for as long as there have been drums, there have pretty much been some form of membrane being stretched over some sort of object, whether it was a cylindrical object or any kind of like small cavernous, if you will, sort of device in order to create a resonating body. And drums and percussion are, they are the original instrument. They are the first instrument, maybe second to voice, but the first instrument outside of the voice. And so for thousands of years, for potentially quite longer, you had drums that were being played and being made with all different forms of oftentimes animal skin, animal hide being used as the membrane. And that could vary depending on what animals were around. We often tend to think of calf skin and goat skin as the kind of the be all end all and it comes to animal hide, but there were all sorts of different types of animal hides being used, looking way back hundreds and hundreds of years ago, thousands of years ago because of what was around because of the development and the evolution of these animals, that total instruments, that performance total instruments were brought in, in addition to voice. And even then those were also using the guts of those individual animals to be able to create tension strings and all sorts of different types of plucked and strung instruments, things like that. These hides were being stretched, cured and tucked into some form of what is often referred to as a flash hoop. And that's now in modern drums, it's what we refer to as just the hoop or sometimes we'll talk about it as the rim of the drum head that often gets confusing with the rim of the drum itself. And there were all sorts of different methods for this. You had a very traditional tucking process which is not all too dissimilar from how calfskin and other sorts of animal hide drum heads are tucked today where you would get the material wet. It would be incredibly pliable and malleable and you would basically tuck it around a wooden ring. And so now we're really fast forwarding into the, let's see, looking at like the 19th century or so, 18th, 19th century. And you've got drums that are being, of course, made out of wood. You've got wooden hoops that are being made out of basically off-cut sections of these drums. And then you have this membrane being tucked around it. And then there's traditionally, of course, rope-tuned drums seen in different armies. You've got these armed forces marching around with drums that are affected by everything from the temperature and the humidity to, of course, the rain. And you've got armed forces marching through all sorts of different conditions. I mean, looking back at it, it's kind of amazing that so much of that marching process was based around the drums. It was based around that cadence. And yet they would march through any weather and had to deal with kind of whatever the circumstances were. And there wasn't any alternative whatsoever. And so there wasn't a whole lot of change in that over the course of time. Maybe just in simple little tucking techniques and things like that. But for the most part, it was seen as, well, this is what we're stuck with right now. I would wonder, this seems like a pretty specialized skill to be the drumhead maker. So I imagine that was like a role that someone would have. It's not the same where right now everyone can go out and buy their Evans or their Remo head and then put it on their drum. So I imagine that was probably something that was maybe handed down generation to generation, this technique of stretching and getting the calf skin or whatever goat skin and doing that right. So I imagine that would be something like ceremonial that's a pretty special thing for people to know how to do. Yeah, you know, depending on the culture, I think it definitely saw a lot more focus and was given that degree of importance. It's tough to say whether there was ever a dedicated drumhead maker within a given community, thinking about the way that there would be later on, metal smiths and all sorts of families that would focus on one aspect of life. I think that oftentimes you would have those that were responsible for making the drums were also responsible for making the heads themselves. Yeah, that makes sense. That was all part of the process. Rather than being able to kick it off to your buddy who does all the calf skin tucking and things of that nature. Yeah, well, so then fast forwarding to also what you were saying, I'm assuming once you're getting into more of like, there's multiple, there's factories creating drums, albeit maybe it's early on where there are small factories, whoever, but it seems like it probably got more uniform where the drum was the same size. You're not cutting it out of a tree and then using intestines from a goat to keep the head on. So I think as we're going on from what I can tell is things are getting more uniform. They're getting more, the drums are the same sizes. They're the snare for the army. You're gonna have to make 1,000 of them, 10,000 of them. They gotta be uniform. Yeah, and I mean at the same time it was still, if we're talking about like the mid to late 1800s or so where you've got the development and some of the standardization of drum design there, you're still using these natural hide skin drum heads. And one of the beauties of that is that it's still incredibly forgiving. And if you've got a drum that's slightly oversized or a little out of round, which just naturally these had to be, there wasn't a chance that they were in perfect rounds. And it wasn't really necessary. Again, because you didn't have something that was, you didn't have a head that was being designed and manufactured in such a way that it had to be so consistent. In a way that's kind of the challenge that we see with modern drum heads is that because of the escalation of repeatability in manufacturing, there's this challenge of fitting modern drum heads to vintage drums. And we'll talk about that later on. Getting into the late 1800s now into early 1900s, you've got some of these drum companies, they're starting to pop up all over the place. You've got Gresh drums is making some of their own drum heads. Rogers is making some of their own drum heads. There's a variety of these different brands, often who are already responsible for making something within the world of drums and they're tucking heads to be used on these drums. And at that point we're still talking mostly about marching oriented band style drums. But then of course, getting into the 20s, you've got the birth of the drum set. And you've got, and actually it might be the late teens and I should probably check my dates on that one. But as far as I know the development of the drum set in New Orleans and the pairing of all these instruments into something that is a trap set sort of contraption that one person can play. So you don't need to have one person on bass drum, one person on snare drum and all these other disparate elements. The double drumming kind of technique. It's funny you see the old pictures like the guy who has a snare on a chair and then he's got a giant marching bass drum where he's taking, it's just funny how evolution happens where it says, hey, I could do both of these at the same time but it is also corresponding with that trap set up where they say, let me add on a police rattle. Let me add on these blocks. So yeah, that's cool. So people are, it is as you said, standardizing the drum set a little bit more. Well, and at that same time you've got these drums becoming a stationary instrument as opposed to a marching oriented instrument. So now you've got a little bit more control. You're starting to see that there are drums that are being built with lamps inside them in order to help stabilize the tuning of the drum head because you would have this change in temperature or if you're in certain climates, you're kind of at the mercy of mother nature and where things are at with regards to humidity and temperature and all that is affecting the sound of your drums. And of course, little things like incorporating lamps into the drums seems like a strange thing now but it made all the difference to be able to help get some degree of control over them without having to tune them every time something went out. Well, yeah, and Mark Cooper on the previous episode just talked about that where it also adds that little bit of, I was like, I'm kind of confused because at first I thought it was a cool thing where it's like a gimmick factor and then it is honestly for the, he kind of brought to my attention that it is both. But and just to clarify, which is I think it's pretty obvious to everyone but the temperature is affecting, it's like your skin where if it's colder, it affects it one way by tightening the head and if it's warmer, it will then loosen because it is actual flesh from an animal where it is affected by the temperature. So that is absolutely the biggest issue for these guys at that point in time. Yeah, and you can even see similar effects with modern synthetic drum heads if you put them through extremes. And it's tough to tell, sometimes it's the drum head itself, but oftentimes, particularly if it's a wooden drum, the drum will contract and expand a little bit depending on those factors of weather. So you'll notice that if you leave your drums, if you tend to leave them next to a heater or something like that and you move them away, the change in the sound and tuning overall. All right, so now we're kind of in that 20s area. The drum set is happening, there's trap drummers. This is obviously an industry. So drumming, like you mentioned, has gone from being kind of a less uniform kind of thing and now it's turning into a little bit of an industry. We've got Gretch, we've got Rogers, we've got people doing it themselves. So yeah, why don't you take it from there? Yeah, so this is definitely an interesting one. So you've got, all of a sudden now, music is really turning into a form of entertainment at a different level, at least here in the United States. And as the drum industry is starting to grow, there's more and more drummers and more and more people running into these same challenges of dealing with the temperamental nature of, oftentimes at this point, at least for traditional style, drum set drum heads, the vast majority of them are made of some form of calf skin. There's still some goat skin, but for the vast majority really is calf. And so people started to experiment and fast forward a couple of decades to the 40s and World War II and accompanied by the name of DuPont develops this material, this plastic material, this polyester film that they give the brand name of Mylar. And that all of a sudden kick starts things a little bit with regards to the development of synthetic drum heads. And while there really wasn't a usable, successful, like something that could be brought to market and repeatedly produced synthetic drum head until the mid fifties, there were definitely lots of experiments taking place. And there were some small manufacturers that claimed to have developed some form of a weatherproof drum head. And that's really how they were being referred to is people were looking for these weatherproof drum heads, something that could deal with moisture and whether it was in the form of rain or in a more subtle form with humidity and be able to withstand those changes over the course of time. So lots of experimentation taking place with all sorts of different materials, even outside of Mylar. But in the end, it was Mylar that did the trick. And so this is when we start to have much better documentation of specific years and periods of time when these developments were taking place. And amazingly enough, I haven't seen a lot of this published anywhere. So it's kind of interesting that this, a lot of this history is still pretty closely held. But it was Chick Evans, a jazz drummer in New Mexico, Santa Fe, New Mexico, who was starting to have some success in developing some form of a synthetic drum head that could be repeatedly manufactured and over the course of several years, starting in the, what looks like probably early 50s or so, he was able to get it to the point where he could actually put these heads on and they would hold their tune and they wouldn't die out fast, they wouldn't break. They were actually not very susceptible to at least soccer playing. He was a soccer drummer, at least that's how he described himself as a jazz player. And he decided that he was gonna go about manufacturing these and getting them out to the world. And so this was in 1956, he filed for a patent for the first synthetic drum head. And this is what really kicks off a lot of the drama. And so interestingly enough, and not a lot of people know this, but in March, it was a very early March of 1957, Chick sent a message, a letter to Drum City in Hollywood. And this was a drum shop, this was like the famous drum shop in Los Angeles where drummers were buying it all of their gear from. And it happened to be a shop that Remo Belly was working at. And actually, I believe was a co-owner of. And so he sent this message to them with the announcement of the Evans Weatherproof Drumhead Company. And basically pitching, hey, we've done this thing, we think it's amazing, it works really well. Please don't compare this to any of the other inferior products you've heard about that simply don't hold up. We really truly believe that we have something that's going to change the world of drumming. And they offer to sell them a snare side and a snare batter. And pretty soon after, literally within a couple of days, Remo replies and decides he's going to go ahead and buy two of these drum heads. Actually, I think he bought several more of those. I've seen copies of these purchase orders, that's the only reason I can make specific reference to them. But there are lasting purchase orders of the individual drum heads purchase and the total cost of those. So I think Remo ended up purchasing a full set of them, just one each of like a batter, snare head, snare side head, I believe like a 13, a 16 inch tom and then a 20 inch base drum head. And so they tried these out, put them through the testing and then responded back to Remo or responded back to Chick saying, you're right, you've done it. You think that you've actually come across something that is interesting here and this is working. And so these, to give a little bit of context, these drum heads still looked incredibly similar to what we're used to with regards to cask and heads. It was a piece of polyester film, this mylar that was tacked on, like physically tacked on to a wooden hoop. And I believe these were actually hoops made by Ludwig. I know you're forcing them from Ludwig drums and hand tacking them all on basically with like some tax holding these little sections on. And I've held one of these drum heads and it's amazing. I mean, there's no collar on it whatsoever. Nothing is being done to mold it. You're basically taking this material and tacking it on to the flesh hoop. And then that's enough for the drum hoop to contact and then apply pressure to. And then it would mold and conform to the bearing edge of the drum. Wow. And so this is where things really get wild. And so Remo makes it clear that they're quite interested in these drum heads and basically makes the pitch to Chick Evans that he's interested in taking on the Evans drum head, the Evans weatherproof drum head company as a distributor. He wants to distribute Evans drum heads. And I wanna make this abundantly clear. This is Remo himself saying he'd like to distribute Evans drum heads via drum city in Hollywood, California. Oh man, I mean, that's crazy to think of these giants now. Oh my gosh. Absolutely. And it kind of contradicts, unfortunately it contradicts a lot of what has been written down in quite a few places with regards to Remo drum heads being the first ever synthetic drum heads. When in all reality, Remo could have been experimenting for sure, but expressed an interest in wanting to even all purchase these drum heads from Evans was interested in distributing them through his shop. And at this point, Chick Evans has applied for a patent on these and is moving forward with the development of the business. And this is a jazz drummer. This guy's not a businessman. He probably doesn't have the business shops that Remo does himself. He's not working at a drum shop. He's not thinking quite that same way. Industry and yeah. What he's working with. Wow. Exactly. And I mean, at the same time now, Remo's a player himself as well, but has this a little bit more business background with this time at Drum City. And so all of a sudden things really kick into high here and it's kind of, it's strange coincidence that we should be having this conversation today because it was literally 62 years ago this week that all of this conversation was going down as there's telegraphs back and forth and there's letters going back and forth between Remo himself and Chick Evans with their interest in meeting up and discussing this. And, you know, Remo wants to visit in person and they're discussing the kind of the capabilities of this industry and what does this look like from a repeat sales standpoint and what about the aesthetic and the capability? You know, at this point, all of these heads are their clear drum heads. So what are we gonna do about brush playing? Well, Chick Evans mentioned that you can spray on a lacquer of sorts onto these heads from a texture standpoint and you might have to reapply over a course of time but that does a sufficient job with brushes. And Remo had also asked about the aesthetic of bass drum heads with a concern about the ability to see straight through and that's again where Chick assured him that you could easily reapply or apply some form of a white lacquer spray or any color in lacquer onto the material itself. Which is obviously a coated head which we're very, very familiar with today. Exactly. And this is a conversation that's taking place like mid-March 1957, you know, before these things are even out really on the market. I mean, he's been selling these one-off to individual players. There's a potential that maybe he'd sold them to a couple of shops but he didn't have any form of distribution or anything like that. No. He was just kind of like casting about hoping that he would be able to find the right people to take on his heads. And he kind of struck old in the fact that Reno himself was very interested in carrying these drum heads and then distributing it to a wide variety of shops throughout California. So he wanted exclusivity on the state of California for distribution. Wow. And it should be noted that 1957 is obviously, it's mentioned as the year that Reno basically, quote unquote, developed the polymer head which would be using the technology that was originally created by DuPont, right? In the World War II, kind of the 40s, that era. So then Chick Evans, he's using that technology and creating this. Then in 57, it seems like it's locked in that Reno is now gonna use this and distribute it. Under the name Reno. So this is when we are actually, there's no mention of Evans as a company, correct? These are being distributed by Reno. Well, it's still Evans Weatherproof Drumhead Company. Oh wow. That was established in 1956. So, and this is unfortunately where again, some of the companies have talked this under the rug. And some of this information is presented clearly on the Evans website. If you look at the history under the Reno website, it establishes that on June 2nd, the Reno Crown logo is established. And Reno Incorporated is created to market supposedly the first successful synthetic drumhead. Now, of course, one could say that that argument is based on your definition of successful. I was gonna say that's your key word right there is successful. Exactly. And so then we're talking about, well, was it because of the distribution channels that they're defining it as successful and their ability to really bring it to mass market? Or, because oftentimes the presentation will be, well, it was the first usable synthetic drumhead, like it was successful and that you could actually play on this thing. But from a performance standpoint, it was really the Evans Weatherproof Drumhead company that their first head as also signed off on by Reno, Belly and self, they determined that was the first viable candidate for something like this. And they purchased even more drumheads. They started purchasing more drumheads from Chick with the intention of selling these and visited him in person. I've seen copies of telegrams going back and forth between them, mostly showing this urgency from Reno himself that he's very interested in getting this conversation going and keeping things moving as quickly as possible. And we're getting towards like the end of March in 1957. And he pays a visit to Chick himself. And as far as I know, this is, again, this is right about 62 years ago to the week that he stops by, books will fly out to Santa Fe, New Mexico and visits Chick in person. And it's tough to tell. There's some rumor about this and some of it's accounted in the letters back and forth. But from what we can tell, apparently Reno visited and kind of made this decision that he was gonna go out and see Chick in person and wasn't quite able to get in touch with him to get all the details together, but he provided information about when his flight was gonna get in and all that and didn't hear a whole lot back from Chick. And he showed up and I guess Chick was apparently hungover from the night before. And there's all sorts of rumors around this, but apparently Chick was not up to speed. He was under the weather to whatever degree. You can look into that as far as you see fit. But to that point, they met, they had a discussion at Chick's home. And apparently it was a very successful meeting between the two, Chick or rather, Reno had inquired about the inventory list of all the stock that they had ready to go. Basically showing that, yes, I'm interested. I wanna see how quickly we can get this thing going. He wants to know about getting those heads out there and shipping them to California as soon as possible. And Chick expresses an interest in potentially visiting California for the percussion fair that's gonna be taking place in April at that point. And they start to make some plans about this. And they're bouncing around the idea back and forth of should I purchase the entire stock or should we go kind of piecemeal and start to float this idea out there? And Reno basically guarantees Chick that I'm not gonna be selling this directly to customers. I'm gonna be selling this to consumers rather. I'm gonna be distributing this to these different shops and wanna make sure that we're getting a fair distribution price and they're really setting up a good business practice here from the start. So everything, all the conversations you would normally have if you were launching a product even today. Then of course, and I know I said it a couple times but this is where things get really, really interesting. And you've got some questions coming about from Reno himself towards the very end of March about, well, can you tell me some more about this patent that you've got application out there for? He wants to know what the patent number is so he can do a little bit of research on this. And then there's another communication. The details of the patent would be unrestricted in terms of competition from other manufacturers so that this patent isn't doing a whole lot to really lock down what they've come up with or what Chick has come up with. And so they're going back and forth a little bit. And now there's question about the fact that since this head has already been sold on the market and there's question about the degree of protection with this patent, now it's a little up in the air. It's like, well, wait a second, which direction is this going to go? And then as we see on the Reno website, they announced that it was June 2nd, 1957 that Reno Incorporated was born and that there was the adoption of this Reno Crown logo. And it's only a couple of weeks after that that a letter from Chick Evans was sent to Reno himself, basically calling out Reno and asking, well, wait a second, I've been informed now that you're producing your own polyester drum heads. And you're ignoring the fact that I have this pending patent and I want to see what you're doing. And basically said, like, I'm going to buy, I would like to buy two of your drum heads, two 14s, a top and a bottom for a snare. And this is where it's just, the drama is really escalating. And there's now Reno Incorporated is, this is separate from Drum City. This is a whole different enterprise and Reno himself has a secretary that's handling some of these communications now. And there's an offer that comes about with regards to essentially paying off Chick Evans to, and it's unfortunately a lot of the information is, it kind of falls off at this point, but was offering to pay him to essentially provide the patent, the pending patent to Reno Incorporated and to kind of walk away and saying that, we don't really have to do this, but we're going to be filing and we would like to take over your patent and we're willing to pay you a sum of money for that patent. And we'd also like to buy all of your existing stock. And so, yeah. And so this is, we're looking at this point, late July, early August, 1957. And that's where at least the communications kind of run dry, but we can assume that something along those lines ended up happening because the patent that had been applied for, and this is information that's available simply through a patent search, the patent that had been applied for was on the 15th of, let's see, the 15th of August in 1957. And so it looks like either Chick was successfully bought off by Reno or Reno was able to somehow side skirt around this patent that was pending with the development of something that was a little bit more robust and that he could move forward with because he also had made the claims that you didn't really have a whole lot of protection over this, other people could be manufacturing something quite similar. And so he developed his own patent and was granted that patent a little less than three years later in 1960. And then things just take off. And I should also mention as part of the request by transferring over this patent was also that he would not engage in the manufacture of drum heads for at least a period of time. I can't quite remember. I would assume it was something like five years or something like that, five, 10 years. So Reno has told Evans to not compete, do not make any drum heads. I'm gonna be taking all of this, the patents and everything. Oh my God, man, that's wild. Yeah, right? This is the information that I haven't found in very many places, but the reason I can back it up is because I've seen these physical letters and I've seen these telegrams. And I hope that that's stuff that's all made publicly available at some point in the future. Yeah, really. But it really is some interesting, some wild history from that point on. Yeah, I mean, well, just to pause for a sec. It makes you feel a little weird because I personally am a Reno guy and I've always loved Reno drum heads and I equate it to this classic company where I honestly thought they were one of the creators of the modern synthetic drum head. And I don't know why. This is again just something I didn't know. I thought Evans would have just come out of the woodwork in the 70s or 80s and just been a company that was like, you know, here's a, it's similar to I'm a Zildjian guy. I thought Sabian just kind of popped up out of nowhere because they wanted to compete with Zildjian. Then you find out about Robert Zildjian starting Sabian because of the dispute with the whole, you know, they both had the family secret. Man, I don't know how to feel right now. I feel weird. It's like odd. That's just a lot of interesting history that is not widely known. Now, do you think this is something that Reno doesn't want people to know? I mean, are they like, let's keep this under the rug because we're obviously, it looks, it makes us look like the bad guy because we're, I mean, they didn't technically steal, well, I guess they kind of did steal the intellectual property and just kind of circumvented the patent process, right? I mean, can you help clarify that, the legality? Yeah, yeah, I mean, what it ends up sounding like is exactly that, that unfortunately, due to the presentation of this information and the product itself from Chick Evans to Reno Belly and the team at Drum City, that they took that and expressed an interest early on in distributing these and dug in and started to do some of the due diligence and discovered that the patent that was pending did not have, it wasn't exactly a bullet proof. It didn't have the degree of protection that they thought that something like this should have. And I can only imagine, of course, this is just peer speculation on my part, but connecting the dots seems like in some room, there was some conversation of, well, we can do this. And we probably have better resources to do it than this drummer in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Wow. And so, and truth be told, they did. And all it takes is a quick look at the developments that took place, even within only 12 to 18 months after that patent, or yeah, after filing that patent, after Reno himself filed the patent, that they were developing an aluminum channel flesh hoop with a poured resin that was holding the film in rather than having to manually tack on this material on the outside. So they really were taking this ball and going all the way into the end zone. And it was very impressive work in the development. Again, none of this should, in any way, diminish the value of all of the different things that Reno did in developing drum heads and really furthering that technology. But it's very interesting to see how it all came about. Yeah, it's the reverse engineering. Again, I think everyone might feel the same way of like, well, yeah, they made it a lot better, but then they kind of plowed over the little guy, which would be Chick Evans at this point. And I'm now, I guess, just kind of moving it forward here, Evans at that point was a company. So they were then making drum heads simultaneously, correct? They didn't just say, oh, well, we lost the patent. Okay, we're done. Cause obviously Evans today is a massive, huge company. So how did that go? Well, and that's where some of the information starts to fall off. And it's tough to say how exactly all of it came about, but at a certain point in time, Chick Evans sold the Evans drum head company brand to a man by the name of Bob Beals. And that was in Dodge City, Kansas. That's where Evans was moved to. And from as much as I can tell, that's where the development of the next generation of Evans drum heads took place. And unfortunately, Bob passed away in 2010. And some of the information that he has is documented, but there's not a ton out there. Not certainly not to the degree of the letters that I'd shared and the information from those communications between Chick Evans and Rima himself. Wow. Okay. You know, I do believe, let's see. I think it was in, it was like either the late 50s or the early 60s that Bob became involved with Chick Evans and working on the drum heads and taking, I don't know if he officially took over at a certain point early on there or if they were working a little bit more side by side. But Bob at that time had a shock as far as I know. And he was doing, I'm trying to remember what the deal was there, but he was trying to demonstrate, Chick was trying to demonstrate the value of this drum head and he was kind of pitching it to him and went so far as to actually pouring water on the drum head as part of this pitch. Wow. He was a really impressed Bob. He was blown away by these capabilities and they started some degree of an alliance and I want to say that it was the end of the 50s, most likely 1959, soon after this drama had taken place with Rima, that he purchased the Evans drum head company from Chick Evans. Gotcha. And started to refine the design a little bit and develop things and started to come up with the first different designs of drum heads that there would be under the Evans name. To make it more, again, it sounds like Chick was more of a dreamer and a drummer versus like a businessman, which ultimately to his kind of somewhat downfall, Rima was a businessman. Sounds like businessman first, drummer second. Wow, man, that's some wild stuff that I had no idea anything about. So I'm like blown away right now. And they're obviously not the first, they're not the only drum heads in existence, but I think obviously at that point that was what was happening. So why don't we fast forward a little bit? And I mean, so that seems like that's when things changed. That was the advent of modern drum heads where minus some, I'm sure some technical things, it seems to be what we're using today, like the Weather King and all these particular lines. So did anything change after that? Well, there were little changes over the course of time with regards to the consistency of production, especially when it came to the hoops themselves. But if we're looking at immediate developments soon after Rima was awarded that patent, they start to release some different variations on drum heads. The ambassador, as we know it, came out in 1959. So that came pretty soon afterwards. The original ambassador, especially for Rima fans that are familiar with the original ambassador that's now referred to as the Vintage Ambassador, they brought it back, that was a two-ply drum head. And a year later, they decided that they could produce this as a single ply of 10 mil. A lot of this came from the availability of that film. In most cases, they weren't having film custom made for them. They were acquiring this stuff and it was already being made for other industries. In the case of Mylar and Development early on, it was for the aeronautics industry in World War II. I was just gonna say, man, I think I thought I remember reading, didn't they use it as in the film for reconnaissance cameras or something like that? All sorts of different elements. I mean, it's really interesting now, you look around today and polyester film is absolutely everywhere. Not just in packaging, but also it's the material that's incorporated in the screens. It's a film that's used to shade windows, like all sorts of things. In some cases, it is literally the same film that drum heads are being made out of. The great example of this is the film that's used for X-rays. That's oftentimes a seven and a half mil black film. That is very similar to a lot of the other seven and a half mil black films that we see on the market being used in making drum heads. But yeah, so when it came to developments that were taking place shortly after that, Remo was starting to launch different variations on these drum heads. Of course, most of us have probably seen that famous drum photo of Remo sitting in front of a giant bass drum. If you're not familiar with this one, it was basically a 10 foot tall, I believe like 40, 42 inch deep bass drum that was made for Disneyland. Oh, that's cool, I didn't know that. Yeah, it was used in parades and all sorts of things, starting in 1961. And I believe it still holds a Guinness Book of World Records record for the largest bass drum. Wow, that's something. Yeah. And so of course, over the course of this time, they're experimenting with all sorts of different types of materials. But what do we know takes place just about three years after that moment in 1961? Of course, the Beatles perform on the Ed Sullivan show. Yes. And this really propels a small handful of brands into the public eye. And so now you've got Ludwig is way out there. Gretz guitars are all of a sudden quite visible to the point where Gretz had had to move their manufacturing around and start segregating their business with the manufacturing of drums separate from guitars because they simply didn't have the space in Brooklyn to do it all. And so with Remo, they're moving to new locations, they're developing new manufacturing facilities and things are going gangbusters. They're starting to develop different materials like the sparkle tone drum heads, if you ever saw those with the kind of like neared finish similar to what we were seeing and all sorts of different patterns. You'd see like these green and red sparkles and I think they have blue sparkle as well. And then at the same time, Evans was starting to do swirls that they were getting their feet underneath them and manufacturing these heads again and you'll see some photos. In fact, I've seen some of these heads in person of these different swirl materials that again have a very similar polyester film design to them but they've got this kind of appearance almost like a holographic kind of thing where if you change the angle all of a sudden the swirl changes dramatically and you get a really interesting retro kind of vibe out of those. Yeah, which is almost kind of coming full circle to today where you get like the color tone and it's which to a lot of people, it's probably like, oh, that's a new technology but now that's been going on for 50 years now. Yeah, it's amazing. At that point, I mean, you've got things like fiber skin being developed in 1975. And even prior to that in the, I believe it's 1970, 1971 was the development of the Evans hydraulic heads. And of course that was one of those happy accidents of some oil getting between two pieces of material for a two ply head and then discovering that it's actually changes the sound in such a dramatic way. And so Remo answered the hydraulic with the development of the pinstripe head using a very similar concept but masking it off only to the outside, recognizing that way they would be able to fine tune some of the overtone control. And that's really when you start to have the development of this concept of not just aesthetic variation in drum heads but in the construction for the pure state of altering sound and controlling the acoustic sound of the drum head itself. Yeah, cause in the 70s you kind of have that, I always equated to like Steve Miller band but that like very dampened T-shirts on the Tom kind of like dead sound concert Tom kind of thing. So why not play on it and actually create it which is amazing. So that, I mean, in as far as I can tell that seems to be like, I didn't know the hydraulic heads. I didn't know that existed in the 70s. I mean, that's something all of these things, I guess you equate it to when you first discover it. And I think to myself, oh, that must have been in like the 90s but that's the key takeaway from all of this for me is like, wow, this technology has just been so, it's just been happening for so long and you kind of take that for granted. Yeah, oh yeah. I mean, it's incredible how long this stuff has really been around for. And it's interesting how some of this information is very readily available on some of it, not so much. You know, Lima actually has a fantastic timeline on their website that showcases a lot of these developments on their end which is pretty impressive thing to go through. Definitely worth it if you're ever looking to go through and see all the different varieties of heads and really when they came out, it's quite well documented on their site. I kind of wish that Evans had something similar at this point. Yeah, that would help clarify a little bit of the confusion on who did what and who discovered what and patents and all that stuff. And yeah, and now we're lucky because today we live in a time where we can get any kind of drum head we want which there's obviously more companies than Evans and Remo, Aquaria and obviously being one. I'm a big fan of the Superkick 2 base drum head which I love and obviously they're regular heads and there's more brands beyond that. But yeah, and I think this is a perfect opportunity unless there's more things that you'd like to fill in here but I think once you get the drum heads actually knowing how to tune them and how to treat them correctly and even putting them on. We all know about the star formation but if you get your first drum head you can, we've all been there where we screw up a $50 base drum head because we tune it in the wrong way the first time. But Ben, why don't you tell people a little bit about what you're doing? Sounds like a drum and I think people would love it. They'll know how to actually use their drum heads then. Yeah, so of course from working for a drum head company and developing drum heads for them and really experimenting with creating certain sounds for drummers through the development of these products. I got incredibly fascinated with the world of tuning and I have to, I definitely have to give a serious shout out to Bob Gatz and for all of the information he passed along to me. Bob was involved with developing a lot of the early drum heads with Bob Beals. This is before the Darian company had purchased the Evans drum heads company in 1995. There were all sorts of new developments with the addition of these overtone control rings around the outside. That was something like what we know from the Power Stroke series of drum heads. That was something that Bob Gatz and then Bob Beals developed with the Evans EQ series. And coming to where we're at now, a good friend of mine and I, he's a guy by the name of Cody Ron who's a blue collar drummer in New York City. He's a full-time player and recording drummer here in New York. Just a couple weeks ago, we hit our one year anniversary and it was 52 episodes. Without fail, we've released a brand new episode every Tuesday for a year and we just kick things off for season two and have absolutely no intention of stopping. Nice, man. That's a huge time commitment and I can speak from experience of it. It's always after the first couple months, it's like, it never stops being fun, but it's like, I mean, you gotta stick with it. The initial kind of like honeymoon phase where as often you go, holy crap, I gotta get another episode out or another video. So, no, I highly recommend people go to it. If you go to soundslikeadrum.com, it'll redirect you automatically to the YouTube page and you can find them on Instagram. You can find them everywhere. So it's just full of good information and you can actually kind of take what we talked about today and look at drum heads a little bit differently, which I know I certainly look at Remo a little bit different. I still love them, but it kind of puts it all into perspective, the whole Remo and Evans thing. I know I should say I look at Evans differently because I now kind of see him as more of a classic brand than I did before. Yeah, and I think it's also important to remember too that at this point in time today, I don't know how many people at Remo actually know any of that story. Yeah, exactly. It's been bundled and sold. Yeah, it could have fallen by the wayside when Remo himself passed away. So I don't know how much of that information is still documented over there. Yeah, well, I think it's really cool that we can then provide that information to a new generation of drummers and I think you're doing a great thing. So Ben, man, it's been awesome talking to you today. I think we've got a ton of good information and I will, as soon as this comes out, start posting more photos and videos related to drumheads. So check out my Instagram at drumhistorypodcast to see some cool stuff. And I'll be sure to post Remo playing the giant, the world's largest bass drum from Disney World, which that's just such a classic picture. That's just like everyone thinks of that. So cool. Well, Ben, thanks, brother, for being on the show and good luck for season two of Sounds Like a Drum. Great, well, thank you so much for having me and definitely keep on the great work you're doing with Drum History. I think that this is a fantastic thing to have and everything that you do in it is just a really great contribution to the community. Awesome, man. Well, I couldn't do it without people like you. So cool. All right, Ben. Have a good one, man. I'll see you later. Thanks so much. 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.