 Hello and welcome to the drum history podcast. I'm your host Bart van der Zee and today I'm joined by Mr. Caden Saunders-Beswick. Caden, welcome to the show. It's amazing to be here. This is like a dream come true. It's beyond the show that I listen to a lot of research and so great. That's awesome. And I really appreciate that. And we met, obviously, through social media. You have worked on your master's thesis, which I'll say what it is and we'll talk about it a little bit more, is from double drumming to the double bass drum's study of what being a drummer means, which is a really cool title. And we actually met because you asked me to kind of contribute a little bit, I guess, or ask you sent me some questions, which you did with a lot of people, which there's a lot there to talk about in general of how that all worked and putting that together. Yeah. So this is a follow on of what I did for my undergraduate, which that all started in a weird process. When I went to uni, I wanted to be the next Howlblane and was basically told in week one, that doesn't exist anymore. That session level of being that kind of session drummer doesn't exist anymore. And you need a portfolio career. It's basically what you were told. So it spent like two years trying to work out what on earth I can do that. I can teach because every single drummer can teach almost like that's the go to next thing down on that. And I've always had a love of history. When I was in college, I remember doing a thesis on the Holocaust denial and exploring that whole conspiracy and stuff. And I like looking at that. Where did that all come from? Because it would have had to have come from after the Holocaust and stuff like that. So I've always had that like the history and stuff like that. And that's basically followed me through. And so when it came time to what can I do? What can I contribute? It became looking at the history of drum kit. So from double drumming to the double bass drum is perhaps doesn't chronologically tell the history of the drum kit perhaps huge. As you'd expect, it doesn't start with, we're going to start here and work our way up. It's more of an exploration, I guess, of the how and the why those changes happened. So why did we end up with double drumming? If you want to look at that from that perspective, you've got to go back to by 1865, after the Civil War, when cost purposes, they wanted one guy to do three jobs or one guy to do two people's jobs. So that became he's going to put the bass drum down, he's going to have the snare drum this that way, whether it worked. And they came up with the double drumming technique. Then it was looking at, well, why did we get a bass pedal? It's more obvious when you look at it that it's not entirely practical to keep kicking a bass drum or playing with your hands in those aspects, something like that. So the bass pedal was born. And then it was kind of like, well, left foot can do something. The right foot can do something. So there's the low bar. And it more explores the, well, why did we get up to this point? And then why in the 80s did we end up with these huge drum kits, massive drum kits? Why were concert toms the thing? And it more explores those, those elements more than perhaps it does the nuances of why do we have these tension or to this or die casting metal. It doesn't do that so much. There's a thesis on this, this side by my mentor, which is called the construction of performance on the drum kit. That goes through the history of the drum kit, perhaps any more nuanced bit by bit sense. And I think Theodore Dennis Brown, which was one of the first theses is on the drum kit, that went through a lot of the playing techniques and looked at that. Whereas I wanted to combine those two things and look at them really following on from what I'd learned to my undergrad. That's essentially the the tier of it. What are some cool things or just facts or information that you learned about with that earliest double drumming type of playing? Is there anything that sticks out to you? That was a very, very difficult period to begin to talk about. And it cropped up in my first my undergrad, which was something I wanted to explore a little bit more. It was one of those little sound bites that was like, that needs to be followed up on. And it was a lot of people when I asked them, where did the history of the drum kits start? Or could you explain the history of the drum kit rather? They only really started at about 1920 with traps kits. That was where they'd start this double drumming and stuff. When I'd mentioned that to some people, they'd be like, Oh, double bass drums. Like, that's where the title of the second one comes from. So thinking, people are going to see that and think, Well, the same thing. Because there was a lot of people, which to me was like, Oh, you mean double bass drums? I was like, No, do you mean is this an area that's a bit lost? And you can't find anyone to interview about that anymore. Now it's all got to come from a secondary source, the people that were around really starting those techniques just aren't alive anymore. So that's, I suppose the biggest takeaway from that, I suppose it's not so much a fact that people would be like, Oh my God, that's new knowledge. I didn't know. It's more so the fact that a lot of it could be lost. A lot of those nuances at the time could be lost. Whereas now when I talk to people about stuff, maybe from about 1980 onwards, I can get so much information. I can tell you how I've had people tell me how it feels to play Simmons drum pads, the first ones that come out, and the cheeky little techniques they use then, you can't get those like now for the double drumming. And you can only start to get some inklings of stuff, even from trap sets. Now, you're looking at basically from Beatlemania onwards as an area of which you can study where you can sit down with someone and be like, why did you do that? Was this the thing that happened around your time? All right. So then how did you do that? And that's such a good point because like you said, you're just relying on other people's information. And it's not like this is a thing where it's like the most written about topic in the world, obviously. I mean, it's a pretty specific thing where they're probably documenting more like world affairs and the war and things like that, as opposed to what one member of the band is doing, where maybe someone didn't think to write it down. But how did you then with your, I'm sure, studious mind of like really in the trenches researching, how did you go about putting things together? What was your process there? Photos. That's a big thing. I know that Daniel Glass and my mentor and I think Matt Brennan, we've had on this podcast before, who's going to be my mentor for my PhD. He, I know that Dave looked at rather photos before and used that a lot. I know poor Archibald who did the essay I referenced earlier. A lot of that was archive research for him. So it's been a lot of taking his work to build upon it. And I want to kind of go off in a little bit of a tangent there, which will probably help explain a little bit more. And when I was researching all of this, which includes both essays and we'll be going forward. Behind me are the three academic essays you've got Theodore, Dennis Brown, Paul's and Bill Bruford's. Those are the three academic papers. Before that, and still to some degree now, it's only really starting to change recently, viewing the drum kit in an academic light. And someone turned around to say, I want to study the drum kit, what that means and what that is, as an instrument, as its history, as the players, as the techniques and everything that goes into that. That's really recent. So the fields of stuff that I have to available to me to collect information from are literally the three behind me. Everything else has to be unverified. It can even be someone's username like drummer123 says that he's seen a picture five years ago at the back of a drummer magazine that showed someone with a bass pedal in 1899. I can't ever know if that's real. He could have just been doing that for clout. This person could do this for clout to try and show you that. I can't know that for sure, but I've got to take that as it could have been a bass pedal then. That could have been that in some weird place down in the back of Michigan going in someone's shed he built a bass pedal. It could be in Leeds, it could be in France, it could be anywhere that this was built. But the first time we know for sure that the bass pedal exists is with the Ludwig when it gets patented. That's the date that we could go, yes. 1909 or yeah, whatever. Man, I have this and I'm going to do a video series on it. I have a gentleman named Jerry Reiman. Raymond Reiman has been sending me a binder and then he's been sending me supplemental pages of drum advertisements in the newspapers going back to the early 1900s that he uses. Newspaper.com, I believe, but I think I'm now at 100 pages that he sent me back and front with little articles on it. I see things there. Again, like I said, I want to do a video going through each one. Here's some really articles from the 1900s about drumheads, but that is all not until now for me, when he put it all in one place. There's so many little fragmented pieces of history all over the place where it takes people like you or Jerry who's sending this stuff to me to really put it all together and there's a lot of competing information where maybe it doesn't line up and there's people who are adamant that they're right. Because they heard it or they saw something, but sometimes people's memories fail them or you really start to... The forums are a place to look for information, but I'm sure this is a very studious thing that you're doing where you have to verify it and prove it, which can be hard. Sometimes with these podcasts, we can just talk. It's for fun. It's for history, it's for knowledge, but it's for fun. You weren't doing this for fun. I mean, you were doing this for a degree. I mean, really. Yeah, just to pick up on that point a little bit. This was done partially for fun. I wanted something that I was going to find fun doing it, so I knew if I had to sit there and write an essay on coordination that I don't think I would have made it out the other side still playing drums, I think that would have finished me. I know that there was points at university where I found it really difficult and struggled to see the point of learning some certain things and techniques. Because I was like, I don't need that way. I want to go in the way I want to play. I don't think I need that. I would much rather learn these things and look at these things. So I knew that I wanted something that was going to be fun and something that would impact my playing and influence my playing. I like to play with color. That's the way I've always described it. I have a low-boy pedal that DW still make, but I don't use it for symbols. I use it to put the stuff you'd usually stack on top of the hi-hat. So I've got a shaker, a tambourine, another tambourine, and I create a foot sound source, a bit like stuff that Thomas Lang does, I guess, in a way with using different foot things to create different sounds. So it doesn't necessarily mean I can play polyrhythms with each hand, because that's just not the way I play. But I can do a basic rhythm with this and a basic rhythm with this hand. But they can all hit different color sounds and in different patterns. That's how I've always liked to play. So I knew that this was going to influence my playing more, learning these older things and older techniques that I can bring back, especially something like a low-boy. That's just one of the go-to things for me. I've always been like, why did it disappear? I would love to use that. So I just ended up bringing that back in my playing, whether or not that would ever become a thing that all drummers do, probably not. So all right, then talking about your research and all this stuff, which I have up over here, you have a lot of people that you talk to. You interviewed a lot of people. Let's maybe go down that road of how do you compile all this information? Why don't you maybe list off some of the people who you did interview and were included in this that you put together and then maybe a little bit about how that process worked and what you found from talking to some of these people about their level of knowledge on history and all that stuff. But starting off, who was a contributor to this process? Thomas Lang did something. Steve White has done something. I got to meet one of my biggest drumming influences, Chris Freya from the Zach Brown band, Don Familaro. Just really chanting my arm and thinking, who are some of the biggest drummers that I know? In addition to all the local people that I know, I probably did 15, 20 local people that people wouldn't necessarily know because they're not household drumming names, but they're working in the industry and stuff like that and some peers and people my age. My masters, I really pushed because I was absolutely gutted that I couldn't get any female drummers for my undergrad. And that was not for a one to try in. I tried really hard, but I just couldn't get anywhere with anyone. And the one or two that I did manage to line up. One is now my girlfriend ironically. So I can forgive her for not taking part, but just nothing would line up with anyone. So this time round, I really pushed hard on Instagram drummers, some of the female Instagram drummers, because that was the most easy way to get hold of some people on there. But that was really cool to get to talk to those people. But it was mostly with these household names, just chancing my arm, sending a message on Facebook, Instagram, even if I could find agency emails, websites and just saying that this interview can be done via paper. I can email it you basically. Or if you're willing to, you can come and do a Zoom like this. I think I was obviously quite lucky that I was doing this during the second, third wave of a pandemic. So people tended to be at home doing nothing, especially musicians. I was quite lucky that ironically lucky in a way that that kind of felt that way. So a lot, it was a mix really, just depending on what their schedules were and whether or not they were willing to do it. But yeah, it was a dream and really helped a lot of my confidence in my playing and self confidence for one to be able to turn around and go, yeah, I can email and talk to these people. I can hold my own in a conversation with them, which is baffling to me. Totally. I mean, and a lot of the people who you meet, I think it's interesting how a lot of the huge stars of drumming love. Of course, they love the instrument and they love the history of it where they're just like us where they want to talk about it. And especially guys like Daniel Glass and Matt Brennan, I mean, these are like history buffs and they are as obsessed with it as we are. And a lot of people I've found are very, which this comes up all the time, but they're very helpful and they want to help people and they want to share the knowledge, which people find out good things like that. Like, you know, oh, it's of course us saying, oh, these are great guys, really does spread positive, you know, vibes about them. And that's what it's all about, you know, being nice to other drummers. It really has come to me realizing that I think a lot of drummers are really like a cult of curiosity about other drummers and about the drum kit and about the history of the drum kit. I've ended up doing interviews where it's gone off on one a little bit because we've been like, oh, why do you save in symbols? Why do I use pasty symbols? And we're just sat there comparing for like 20 minutes gone on about, like, why did you pick this drum kit? And I was asking out of originally the question is like, why did you pick that drum kit? So it was that because you saw like, do you play Ludwig because of Ringo? Like, is that why? Or is it because you sat down one day at these drum kit? And that's just how it happened. But I find it ends up being a cult of curiosity, like, why do I play premier drums? I've got a 60s kit on that side and a 70s kit on that side. And it's like, why do I play them? That's just how it fell for me. I just, my drum teacher played premier. I just got really used to the sound because I had to buy a drum kit and then I'll buy another drum kit. And I'll buy another drum kit. And it's just become well, I want to keep it the same brand because I quite like the sound that I want to get. The second kit was good. So why change once you've got two kits that sound good? But yeah, there is a real like, cult of curiosity. And a lot of people when I finish those interviews were like, I really want a copy of this, not because it's like, I want to see what you wrote about me. Make sure you haven't done something bad. It's kind of like, I want to see what other people have said. I want to see where my words fit with other people. Was I the outlier? Did I say something that fit with everyone? Did you cope my words on this bit? Or did someone else's words really resonate with me? Like this quote just makes so much sense and explains what I was saying so much better. I think there's a lot of, there's a lot of cult of curiosity about it. Yeah, no, I agree completely. And you had a good, it's just a good thought starter that you just said about, you know, someone who's playing Ludwig, are you playing Ludwig because because you like Ringo or because you like the sound of them? And there's nothing wrong with either either one of them. I would say as a kid, I would absolutely be guilty of seeing a video of John Bonham playing and seeing the Ludwig logo and saying, oh, I want a Ludwig drum set without really knowing the sound of them. So that's that's that the importance of branding and putting a logo on things. And for premiere, I mean, being a UK drummer, it's like, it's premier. I mean, it makes sense. I mean, that's probably subliminally that kind of has to be in the back of your mind a little bit too of like, we really get connected to our brands, you know. And I just tie this back wonderfully to my research. This was something that I wanted to look into these brands wise. And it was a little bit towards the how self-sufficient some brands were back in the late 40s, 50s, even into the 60s. Premier had ever played, I'm just going to use Premier because this is the brand that I know the most about because I play them. I usually tie everything back to Premier. They had their own hardware. They made their own sticks. They made their own drum heads. They made their own drum kits and they were tied in quite closely with Zin symbols. So if you played Premier, you had Premier hardware, you had the Premier made drum heads, you had the drum sticks by Premier and you had the symbols by Premier. So you were very self-sufficient. This one company was everything. And I think it was the drum heads episode, the look with drum heads episode that recently and a point stuck out that I was up here doing some like restorations and kits. I had to stop because I was like, it drew a dropping moment. It never occurred to me before, but I can't remember if it was you or who you were interviewing said that perhaps as the companies were getting bought out, they would look at certain areas and they would, that's not cost effective. We don't need to do that anymore. And that happened in a way with Premier that it didn't become cost effective to make the heads, but not to worry. Remo and Evans are around so they can get there on heads. That's fine. You don't really need to make their own hardware because other companies exist. You've got Gibraltar. They've got DW, Yamaha. They own hardware. That's fine. Don't need to worry about that. Stex, you've got ProMark, Beta. I've got Akinadrum Stex. You've got Multitude Companies. And all of a sudden the company goes from makes everything you can have to smaller and smaller and just a drum kit company. Yeah. And that was Bill Ryder on that episode who did a ton of research. And I mean, you're right. And then is it a good thing? Is it a bad thing? Is it focusing more on one thing, which I can say seems like a good thing. Like, all right, we're going to, instead of being so spread out where, you know, or is it better to focus on making what you're good at, which even now it's almost like things thin out even more where for a company to make their own shells is pretty impressive where now there's a company who makes their shells and maybe this is assembled at X factory and everything else is kind of sent in where the days of everyone making everything seems like far gone. And, you know, just kind of again, just as a thought, like if a company did say we make everything, we make the drum heads, we make everything in 2022. I think sometimes the thought might be why, like you don't need to and God making drum heads, especially back then. It's all that I love the stories of sourcing calfskin and how competitive it was and not getting the, you know, the calfskin that had like holes in it and stuff. It was just a different time. And I guess globalization wasn't as big where you couldn't get things from overseas or from, you know, a different continent. You had to be more resourceful. And I'm sure that came up in your research of just being like you said, you just, you didn't have an option. Did the people you interview really speak to that much? Or was that more of something you kind of just discovered on your own? It's more of a discovery on my own and kind of a realization of you could pick any like drummer now, like just name a random drummer for like any instance. And it would be, oh, this is their drum kit company. This is their hardware company. This is their drum stick company. This is their cymbal company. I was hardly talking to anyone because of the amount of reach that perhaps DW has now, like they've got, I think Gretz, Gibraltar, Slingler, they're all under that umbrella. You could almost say in some instance that that is probably the closest you can get to one company, does it all? Yeah. True. But it isn't really because you're still playing a Gretz drum kit and maybe Gibraltar and DW hardware, or like the amount of people you see with the Gibraltar rack or the DW kit, it's like you would instantly think they're no different to any other drummer with a hardware and a drum kit company, but they are kind of under the same umbrella. But that more so, I guess, comes from the ease of being able to get hold of that stuff quickly, whether you're in Brazil, Japan, UK, America, Canada, you're always be able to get hold of something from DW, Zilch and Pastey, RIMO. All of those companies are pretty much there now. So I guess that kind of defeats the objective of making it all in one house because then the responsibility is if your artist, if you're Premier and you make it in the UK, your artist is playing Buenos Aires and you make all your stuff in the UK. And they break their drum head in the middle of the tour and it's like tomorrow they're playing in Brazil. That's a long way to get something. Yeah. And there's something to be said about endorsements. And it's kind of cool for people to have five different endorsements with different, you know, this is my sticks and you have all these choices where we nowadays have a lot of choices. Whereas back in the day, you wouldn't have as much options. You'd kind of get your drum set and you'd put it together and go way back to the double drumming. It's like you're using an old marching bass drum and an old marching snare. And maybe there wasn't a snare stand until Leedy, I believe, or Wahlberg and Auger invented it. I forget which one. But you had to make do. So there's like a ton of choice nowadays, as opposed to back in the day. Yeah, yeah. Again, I suppose this is a naivety that perhaps you don't get until you get to some point. But in my mind, endorsement has always been an endorsement. To be honest, didn't really know what it meant. I've always dreamed of having an endorsement. I'd love pasty to come and endorse me. So this is me actively saying come and endorse me pasty. This is my announcement that I love you. But I always thought, oh, it is what it is, an endorsement is an endorsement. I never realized there was levels to an endorsement until I was interviewing someone and they were like, Oh, this is what my endorsement, I won't say who it was or what level of like the endorsement they got or what company it is. But they explained to me how their endorsement worked. I was like, I was like, that's crazy that you're at this level and you wouldn't be even touching someone at this level. But also, I can't even touch the level you're on. So I've still got to go and I've got to hope the shop that I go to has it, where this person can phone up their representative and request that symbol and get that symbol. And it was interesting to get that side of things. And again, it's so much that I would love to look into more like the history of hardware. Drumheads is something I've hardly not touched upon yet. And history of endorsements are just three things that I think once I've got like these trilogies of the history of drum kit finished that I think deserve research of their own. There's a lot of areas that I would love to go back and be like, this needs to do it, this needs to do it, this needs to look at because there's no one really doing it at the minute. This is a very small field. It is. And I know there's an episode with Rob Cook on the history of drum endorsements. And then there's one with John de Christopher about it was like how the drum industry works, which ended up being very like kind of specific to like Zildjian, which he was he talked about endorsements there. And I mean, you're the people who are on top who are making a lot of money and getting the views get the most attention, obviously. But that whole thing of just like it's interesting going back, I was looking through the Gene Krupa book that Brooks Tagler, he sent me the hard copy recently, which is awesome. But just the the whole thing, all of this, all of the history stuff is like, you know, hindsight's 2020 where you look at it and, you know, they realized that Gene was on, you know, a movie or a TV show. And they're like, okay, next to the singer's head is the drum set. Why don't we have the Slingerland logo right there? And it was like, you know, well, duh, you think now all of this is just like, it's such a it's cool to look at the progression of this happened, then this happened, then this happened. But it definitely opens up to a lot of debate on who was more correct with especially like the history of the hi hat is a big one. Did someone, did Papa Joe Jones have a plumber friend who made it out of tubing? Did someone drop their stick and it hit the low boy and it made a sound on the on then they went, oh, I could play that with my stick. How would you and your thesis navigate those waters of what's we'll say truest where there's a lot of stories. How did you really say, I think this is the one that I'm going to document. This, I will use the hi hat one that you're talking about there. Now, I interviewed three people. They gave me three very, very different stories to what the hi hat was invented. And I documented all three, because as I said to you before, how do I know that there wasn't a pedal in 1899? How none of us will know that. Really, nobody would really know. So the one story is that someone was working in a pit and I'll just tell you the three stories. So they saw that there was railings at the top. So they basically broke one of the railings off, took it back, took the bass drum pedal they made, really MacGyver together like Mythbusters-esque, made this little tiny little foot thing that would basically make a clapping sound like that's what that's what they did. And that is how the hi hat was invented that you eventually thought, well, I'll just make the two bigger so I can play it with my hand. So I can also do the same that but I can also play it. That was the one story I viewed for how the hi hat was invented was some bloke thought that the pipe should be taller once he made a small one. That sounds plausible enough. There is the one I viewed where someone was given a lowboy that someone had basically built or whatever their approximation of a lowboy was and that they were bending down to play it and they eventually thought it's got to be an easy way of doing this. So I went back to the guy and said, could you make it a bit taller so I don't have to lean down and play this with my wrong act? And then hi hat was invented. Or the other one that I viewed that I possibly think is a little bit more true was that they were both invented at the same time. There was a lowboy and a hi hat. They were both the same thing. How they were invented, who they were invented by, nobody really knows, but they do appear in catalogs, especially premier catalogs together. I think in one of I think it's my undergrad, I went through this took so long and was so boring, but I went through every single premier catalog I could find spent hours downloading every single one that I could find, starting in like 1900, going all the way up to about 1970, I went through and had to look, where did the lowboy start here? Right, right that down. Where did the lowboy end here? Right that down. And then went back through and look where the hi hat started and then wrote down where that was. And then even looking for it just written in words like coming soon, even so when was even the most inkling of it. And they do overlap quite a lot. You could still buy and people I've always heard of, well, nobody bought a lowboy when the hi hat was invented. Lowboy died overnight like that. It was gone. I'm like, it can't be if it was in the catalogs for like six years. Someone must be buying it. They don't waste space with something that's going to be no one's buying. Yeah. And they wouldn't waste resources building something equally that nobody's using. So someone must have been using it. Someone must have been using both of them at the same time, or at least was using one of them. Yeah. And I know Rob Cook talked about Skip Rutherford inventing the hi hat and got a bunch of documentation. And I remember when he talked about that, I was like, now I know. But I was like, who's Skip Rutherford? Like, where did this come from? Which there's a lot of play. And then, but what you also have to think too is like the world is huge. And like you're saying it might have happened in different places at different times. And like sometimes, and I say this as an American, but sometimes the history of the drum kit, it gets kind of Americanized, even on my show as an American guy, which I'm sure you're aware of. But there are lots of other places where things happen. And I try to be cognizant of that and make sure there's more of a global. Like not everything was invented here. What's your thoughts on that? The Americanization versus stuff versus other things happening globally? This could be a podcast of its own to talk about this, this topic. So I do it myself, I describe the drum kit as an American instrument. And I think it is. And I think it is to a different degree that, to be fair, all of these essays describe the drum kit as an American instrument for a very slightly different reason. And I think that's because America has always been a melting pot for lots of different cultures and different people. And lots of stuff has come into America over the years. The Rogers was an Irish company. Zildjian was Turkish. Those countries are European. The bass drum, the snare drum is European. The cymbals, you could argue a Turkish, Greco-Egyptian, depends what Chinese. Yeah, where you want to put that from. Tom Tom's, you could argue, we're really Chinese, but what we've got now is nothing like a Chinese Tom Tom. Nothing like it. So therefore, all of those things that came in have been Americanized to put it in a way and have become this instrument. So, but then again, I've also heard that the drums home, and if you follow the drum, the drum now we're talking to instead of a drum kit all the way back to its origins is African. But when I look at a drum kit, I can't see any African instruments on that. There's no African drums have ever got into that. A lot of African rhythms did. There's the Bamboula, I think, beat, which is talked about in the Dennis Brown's essay. But in there, it does talk about beats and where they came from. And it's more of a history of drumming styles. So the drum kit is very all around the world. And another person that took part in my essay was Stan Timore, another big influence on mine. And the reason I really wanted to interview him was because he uses a pandero, which is a South American drumming is not something I've really looked into. I have got the podcast, one of your podcasts on it that I need to get listening to, but it's working my way through so much. And there's 150 episodes slowly catching through. So I think there's a lot to be still looked at in regards to that is why did we end up with the instrumentation we've ended up with? Where do all of these bits of instrumentation come from? And then I hear people describe it as an American instrument. And I'm like, but I think you've missed the point of why it's an American instrument. That's a good point. And because American instrument 2022 is different than American instrument early 1900s, where Stanton Moore talked about it and Jazz Sawyer on his episode, The History of the Drum Set, where we're talking New Orleans, we're talking Congo Square, we're talking the very dark history of America and how people would end up here, but they would bring their African culture. And that's where, yeah, it does have a history with Africa, even if it's not African drums per se set up in, but that concept of a drum set is like multiple drums put together is kind of the makeup of a drum set. And I'm sure they were doing that in African cultures going way back. But that melting pot is just, it's just so different. You need to think about it as yes, American, but America was very different then, which now there's tons of immigrants and people coming and bringing their ideas. But then it was a little bit more different where I guess you could say American, but the actual inventors and innovators were likely not born in America. Yeah, I think that's the point that I was trying to get to. And I really only briefly touched upon it in either essays that I think I put in the parts about the forced immigration, migration and immigration was a very small paragraph for a very large topic. But there was a lot to unpack in there of where all of these people come from and where little bits of the drum kit come from. I've got the Big Firth rudiments poster up on the wall there. A lot of rudiments came from Swiss drumming to really boil something down to a very short amount of time. I've got on there. Then next to it is Tommy Aigo's Groove Essentials. There's a big list of world beats that really go anything from like this Caribbean, Jamaican, Brazilian, Dominican Republic, Afro-Cuban. There's a lot of stuff in there that was not meant to be played on a drum kit, but we've had to make it work on a drum kit that was played with vastly different instruments like the cross stick covers usually for clave, stuff like that. There's a lot of stuff in there that really is a substitute for this sound to try and make it work on a drum kit, which also leads to people being created with those sounds. I've got old Russian temple blocks, the treats on my side that I think I just accidentally hit women to my ring. But those there, you see them in Karl Palmer's kit in Fanfare for Common Man. That breeds creativity. They were originally Korean temple blocks that were used in I believe like temple settings, don't really know much about it because they only researched how they got where they came from to get onto the drum kit and then where they've ended up going from there so far. But they're not being used for their intended purpose when Karl Palmer's playing out and he turns and uses them. He's not using them for any temple moment. They've been used for this sound. So they've led to this force of being creative by what would have then been Americans because they will have immigrated and they would probably class themselves as American at that point. Yeah. And I mean, it is American, but it's because of all those different elements. And I think it's really cool that people can take these different ingredients and put it and make something new with it. And it's all very creative. And it's a really cool thing that I think everyone, you know, and hopefully I think like we're doing, we can kind of dissect those pieces that make it up a little bit more and make it clearer of who's involvement did what to a degree. But so as we're getting closer to kind of, you know, the time here, I want to just out of the title, double drumming to double bass drums. Let's talk a little bit about more about modern big double bass drum set because it's in the it's in the title. So what was your discoveries with that? Because I do plan on doing a full on double bass set, you know, episode, Louis Belson, Rufus Speedy Jones, I believe, and in those guys. But what did you kind of learn as you went towards the end of it to double bass drumming? And I know it's just part of the title to show the the evolution of it. But yeah, would you would you learn towards the end? The bit that I really feel most comfortable probably talking about, like, where I know most of my stuff is going from about the about the 80s, late 70s, when electronics turned up. And I've got a few like anecdotal stories that I can pass off about how the state of drumming was at that time. So the first one that I love to love to talk about is that a drummer I know from round year, they used to play in some of the label clubs back in the day, which was like a big thing. I don't know if you'd know that much. I don't know if that translates well to America, but they were basically like clubs where a lot of workmen would go. This was in the 50s, 60s, maybe even up to the 70s, where they put acts on acts would come round and they would play and they'd usually be a house band. And sometimes acts from America would come in and they would play some of their stuff and they would also bring their own kits and stuff. So this is where this drummer I was talking to first saw his like Ludwig Kitts, his Gretch Kitts. This is where you see like the American Kitts coming over and how much better he described them than they were the British Kitts. His kit had some of the very first premier electronics that were eventually became part of the Simmons line eventually in the history of it. But they were essentially just a box with some like looked like bongos essentially bongos in a box. That's if you want to visualize what these looked like. And this American guy came over with this brand spanking new invention called rototoms. And while they were on the tour, he was like, do you want to swap? So he swapped his very early electrics for rototoms. And now afterwards looking back, he's like that was probably the stupidest decision I ever made. Because those would probably be very useful to me now. Rototoms are great. I love rototoms, but everyone needs to own some rototoms at one point in their life. But yeah, probably should have kept the rare early electronics. But I suppose at the time, the electronics, they were a thing, but nobody really thought what was going to happen by the time the 80s come on and just like that madness that appeared everything was electronic. Whereas the rototoms were probably like alien technology, seeing them come over something that wasn't available in the UK at the time, like to jump at the chance to have that and add that to your kit, like you'd stand out, you'd be like, yeah, you know, so and so he's the one with the rototoms. There is the do, do, do, do, do, do, do guy. Yeah, exactly. And then I suppose the other anecdote that I like from that time was that someone was describing said in the early 80s got to record with a Simmons pad, got to a studio and studio had said, don't worry, there's a drum kit. So he was like, I won't bring any of my gear, I'll just bring my symbols and stacks. Happy day. It's perfect. Got there and it was a Simmons pad, a full Simmons kit then. So this studio got hold of a Simmons kit, really early Simmons kit. I was like, this is a once in a lifetime opportunity. I've got a house. What was it like to play? It's like it was like hitting concrete. He said they were terrible. The first ones he said were terrible. And I just didn't get on with it. And he said I was really struggling to play it. He said, well, one trick that I did notice that you could do with it, which I perhaps take for granted now. And that's something that I love to do with any electronics that I've got is you could unplug the floor tom sound and unplug the snare drum sound or the bass drum sound and swap over the leads. So if you wanted to play the snare drum with your foot, you could. If you wanted to play the bass with your hand, you could. And he said, we had this song and it had insanely fast double bass drums. He said, I just couldn't get on with doing it with the Simmons pad. He said, you got to remember back in those days, double pedals weren't really a thing, or at least he hadn't come across them at that point. So he said his solution to not being able to play this quick enough, one enough on the Simmons get was to plug the bass drum into the floor tom and play it with his hands. Oh, man. It's pretty smart. Yeah, I was just sat there thinking, yeah, that must have just been groundbreaking and just that must have been a real MacGyver moment during the time. Like, especially considering you've not really had experience with these electronics yet. So I suppose that the main thing I got to take away from there was that it was all really raw and just really brand spanking new in that probably 1977 to about 1984 period. Drummers were just getting to grips with this new world just appeared and was getting exponentially bigger and looked like it was never going to stop. And there was all the drummers are going to be replaced thing, which was a theme that I really wanted to hook on to looking forward. And I came away with some conclusions from that of that drummers will never be replaced, because what happened with that was, and Taylor Hawkins really once he passed away, a lot of obviously videos cropped up with interviews with him. So he just watching him back, just remembering him and just just remembering how good of a player he was and stuff like that. But something again, just piqued my interest when he was talking that he always used to listen to Queen Records or 80 stuff. And then when he'd go and practice, he'd be trying to recreate these electronic drum sounds with his drum kit. So there was also a whole generation of drummers that were listening to this stuff with electronics that weren't necessarily playing at the time. So happening same time, like tangentially just there's your drummers playing at this level, gigging, getting to grips with this stuff. There was also this new generation of drummers being influenced trying to recreate all of this electronics that by the time you get to the 90s and the 2000s have absorbed all of this technology and embraced all of this technology into their setups. I think that's partially why we've ended up with an industry standard of an SPDSX. And one of the biggest takeaways from my master's thesis that really stuck with me was that I did an interview with Mike Dolbe. We just got talking about the music industry and stuff like that. And he said, the emphasis is now gone from drummers being a good drummer to get the gig, like Buddy Rich, Louis Belson, all of these were good drummers, probably great, massive drummers that could play anything you asked them to play. The emphasis has now gone from you being this good, great drummer that can play anything and do anything to a drummer that now could be he's okay, but he can play in time. But the biggest added bonus is he knows how to work in SPDSX. He can do the tracks. He can do this. Yeah. It's like, oh, so sometimes when you're going for a band now, it's perhaps not as much you need to be able to show off that you can play all of this amazing stuff. But maybe the fact that you know how to get a backing track up and that you know how to play to a clip track. And it's like that just blew my mind. And he was like, that's probably where the industry will go. Is that it will be more so emphasis on can you play in time? If you've got a good pocket, if you've got a good groove, while also do you know where to put these drum pads to be able to play them and how to use them? And perhaps COVID has given this area of the drums to kick up the backside it needed was like his voice was that he was telling me that there was a lot of really massive working drummers that used to turn up to a show and it'd be sound engineer, mic it up. I'm going to go and have a cigarette, a drink, gonna go and get a bite to eat. So it never really dealt with any of this recording software side of stuff that soon as COVID appeared for like, I don't know what to do. This is like, and they have to learn all of that. And that made me feel a lot better because I'd also been quite guilty of I never just turned out and going, yeah, that's that's them over there's problem. So I'll wave at you, say hello to you, be polite to you, but I don't know what you do. Whereas in the last two years, I've had to learn how to do that. I've had to get drum mics. I got a zoom R16 box, I've had to learn how to record. One of my uni exams went from it was called ensemble performance, went from learning to play originals in a band setting and putting on a good performance and showing off your ability to play to good luck. You need to record this from home and submit it by six weeks. So yeah, and sound good and make it. But we live in a great time now where and I used to have that same zoom R16 really good little box and it like, or I guess you could say mixer and interface. The technology's gotten so much more accessible where those early electric drums back in the 80s are really expensive. And they're really kind of it seems like they're pretty uncomfortable to play, but now it's so much easier. But it's it's fortunate that we live in an era where there were, you know, I feel like and I'm sure you do to kind of a digital native where you grow up in this world, but people who are a little bit older might not and it might be kind of scary to get into it or to get be lose out on a gig because you don't have that experience. But it just it made me think too that like, you know, your story is about like, well, I got the gig because I had a van. And then we could take it to the gig and your drumming is important. But it's it's also it's like, you're a good drummer and you know, whatever the and is you have electronics, you have this, you have a van, you, you have a basement where they can practice, you know, and now it's it's the importance of and those are all like kind of like, you know, I'm sort of joking. But really, now it's like you have to have that knowledge of pads, which I personally, I've played them, but I don't have one. And I've I'm sure I could figure it out pretty quick from kind of being with this world of electronics. But you know, it's different, man. I mean, you just you kind of think it'd be nice just to be a drummer and not do this. But I think you should people should embrace it as, oh, it's another thing that I can do to differentiate myself and make myself more you got to be sellable, you need to be, you know, stick out a little bit and and be comfortable with it. And I have that where sometimes I'm like, oh, I don't want to do, I don't know, I do a lot of the social media stuff. And I'm always like, I'm not doing TikTok. And then I'm like, I, which I still don't, but I'm like, maybe I should like, but you get in your mind stuck with like, I'm not going to do electronics. And then it's like, well, maybe I should like, why not? But you just can't do something that makes you uncomfortable, but you also can't be too rigid and not adapt to what's happening nowadays, because it's a different world than it was in 1909 or 1865, obviously, but things are very, very, very different. Like every decade, things get extremely different, you know? Yeah, if I can just pick up on a couple points you said in there. And number one is not to say the fact that being good at drums isn't important anymore. But that role of before 90% of it was how good you are, then maybe it became 60%. And now maybe it's 50% your ability to play the drums really well and have these desirable qualities. And the other 50% is knowing how to do some of this technological based stuff. And then the other point that attaches to that and also came up during my master's was the amount of online resources out there now, and knowing which ones are trustworthy and which ones are teaching you the right things. And this was something that, again, cropped up a lot. I interviewed Adam Coombs, who was from my university. I always like to, whenever I do any of the research, have a non drummer take part, or someone non connected to the drum industry. There's almost like a control, like someone I can ask these questions to, to get something to compare what a non drummer is to it. And so my undergrad was a guitarist named Dan Patlanski from South Africa. This time, right? It was Adam Coombs. And in, and I think it was him and Mike Dolby that we got into the biggest conversations about the fact that all of this resources online is great, but also not great because you might be learning the wrong thing. You're learning the wrong technique. You sat the wrong way. Someone's taught you how to tune the drum, not wrong, because I don't think there's a wrong way to tune your drums, but it's taught you a weird way to do it. And that might work for you. Cause that might end up being your thing is that you've got Charlie Watts is broken eights. Nobody would teach you that ring goes. Yeah. Ring goes really weird and sometimes quite garish fill style. When you hear that, you're like, Oh, I know that is. Yeah. Or as soon as you see the drummer or if, if you went to any drummer, who's this and did that, they'd be like, Oh, Charlie Watts. Exactly. I know who that is. Or like certain people like Copeland's really pushy style or ACDC songs really laid back style. Those things are not necessarily what you would be taught. Or if you did pick them up, you might fall into you have quite a odd fill. Like just for instance, your inspirations at Charlie Watts ring goes star and ACDC. You have a really laid back, weird fill based drumming style where your high hats break. We are, but you're still doing the wish, what's windscreen? And then playing a really weird fill in, but that's your style. And that's not necessarily something that you would be taught. But if you were taught in person, they'd be like, Right, on to, don't break eights. You don't do this. You do this this way. You feel as you need to learn to play it to a click. So you might lose that little nuance to yourself. So that would always be my take of it. Yeah, you might look at something that's taught really terribly, but also it might help you find what makes you unique. I suppose that was my take away from that. No, very, very, very true where like YouTube can be a scary place where you need to filter out and be your best judge of what's what's right, which we've all practiced some things where you got, you know, you find out later like, Oh, I shouldn't have been doing that. But no, very good point of just we there's a wealth of information out there right now, but there's no filter. There's no barrier to anyone can post anything online for better or worse. I mean, it's it's awesome. I wouldn't be here. We wouldn't be doing this on the podcast and on YouTube if there was like a barrier. I mean, you'd have to I'm sure we could figure it out. But it's different than the old days of like, you know, TV channels and things like that. But this has been awesome. I think this is a great conversation. It was it was different than then and in a very good way of breaking it down about talking about how you did this and stuff. I had a lot of fun. So Caden is going to stick around and do a Patreon bonus episode. We're going to talk about his PhD and the topics that he thinks are really worth researching because I mean, even that wording alone, which which you have provided to me of a good topic is worth researching because this takes a lot of time. This takes a lot of energy and you don't want to research something that is just, you know, you're doing it. You're putting a lot of time and energy of your life into this and you want to make sure it's something that means something to you and that you can take and go on into your life and use, you know. And it's not just that is that if anyone can get anything out of this because at the end of the day, probably 90% of what all of this research and the stuff I've written is for is so that someone else can read it and learn something from it. Because I want people to really get interested in the history of the drum kit. Yeah, absolutely. So we'll talk about that. If people want to hear that, they can go to the go to drumhistorypodcast.com. There's a Patreon button, click it and two bucks a month and also be sure, I think I've mentioned it before, but these video, if you're listening to the podcast, you can also check these out on YouTube where there's a video interview, not every single episode. Sometimes things go horribly wrong and the video fails or something. It's just the way it goes. But most of them now are video interviews and you can see the new lighting I got because now my background is green and I'll be messing with that more as time goes along. So, Cad, why don't you tell people again, your website where they can find you anything cool you have coming up before we wrap up and then we'll go from there. Yeah, you can find me on Facebook and Instagram at CGI drummer. If you go on Instagram, it's not CGI drummer 12. That's my personal account. You should be able to find CGI drummer. That wasn't good forethought when I did that. My website is CGI drummer.com. Yeah, I've got nothing instantly amazingly coming up instantly soon. As awkward as I said that, but I am in a country band that we're looking to start doing some gigs in the next couple of months if things all work out well. And I recently did some percussion for a band called Miss Kill that they're going to be releasing their EP soon. So if you do follow me on any social medias, I will point you towards that when it appears. Cool. Thank you for being here and thank you for sharing your knowledge. And again, congratulations. Thank you very much. It's been a pleasure to be on this. A dream come true. It sounds a bit corny probably, but yeah, this is really fun. Awesome. Cool. Thanks, Cat.