 Welcome to the drum history podcast. I am your host Bart van der Zee and today I am joined by Beth Hammond to talk about practice pads Beth. Welcome to the show Hi Bart. Thanks so much for having me here. Absolutely. So you are like on Social media on Facebook on the practice pad page You are just so knowledgeable and passionate about practice pads. I just had to have you on the show to cover this Seemingly on the surface. It's sort of like one of those topics that people might go. Well, you know, whatever but I know there's much much much more to it and It's got a rich a rich history, but before we start what got you so into practice pads? Well, two things first of all, I grew up in a series of apartments Until I moved into our first house at age 12 And so living in apartments you develop a style of walking that my sister and I call apartment feet You have to be conscious of the neighbors below. Yes If you live below people you have to be careful that the sounds you make don't travel up So you have to be apartment sensitive and I didn't get my first real drum until I was 15 So in order for me to learn how to play the drums I had to play everything exclusively on a practice pad and so they're kind of near and dear to my heart when I rekindled my interest in drums and drumming about 10 years ago after after establishing a career as a cantorial soloist in synagogues I Decided, you know, I was getting all these emails from friends. Oh, are you into vintage drums? No, I'm not into vintage drums who could afford that. I can't afford that. Yeah, where would I put them all? You see these things on Facebook these guys on the vintage drum networks that have like entire Wings of their houses devoted to storing vintage drums, and I went that's not my life But I did notice two things. Nobody was really into collecting practice pads What was talking about it and nobody was really into researching the history? And so I decided that it just spoke to me and I said Practice pads. I love my practice pads Sure, and by then I had already been collecting for like 20 years And so I had a number of practice pads and I decided to make that a hobby focus About four or five years ago. I started really getting into it. I also enjoy research I like to look things up and go down rabbit holes and read Strange tangential wings of topics that Seemingly don't connect but if you keep going down the columns and you keep reading you discover. Oh my gosh There's a connection here. Yeah, and so that all of that led to me going practice pads I love practice pads. I'm currently surrounded in my studio by about 150 practice pads. Oh my gosh Wow, but they all but they all fit on shelves and in one room and My vintage drum collecting buddies can't do that. They can't match that. No, it's there's parallels to that to some of the guys I've had on who've talked about Collecting vintage pedals where oh my gosh much more attainable much smaller and they They they basically said that it's it's a similar thing where it's cheaper, you know, you get it for 50 bucks Well, it is I mean and most people don't dig practice pads the way I do so sometimes I luck out and I find something really Interesting and different and you know, there aren't a lot of them around either because it's a really old homemade pad from the 20s Or it's a one-off that some teacher designed and his student made That you're not gonna see those masks produced, but boy, they're interesting And so I go I want to try and acquire that so I can look at it up close and study it and really Understand it. Yeah, just just as an aside. I was also a professional bicycle mechanic and bike shop co-owner for 20 years So I've always had an interest in how things are made and how things work So you're a very mechanically inclined person to begin with and I am obviously very intelligent But also you just have that part of your brain where you want to learn more and you want to push more and I'm Fascinated by how stuff can be made into other stuff Yeah, and that's a lifelong obsession of mine. I started by taking apart a wind-up desk clock when I was Six and by the time I was 12, I had carefully taken my mom's stitch ripper to dismantle a shirt So I could see how it was made. Nobody had told me yet about patterns I've always been curious that way. Yeah, and it's it's clearly paid off And it's good to be curious and practice pads are Like I said, they're seemingly You know, what's the big difference, but as I think we're about to find out from you throughout time there are a lot of differences and I will I posted a question on drumforum.org. I mean, I think I posted it there September 16th 2020 which almost a year ago and and it takes a while to find the right people and then you I kind of like I was sort of watching your page and stuff and I was like, okay, you were definitely the right person here So I have some cool little like pictures from there that I'm going to share on social media later And you yeah shared some pictures with me that I'll post on social media But right one of the pictures you shared at drumforum Yeah, was of a practice pad that I wound up becoming the owner of oh really and that was the white practice pad with the rubber spot a top a clear plexiglass Angle mm-hmm. Yes. Yeah. Yeah, I call it the deco pad I actually wound up buying that pad from the previous owner and I went down some crazy rabbit holes doing research about Why did this pad get made and who made it and what was their background and and what happened to the business of Selling in these pads after he started baking them and it's it's on my drum blog I have a blog called drumlove on blog spot One word drumlove. There's topics there under the deco pad Awesome, so you can find all the history that I dug up on this one pad, but I love doing that kind of research. It's fascinating Yeah, it's very rewarding And and I'll go through all of them later, but I believe that his username or her name was stop sign 70 I think who posted that original one, but I'll go through just because everyone posted a lot of cool pictures and just give But Anyway to jump in to the topic here Let's start at the beginning and learn about the history of practice pads Where does it all begin as far as we can tell, you know? the only evidence that we have as far as anything prior to commercially made mass produced pads is Anecdotal it's somebody writing in a journal or it's somebody telling somebody about what they used and The earliest references in that sort of vein that I was able to find date back to the 1880s Somebody was interviewing a theater drummer of the day and he was warming up By playing his sticks on the leather padded center Cushioned part of a wooden dining room chair. Yep, and that was his practice pad They you know People used stacked pieces of cardboard boxes People stretched leather around a piece of wood and tacked it in place or if they had it They would take an old calf skin head that didn't serve anymore cut it into a smaller size Add a little stuffing like you know wool from a sheep or something and they'd stuff that under there And then they'd stretch it as far as they could and tack that into place with tax and a hammer and all of those things became practice pads My first practice pad on the road wasn't even my remote tunable pad which dates me I started playing drums. I started playing drums with six in 1973 when I was 10 and My pad the standard issue in those days was the little gray remote practice pad that was tunable You could replace the head sure but on the road when I toured one season with a drum core I didn't have room in my bag to bring my practice pad and and everybody said that's okay They make us practice on pillows bring a pillow and we also and at night we'd lay out our sleeping bags in the gym and We'd practice our show on pillows with no rebound Which meant your hands and wrists got really strong because they really got a workout From that from from base, I mean We talked earlier about me having a mechanical bent if you think about what American life was like between 1890 and say 1920 Most people knew how to fix their stuff. They owned and a lot of people, you know America was still a semi rural country That was rapidly industrializing. You had a lot of people out there that knew That knew rudimental rudimentary machinery. They knew some some carpentry They knew how to make stuff. They knew how to fix the things they owned. It was a very different time from the way we live now and so Practice pad and I put this in quotes practice pad Innovations were one-offs. They were one at a time as the individual found something that they needed or figured out that they could use And so you don't really see any standardization of this Until we get into the 20s The very first u.s. Patent awarded for a practice pad device was awarded to a man named I believe Henry Bauer. I could it could be Harry Bauer. I wasn't able to find it But but mr. Bauer submitted a sketch and a description for a patent on a drum practice device in 1919 I believe the patent was awarded in 1920 by 1921 his His pad Had been licensed. He had licensed the manufacturer the quote mass production Of his pad to a fellow in Los Angeles who ran a music store and he licensed this fellow to Mass produce his pads. Now when I say mass produce, I'm saying it with my tongue in my cheek really because mass producing at that For the population of that time mass producing meant you probably made a couple hundred of these Yeah, by most. Yeah, and you sent them out to people. Yeah, so what we have And I sent you pictures of it. Yeah, what we have is is a a platform of wood Carve cut into a round shape and Then holes were drilled so that you could then lay a piece of Tanned leather over the top With also with holes drilled to line up and you you took literally a shoelace and you tied these two things together most people your bat was designed took a thin piece of boiled wool maybe Maybe no more than an eighth of an inch to a quarter of an inch thick and slid it between the leather and the wood You took the shoelace you tied all of that together You tightened it as much as you could and suddenly you had a practice pad and it was actually pretty functional for the day Yeah, and and honestly looking at it though I like it because there's certain pads like like I had Jason on from ProLogix and I know they have Switch the top out and get different You know feels and I honestly see this the bower pad is being similar to where you could probably change out your material You could change, you know, oh, it's worn out. Let me let me put a different Piece of leather or piece of calfskin or whatever on there, right? Right cool that it's interchangeable. I like that It is interchangeable though. I don't I don't see any evidence in the limited documentation That indicates bower was thinking that far ahead Gotcha. Yeah, you know, I think it's a great idea. I'm certainly curious now It's like oh, I got to make another one of these I made a functional replica based on bowers sketch that was submitted for patent. Yeah, um and Because I'm the kind of person that likes to make stuff out of stuff Mine is pretty crude. I don't have a lot of fancy woodworking tools where I live but I was able to get an approximation of a very functional pad and it works. It's sure it looks great. Yeah There you go. It sounds good And I love how it says directions because you have on the back I'm assuming this is like the original price that you've you've printed and put on the back I like how it says directions place upon a sofa pillow Inclined slightly to allow left stick perfect action. Well, you remember everybody played traditional grip in those days Yes, which I think we'll get to soon with the the practice pads that are more Lifted which obviously we'll get there, but it's pretty cool. And but I I Think it needs to be said that Talking about practice pads and drums in general and like you said where you're just playing, you know, you're your instructor or whatever said play on a pillow yeah 1880s as the first kind of formal practice pad. It makes me think though that guys and girls had to be just literally playing on their knee or their bed or their pillow or their, you know In their cave I'm looking for a flat surface that I can strike with a stick. Yeah, okay. The ground works Yeah, the ground is flat. Look, let's use that um, I I'm not going to dispute it. I I would say that you know before we had a sense of industrialization of drumming and drums People may do with whatever they could cobble together sure in a pre industrialized America in a pre industrialized Europe even I mean I now now understand that most of my research is about practice pads in America because that's the easiest information for me to find through research Yeah, I'm glad you said that there's a wonderful website that you can look up called Google patents and you can use That to locate patents on innovations in almost any field Including drum practice pads. Sure. Yeah, good I'm glad we kind of clarified that because of course we're talking about You know more Quote-unquote modernized practice pads not in like, you know The year 1200 or something. No, no, no, no, no this this Bowers Bowers design was patented in 1920. Absolutely. So that's the first recorded patent awarded specifically for a drum practice pad and Everything just kind of walks forward from there. Yeah, and it's gonna be based partly the part partly the history of commercially made practice pads will over time is going to be based on Scientific innovations that were happening independent of drums and percussion So you have some kind of a calf skin Stretched over an opening or stretched over stuffing and we see that from probably the 1890s Maybe earlier, but I can't find documentation well into the 1920s and early 30s and Sometime in the early 30s. We start to see rubber being used in various grades and blends in compounds gum rubber that is pure gum rubber is very soft and the earliest gum rubber surfaces for pads are Soft almost to the point of becoming very tacky when they're new Once they figured out what they could mix with the gum rubber to create a compound that was more durable But still provided a rebound you started to see Different kinds of rubber in various grades and compounds in the mid to late 30s You really started to see more of that By the time we are getting ready to enter the second world war rubber production had ramped up Yeah, to meet the needs of the military and to meet the needs of industries that were all helping the war effort And so we start to see a real influx of rubber covered practice pads in the early 1940s and Again the rebound and how well the rubber ages over decades is really is really a set of variables I have a rubber pad. That's probably from around 1940 It's labeled the globe and I'm assuming that was the company that made the pad. This pad is really worn. It's been loved It's been used the rubber is still fantastic And I still like to take this pad out and play it once in a while because the rubber is in such great shape Which tells me it's not pure gum rubber It's been something is a little something has been added to it because Would have deteriorated or gum rubber would have either been Soft tacky melted in extreme heat or it would have hardened over time I have a couple of gum a couple of rubber pads Rubber topped pads where the rubber has degraded to the point where it's a little hard And it's almost like playing The purposefully hard service of a modern marching specific pad Hmm not a lot of fun to play but I have it because it serves it feels a historical hole in my collection Yeah, yeah, absolutely. So all through the 40s and into the 50s You see a lot of rubber topped practice pads This is also when you really begin to see the tilt the the tilt to accommodate traditional grip a lot of those pads are happening in the 40s and forward And and really from from I would say roughly late 30s early 40s all the way into the 80s You are seeing practice pads with a built-in tilt either They've been on a built-up wooden platform or their rubber mounted on a solid wooden wedge The way that Premier made their pads in the 60s and 70s And that was because back in the back in the 40s and 50s Hardly anybody was playing matched grip even at a drum kit most drummers of that period We're still playing traditional grip because the first thing you learned were your rudiments Why did you learn rudiments so you could march in your local band or drum core? How did you do that you wore your drum on a sling so there was a natural tilt to the head? Yeah, and I there's some great pictures here on the post in drum forum where I again, I'll share these pictures, but Stop sign 70 username shared where you can tilt or Untilt it's kind of on a rise as opposed to yes a wedged block So as we're going here, I it's obvious that like after 1920 I'm assuming pretty quickly that the big drum companies started to adopt these and put them in their own catalogs because it seems like It became just part of the drumming Culture to have a practice pad to work on it. Why not capitalize on it and put a brand name on it? Well, and really practice pads that didn't really innovate were still included in catalogs Especially starting in the mid to late 20s as a way of just further getting the brand name out there. Sure There's a But if I have a I have a copy of a 19. What is it? I have a copy of a 1911 Ludwig catalog. It's like eight pages. It's little it's bitty and There's a practice pad in there that is basically it looks like somebody took a giant embroidery hoop Stretched a skin over it and stuffed it with batting. Yeah, and said here's a practice pad Wow, okay, and you're selling this mass produced Well, they're selling it mass produced for 35 cents, which probably went a lot further in 1911 than it does today But what you really see is that once we get into the wooden tilted platform era of pads in the 40s and 50s The differences between pads in terms of their feel Aren't that great? I mean, yeah, there are some there are some really beautiful pads from this era One of my one of my favorite pads in my collection dates from about 1948 to 1950 it is a Slingerland Radio King practice pad and it has a radio King cloud badge Specifically made for the pad. Wow. There's no hole in the middle. Huh? It doesn't go around a sound hole So they made a specific cloud badge just for that pad and they only produced that pad from like 1947 until about 1952 it was a very short run and I was lucky enough to score one of these. I gotta tell you the rubber is not so exciting It's just basic black rubber that's been tacked to a wooden platform The cool thing about this is it's a slightly larger pad than you normally see and it's on a stand Okay, it's neat to see that that sort of development because a lot of these I guess would have like a Whatever the threading would be. I don't know the exact size quarter thread or whatever like to fit on do a either a symbol stand or I guess that probably came in later though. Once the threading became more universal in this period There were stands that looked like symbol stands But they were really designed to take hardware Specifically that was nailed or bolted to the underside of a wooden pad and it didn't depend on threading. Hmm Interesting you had yeah, so if you look in catalogs from like 1945 up through the 60s, you'll see this hardware And and you can have the option of having this, you know practice pad X can either have rubber feet on the bottom Yeah, first for use on a tabletop or on a music stand, which is how I was taught to first use them Sure, or they come with hardware that will let you mount them to a specific stand for that pad and You can find these stands Sometimes online on auction sites and for sale sites But without the hardware that attaches it to the pad. It's not terribly useful. So So so some really some really interesting stuff started to happen, you know you had this you had kind of Mild variances of size and look and how well the wood was finished and whether the labels were metal or Decals they were mostly decals because they were cheaper to make. Yeah, and we don't really see any more extreme innovation Until the late 50s and we owe that to Remo Belly In 1957 The first of two revolutionary moments happened that directly affected practice pads later on the first was that in 1957 Remo Belly filed a patent for the first synthetic drumhead, which was made of a new space-age material called mylar and that patent went through revisions and hearings and it was subsequently approved and awarded in 1960 in 1962 the Remo drum company Put out on the market the first tunable practice pad you could tune it I believe the earliest versions could be tuned with a screwdriver They were originally made of a fiber a fibrous wood Compressed wood fiber platform over which was mounted a metal Framework that allowed you to have a tunable mylar head It felt just like playing a regular drum It could be tuned just like playing a regular drum and for that time It was the it was a massively bold innovation and suddenly everybody went. Oh my gosh I have to have one of these pads. They're insane. I gotta have one I gotta have I've gotta have a drum kit made of these pads And so you see you see a practice pad drum kit made up of all these first early tunable Remo pads and it's phenomenal people go drummers go nuts Schools go crazy for this thing because suddenly they don't have to budget having a whole drum set in the band room And it's nice and quiet and you're not getting you know, you don't need to just annoy everyone down the hall That's right. It's quieter than a drum kit. You don't have to go sit in a soundproof room. It's amazing Yeah, I have a few examples in my collection of these earliest Tunable Remo pads. I also have in my collection the pads that predate them which are made of a very lightweight wood and have a pre-stretched pre-tuned Mylar plastic head. I think they attempted to fill the space between the head and the platform With some kind of foam rubber that really disintegrated over time because now I have one of these things and it's foam rubber crumbs crawling floating around inside, but I have Here's another Here's another resource that you could go and check out. That's a really fun rabbit hole for drummers of all ages Remo drums Remo percussion has a timeline a historic timeline from the beginning of their first developments to their Establishment as a company all I take I think it takes you all the way up into the early 2000s Very cool. And and you can see if you look closely enough You can see the changes in the logo that help you identify what year your pad was made I have three Remo practice pads from the pre-tunable era. So like 1958 59 60 and Each of them is from a different year based on the shape and design of the logo on the head This episode is brought to you by dream symbols dream Just sent me over five symbols to try out including the dark matter bliss paper thin crash in 17 18 and 19 inches and Two dark matter bliss crash rides in 20 and 22 and these symbols are awesome. They're dark They're gritty. They're explosive and they're just super unique beyond how they sound though They look like they were buried for a year dug up lit on fire buried lit on fire again And then sold to you they just look so cool And I highly recommend them learn more at dream symbols calm and find them on social media at dream symbols I know it that the the ability to tension and you know having the either the tuning keys or the screws around Mm-hmm was obviously for tuning purposes But I would assume you could also change out that head if yes, you completely because looking back at some of the pictures on the You know drum forum here. Some of those old pre-mylar heads I'm assuming I mean some of them looked like like you said the Internal stuffing whatever it was just as you said turn to dust So I'm sure you'd probably want to stuff that a little more or or pick a different material Early foam rubber was a disaster and it disintegrated quickly when exposed to the UV rays of sunlight Yeah, so that's why you know the leap from wool batting to early foam rubber was not a successful leap Yeah improvements in in rubber and foam rubber had to be developed along the way for that Stuffing to make sense by the time I have my Ludwig pad in 1973 and I still have my pad from 1973 by the way very nice this the foam rubber inside is still intact and still perfectly functional Wow, but they'd improved things by then the The whole point at you know and and practice pad kits tunable practice pads took off and Again because you're dealing with copyright law and patent law Whenever you're dealing with protecting intellectual property rights The law is going to lag behind reality by at least 10 to 20 years Um, absolutely and so that allowed For well, what percentage of this product do I need to change? So I don't violate the previous patent holders design and that's why you see Ludwig tunable pads in the 60s that could only be tuned with a drum key and those things are monsters I have a couple of them in my collection and they are beasts You know, but yes, they were designed to be able to so you could change the head if you wore it out It was a brilliant idea. It is brilliant and this kind of leads me to so Well, you know when I started getting into obviously more of the drum history stuff particularly into this practice pad Stopped about a year ago or whatever do it with that post on drum form. I didn't realize That the kits were so old so I had when I was younger a practice pad kit That I believe I ended up trading when I was younger for like a DW 5000 pedal or something and You know, every I feel like that was more of the modern one that everyone was aware of that little DW one that had the you know Pads kind of just branched off of a stand in the middle. Sure. I did not really later model That's a later model of practice pad kit. Exactly and I didn't realize though looking at the great photos posted by mr. Stop sign 70 There's some just amazing almost art deco Like practice pad kits that look like the fifths kit FIPS the fifths kid Man, that thing is a piece of art. I could put that in the Portland Art Museum and put a plaque next to it And people would pay to just come look at it. It's so beautiful. It's so it's so streamlined. It's so modern for its time I have never seen one in person. I have never tried playing one Yeah, I would love to but but some of these things some of these innovations became design They became works of design art Here's another example of you know, we've had practice pad kits for a long time since the 50s at least Another one was Colotto, which also became regal and regal tip sticks Yeah, sure. So Colotto took the tunable practice pad and he Tweaked it a little bit and then he turned it over and he added a rubber playing surface on the bottom So that you could flip it and have a choice Which we see a lot today. There's like a Vic pad. There's all kinds of pads where you flip them and you get two different Yes feels and and on the kit side of things. There's also another great picture that was shared It's basically a suitcase that opens up and has yes different You know, there's a little pad on the back of the suitcase I I don't know how I feel like people played softer back then without a doubt. Simple stands were thinner Things were just you know, the Tom arms were thinner. I think I feel like people Yeah, before before the Grateful Dead came along You didn't need two drummers because you didn't have guys pumping their amps with their electric guitars to get waves of feedback That that changed everything. Okay, the Grateful Dead had two drum kits because at some point in their musical adventures They needed them. Yeah But you know what's moving a little forward now What you have between the 60s and the 1980s are to what I think and of course This is my uneducated opinion. I did not grow up in the drum industry so all of this is based on research curiosity and a little bit of Deduction on my part between the 60s and the 80s you had two different things going on drum companies were innovating Drum companies were being bought sold merged with each other you know, um and so what you had was a kind of a multi-decade confusion of Oh my god, here's all this stock That's labeled You know, it's labeled George Way. What do we do with it now? Well, we relabel at camp go and we just we we put these things together and sell them Got the heck out of here so we can make room for new stuff that's labeled with our company So you have a lot of that going on Um, you see in the catalogs that there are models of practice pad that were developed in the 50s And they're being held over until 1979 or 1980 Because they're sitting on back stock in a warehouse somewhere that they have to clear out Having owned or small retail business I I understand that, you know back stock in a warehouse is dead stock until you find a way to sell it and make some money So you see a bit of a confusion over those those 25 or 30 years of Hardware from older models being put onto new drum shells just to move it the heck out of here Yeah, you always hear about that too with Ludwig stuff where it was, you know They or slingerly they just reach in and just grab stuff. That's what makes dating things Very difficult, but it just makes sense Well, and dating practice pads is almost impossible during this time because You have the whole wfl Ludwig leady con mess Which you know took a full decade to sort out and in the meantime people have to work people have to eat So they're pulling whatever they can find out of the warehouse slapping it together. Okay. Well that works here Just send that out to a dealer somewhere There's a lot of that going on, but the thing with practice pads is No serial numbers Practice pads today still don't come with serial numbers as a rule So dating them Is very very difficult. You have to use You have to use your resources You have to go to drum forum and find knowledgeable people with pads in their collection that they're willing to Share photographs of you have to go to The the the drum catalog drum archive. Yeah Archive the drum archive Yeah, and that's an amazing resource for anyone who's into drum history Because you can just go through catalog and catalog and catalog and take a look at the progression of A product to try and approximate a good guess on its age I've actually done that with a couple of older drums of mine But with pads, it's a little harder. But what happens is that For my money, I don't see any You know other than a few outliers like kifa pads in the early 2000s You know, I don't see any real innovations in practice pad technology until we get into the mid to late 1990s and early 2000s with the rise In popularity of the marching arts the pageantry arts Because what happens then is that now we're seeing Purpose specific practice pads. You have your regular practice pads for people who play behind a drum kit you have Practice pads that have brush applications that you know, I mean the 10 inch Remo tunable pad which has still which is still being made today Is a perfectly acceptable surface for a kid to practice their first brush strokes If they have nothing else when I was a kid I practiced on an open copy of the yellow pages and I played directly on a page inside the yellow pages Yeah to get that feel to get a little texture Just to get a little texture and I'd set that up on the piano bar at the club where my dad played And when I would come in to play brushes for him because my parents were nightclub musicians I would he would just grab the yellow pages and slap it open here play this and I'd pull out my brushes the song The raven sings he'd hold the microphone for me play one Play one handed chords and I'd sit there and sing along and play for myself It was it was it was a nice parlor trick, but it was also what I had available Well, that's the beauty of drums as you can do that and there's a there's one of steve gad's old tapes where he's Someone is sitting there. I believe holding a like a two inch Like tape box, you know like a master reel and he's playing brushes on it And it's it's kind of funny because like He plays for like three minutes and this guy's holding this box and you're probably like the guy's probably like Okay, can I put down the box now? No, but in the meantime, it's steve gad. So he's making art Exactly and you don't want him to stop Right, okay. It's a beautiful thing So we're now we're in we're gonna fast forward a little bit because out of interest of time Now we're in the early 2000s and now a lot of new innovations are happening First you have new approaches to making rubber compounds which Can be fine-tuned so that now you can make very specific recipes to get Different hardnesses different levels of response on a rubber practice pad That's a big innovation right there because when you can fine-tune something That's going to open the door to a purpose-driven pad. Yeah to You have the rise in popularity Of the marching arts because in the late 90s early 2000s Drumcore finds its marketing gold and suddenly all these kids go. Oh, that's cool. I want to do that Right. And so suddenly you have a market that you've been growing that is now clamoring for these kinds of pads in What is it uh 2004? 2005 You have the guy who would go to go on to found ximox But in the beginning before he founded ximox percussion He had patented a design So that you had a rubber pad on top and underneath Curved into the wood you had a recess where you could put Metal ball bearings cover it with a metal panel Adjust the tightness of the screws just so so that the balls would rattle a little bit And suddenly you had a practice pad with fake snare drum sound And the fake snare drum sound was just tight enough to approximate the sound of a highly tensioned Early kevlar headed marching snare. Yeah, and the kids went nuts And as he was beginning to grow this you know ximox percussion. He was also Licensing this patent to other drum companies and they would brand it pro mark ahead Oh my gosh, who else yamaha They were all taking this same design and the pat the licensing the patent sticker is on the metal band on the bottom of the of the pad And it would say oh, you know Patented patent number blah blah blah blah blah and you turn it over and it would just be whatever brand had hired His company to make the pads and brand them for them We're gonna see more and more of this as these purpose specific pads take off But that was a real innovation that was of its time Yeah, and now it's happening all the time where you think of a pad that like that that has that little bit of a sound And it's kind of like a oh duh. Why not just throw it on there and you know, it seems like uh It seems like a no-brainer, but nothing is a no-brainer until someone does it and that's right. That's right Now we all do it And so there was a quote on the drum forum site that I went and found Which really uh, it really speaks to me and and it was deaf moon On the drum forum site. Okay. Yeah Here's the quote drum practice pads began on a padded chair Went through cardboard boxes and then to a piece of plumber's rubber nailed to a board How we got to someone charging a hundred and fifty nine dollars for a rimmed space age material Screwed onto a plastic body is beyond my understanding And yeah, okay. He's talking like a professional curmudgeon, but he has a point He has a point. Um, what's really interesting about my interest in pads is that I'm also a longtime advocate and practitioner of sustainable living Um, because my industry was the bicycle industry I I've I lived for 35 years without owning a car I wrote a bike everywhere. I didn't need a car in portland. We had bikes We have great public transit and I got really tuned into the idea of Making a life more sustainable My interest in practice pads runs counter to that philosophy because Because now there's a practice pad. Oh wait, I need to be able to play these rudiments on a pad But on thursday So now I need a pad for thursdays with these rudiments and you know, somebody is going to go there Okay, somebody is going to go there and it's going to go from the ridiculous to the sublime I recently acquired for my collection Um, I'm going to reach back just a little bit. Sure. HQ real feel pads Those late 90s pads with the tan gum rubber and marching drummers of a certain age that grew up on these pads They're all oh, I'm so sorry. I sold that I want to get that pad again And and suddenly it's like the hot used pad item on ebay You know people are paying like 70 80 90 bucks for a used HQ tan gum rubber pad. It's like really I recently found one that I'm sure had to have been a trade show gimme it's It's three inches across It's adorable. It can be played the tiny pads. That's that's a little bit and you know what? Yeah Sounds good. It sounds great. It feels great. You put it on a rubber surface. It's not going to creep a whole lot. Um But it's you know now We're blowing up the sustainability idea right and left in practice pad manufacture because How many different rubber pads does a person need? Now you have people on drum discussion groups going Is there a meaningful difference between the yellow vader pad and the red vader pad in feel? And and maybe I should have both and and and people People have gotten as fussy about modern practice pads As they have been about drums and heads for decades. Yeah But you get it as a enthusiast. I mean you obviously do and but that's a good point because rubber Does not I mean rubber is coming from places where it's usually not. I mean you got to be careful You know, you know what? I mean, it's it's it's rubber is not an easily renewable resource. No exactly and You're it's great. You mentioned that uh because I never thought about that I am just usually an idiot and don't think about where things actually come from but Yeah, but that's smart. So I want to Take a step back here and I ask you about a couple particular pads that I'm seeing well first I want to mention that so I've talked about it on the show before but my grandpa was a drummer and um In the fit I posted a picture on that forum on on the I saw that photo. Oh, that's so sweet And he's he's sitting on the side of his bed. He's smoking a pipe And he's practicing but I guarantee and I think he told me when I was younger I guarantee he just took a saw and just cut out a piece of wood and then like some, you know Leather or rubber or whatever on it or glued it down and and uh, he would also talk about Cutting up newspaper and putting that in his bass drum and just all those old school Techniques, but I just want to give me pads. Yeah homemade pads because then it's like It it was different. It's post-war. I mean obviously which was kind of I guess a boom in the 50s But I think that was around 56 or 57 So shout out to my grandpa tom con up who's no longer with us But was a big influence but a couple things here. So looking back at the um drum forum thread The gladstone the billy gladstone kind of vacuum drum pad that sits on the middle of your snare Yeah and converts your snare Will you talk about that a little bit? I mean that that everyone has used one of those at some point in their life Oh, yes. Oh, yes Um, I think if that's what you grew up with then you thought it was great because that's what you had access to Yeah, I think that it I mean if you play on the thin part of that pad You get a snare sound that's a little muted makes your mom happier. Um I think that's not an optimal pad for developing great drum technique I think it's an optimal pad for making your drum quieter Exactly and sometimes you have to make choices as we say with my people for the sake of peace Billy Gladstone was a nice Jewish boy who understood that sometimes you have to make choices for the sake of peace And he probably developed that pad To make mothers happy. That's funny. That's a good way to look at it. I get Billy Gladstone I completely get him and love him and love his contributions to drumming. Absolutely. Yeah, and I get it. Okay, but homemade pads are still a thing um You can still make your own practice pad out of scrap wood and whether or not you want to put a tilt on it is up to you I have I sent you a photo of two Homemade pads that I love. Yes one of them is covered with stickers and it I made it from scrap wood And a cast-off piece of gum rubber from some industrial application It's my very first homemade pad. I've had it for a number of years and I still take it with me What I didn't show you is that the bottom is covered with mouse pad Or stack cup stacking game material with the rubber side out and the fabric side glued to the wood And so now you have a pad with a non-skid surface and cool And it feels wonderful. It sounds wonderful and it at a at nine inches square Or 10 inches square It's it's carry on if it's in my carry on bag and it's it's a pad I take with me places when I have to be quiet the other pad is one that I actually just made last week um Rema tip top are the manufacturers in germany of the most familiar Tire patch tube patches in bicycling Everybody has a reama patch a remit patch kit in their cycling bag They make they make patches for inner tubes of all sizes including tractor tubes and I have A new old stock box of 10 of these things that are each of the patches is like four and a half inches in diameter And you know they're four and a half inches across it's a big round giant reama patch And I glued a couple of these one on top of the other on another piece of scrap wood and you know what? Oh, yeah And it feels great. Um, absolutely and And again, I took some mouse pad material and put a non-skid surface on the bottom That non-skid surface also insulates if you're trying to protect the tabletop so far I have not added a tilt to either of these Um, but I could yeah, I think I think that if you want to add an element of experience To the drumming that you are learning to do It's a great thing to make your own pad. I was just going to say that you're you're You're invested in it. It feels it's like like I am currently totally unrelated to drums, but I am currently staining some pine closet doors For my two-year-olds room and I'm putting three coats on each one. I'm doing poly I had to use pre-stain I feel a connection to these closet doors that I'll always Have You know why it's a beautiful thing Bart? Because it's a throwback to the time when Americans knew how to fix the things they owned exactly And anything that you and I can do today to bring us back into that space Is good for us and it's good for our community and it saves money, which You don't need to go out and you know, you can you can buy a hundred 50 dollar pad a hundred dollar 60 pad, but you can also just make it um, and on the um rima tip top, um Patches I just want to say on that, you know, give a shout out lane Bune and then lee van keef, which is a good lee van cleaf the actor reference. Um Both had a back and forth talking about that on the thread and it's just so cool to see that where he said I have this pad. It's homemade and then lee van keef got on and said this is what it is. It's this old Yes patch. So that inspired me to make my own. Oh, that's so cool. I love that inspired me and I went Oh, he's right. This is a great material to play on This is great. It's the community. Um, it is. Let me ask you, uh, I think one last Bit here that I want to mention is there's some pictures that were shared uh on our with our drum forum friends here that well two more so uh Going back to stop sign 70 who shared a couple pictures of something that I've seen more modern More modern lee, but uh, it's the pad that looks like it can strap onto your leg Which oh sure. I'm I'm seeing very old versions of those with with what appear to be cap skin heads And then it gets newer I didn't know that one back that far One of the earliest versions of that that I saw came from france and it's from the 19 teens Cool and it was it was a homemade pad nice Yeah, because if I can if i'm gonna play on my leg, why should it hurt? I'll put a pad there. Yeah It's like ingenuity. It's just like the okay like exactly like well my legs are really getting red Well, I wonder if I put something there. Boom idea Why why not? I have to say that one of the things I love about being a drummer in terms of being part of the drive the tribe of drum is that I can tell you that this kind of homegrown innovation Probably doesn't happen to the same extent in the tribe of bassoon for example You know what i'm saying? Oh, totally drumming is so hands-on. It's so primal the response the rewards for drumming are so immediate You hit something with this dick and you get a sound. Oh mom. That's so cool. I want to do that How many kids are doing that with a double reed instrument? I do not know but but because it's the the the connection between player and instrument is so primal and so direct I think it opens the door to a lot of grassroots innovation and that is a big part of what I love about being a drummer. Yeah Yeah, absolutely. And the last one That I just think is a neat one that i'm just trying to hit on the ones that everyone that i'm seeing pictures of that I think everyone has seen in their life is the The dude posted one saying um in 1966 he used It's basically like the the kind of keystone looking badge where it's just a it's just a big hunker rubber Oh, yeah, David says porto practice pad um, and there's just That big chunk of rubber cut into that kind of keystone shape Those were just That they must have caught on with schools Um, well they did they were they're ubiquitous. First of all, you can still find them everywhere. I think they're like bunnies and they breed Yeah, they came about in the 50s after rubber compounds started getting messed around with and improved for durability Uh, the they're really great for kids because you could just stick it in your pocket It's literally a pocket pad. Yeah, and it's you know, it's and and if if if they've lived in a climate where The climate didn't destroy the the rubber compound. They're still great. I have one. I take it places. It still works Yeah, they're terrific Some of the coolest pads are the ones that were mass produced to the point of being ubiquitous Yeah, for sure. They're popular for a reason. I mean they're They caught on and I just have to read it and you know, it's funny. I'm sure he he wrote it So it's worth, you know, it's out in the world, but he wrote uh, I could shove this pad Uh in the pocket door to my bedroom and my parents couldn't open it While I smoked from my bong and ex exhaled it through a short garden hose. I hung out the window. Oh, yeah I remember reading that and laughing out loud. That is too funny. Thank you See we're drummers. We are natural innovators We will come up with solutions to things people haven't thought about yet. Exactly. That's genius. So, um Well beth I want to um, just like First off, just thank you and we'll talk about we're gonna do a little bonus episode which we'll talk about in a minute But I want to go ahead and just thank everyone on the forum real quick vintage drummer, sweden the dude Uh stop sign 70 Don't forget deaf moon deaf moon. Yes deaf moon and then bethness. That's you. I'm just seeing you. Yeah Lane yoon noble cooly nut uh, no Libos Dave zedle. Thank you, Dave zedle. Um deaf moon jda Frank gdiva L rod 1707 matched gripper gk rk pedal pusher drummer friend, uh, who's a fan of the show csr had some great pictures uh, malt jd And lee van keef and I believe that is it. So thank you to those People for submitting those and it took about a year to get this together But uh, we found the right person with beth um Anything you want to plug now at the end for people to check out that you're working on. Oh my gosh. Well I have two musical hats that I wear one is as a drummer percussionist historian the other is as a An acoustic folk pop singer songwriter And if you'd like I will send you the links to both of those places Please don't you're done so you can include them at when you post this interview. Um Uh, I I I do singer songwriter stuff under my name beth ham and music And I do drum stuff under the blog Uh, the blog spot blog drum love one word cool Awesome. Well, um for everyone listening, uh beth is gonna hang out here for a little bit and we're gonna do a quick episode and Beth doesn't know what I'm gonna ask her but I'm gonna say now So beth what I want to talk about with you is maybe A couple stories about how you've gone about uh, acquiring And cracking down. I knew that was coming. Yes, we're gonna we're gonna pull back the curtain and and destroy the magic Let's do it. Cool. So we'll wrap up here and then we'll jump over to that But for everyone who wants to check out those, um bonus episodes Go to drumhistorypodcast.com click the patreon link Two bucks a month and up if you want early episodes and all that it's a little more But um, then you get the bonus episodes so On that note. Um, oh and we should tell people to join your awesome facebook group So yes, there is a facebook group for people who are super into drumcads. It's called the drum pad history group It is co-moderated by myself and mark beecher And if you want to join you do have to answer the two screening questions One is to tell us a little about yourself as a drummer The other is to agree to our very simple and very basic rules You must answer both of those questions to be admitted to the group Thanks so much mark for having me on your show. This has been A surprising and wonderful delight Yes, you you are great. You're the perfect guest for this a very Nice and sweet person and and shout out to mark beecher who's been on the show and who made me an honorary member of Nard. I'm just super proud of that still. Um, I don't think I could I have the I got to work on my chops more to actually You know follow up with it, but um, thank you to mark For being a member of that group and running it with you. So beth on that note Thanks for being here. This has been a blast. Thank you for having me part. Take good care 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