 Welcome to the drum history podcast. I am your host Bart van der Zee and today I'm joined by Mr. Paul Mason of Tempest Drums. Paul, welcome to the show. Thank you. How are you? I'm doing great. I'm really excited to have you on the show as a very respected and just Tempest Drums in the circles of people who've used them and know about them and on the forums when I was doing research. There's not really any bad comments about them. They're very loved drums. You've got a bit of a following, which is great. That's just so cool. You could create this brand. Well, I was very fortunate in some respects with timing, various opportunities that came along. I think also that the uniqueness of what I did helped to to push it along in that way. I mean, there was nobody else doing that then. I don't think there is even now. With any luck, that helped it to stand out from so many great craftsmen out there, but nobody doing the composite thing in the way that I did it. Sure. We'll talk all about the uniqueness of your brand and the materials you used and all that stuff, but why don't we step back first and we'll get into that, the carbon fiber and all that. But first, maybe start talking about your background and really what was the origins of Tempest. Okay. Well, I took my first drum lessons in about the middle of February of 1971, having moved here from England via Montreal, finally got into music at that age. I was 13, I think. And finally, I got a little drum set for my 14th birthday that July, much like the one that you had described, no hi-hats, just the very bare minimum. It was good stuff. And that was enough to get me through three or four years, I suppose, of learning to play and developing, adding bits and pieces to it. But then there was a company in Vancouver that had been formed, I think, sometime in 1973, which was called Milestone Percussion. And it originally was part of a drum shop in town here called Drum Village, which was co-owned by a man named Michael Clapham. So I think the year that I got out of high school, which would have been 1975, I went down to Drum Village to try these instruments. I'd heard quite a few good things about them. And there were quite a few players at the time who were kind of getting on board with that. I think Gary, I've got to know whether you guys know of the band Max Webster. You might well do some of your more diehard Canadian aficionados. Max Webster had a drummer named Gary McCracken, who was a great player. He'd bought himself a set. Jerry Mercer with April Wine, perhaps a bit better known, Billy Cobham in those days had also had a set built. So I went along, you know, and I thought they were just wonderful. So I put down a handful of cash, and I had them build me a set. It was the first Canary Yellow set that they ever created. And the only reason I went with Canary Yellow is because I'd seen a photograph of Yann Hammer playing a Canary Yellow Gretz set, and I thought, well, that seems nice. And so shortly after that, I became a full-time professional gigging, traveling musician at the age of, I guess I was 18 at the time. And it took milestone because they were so busy. It took them the best part of the year to build the set for me, which I finally took delivery of while I was gigging. And I played that set, you know, added onto it, and then played that set basically for, I don't know, the best part of eight or nine years, I think, before I kind of reluctantly had to concede that I was never going to be an internationally renowned rock star. So I began looking for something else to do, and this would have been 1984. So by which time the milestone percussion operation was for sale. So I went to see Michael, Clapham, and we chatted, and eventually I bought the milestone operation. And at the time, he wanted quite a lot of money for the milestone brand, the name, which I couldn't afford at the time, but also unfortunately, he had managed to damage the name quite badly. He was an unusual man. He had some funny ideas about customer service and updating the product and, you know, things that kind of make it more alluring for newcomers, you know. So I didn't buy the milestone name for him, which is why the name Tempus came about. And I think it was something that my brother Dave and I, he's a designer, well, among other things. I think it was a name that my brother Dave and I kind of came up with, Tempus, of course, being effectively time. Sure. In Latin. In Latin, as much as I speak Latin. I googled it. I don't know any Latin. Yeah, I think, you know, pre-Google, I might have had a dictionary, but that was about it. Sure. And so that was the beginnings of Tempus, as it was known in April 1st, 1985, was launch date for that officially. And it was then Tempus Instruments Incorporated. I think we went with Tempus Instruments because, you know, it sort of seemed as if that offered a few possibilities. If we wanted to go beyond drums, who knew? I mean, it was probably some philosophy. Yeah. What did you acquire? So when you bought Milestone, was he building his own shells? Like what all equipment did you get besides just the name, which you obviously ended up not using because of the whole, you know, start fresh mentality? The philosophy behind Milestone always was. And it was the basis for the company was that they built their own shells. We'll get to the composition of those shells in a little while, I think. But it was all done in-house. Every single shell that was ever built was built in molds that the company owned itself. So I acquired those molds along with the production equipment and the inventory and quite a lot of other odds and ends and bits that we later added on to and modified and modernized. So yeah, it was a self-contained operation. They owned their own die-cast tooling for the tension casings and the bass drum claws. A lot of hardware, which unfortunately wasn't very reliable, which we kind of took a pass on as well. But it was very much a, in fact, I think it might be one of the last, perhaps one of the very small operations to have actually owned that much of its own proprietary hardware, casting equipment for the hardware. They didn't make that themselves. Of course, it takes an immense operation to die-cast. But that was part of the philosophy. So pretty admirable, I think, in the early days. Yeah, that's great. I mean, but it's cool that you could kind of find it and reuse it, recycle it into a new brand and not just let it get melted down or whatever. Well, that was partly why I wanted to acquire the operation. I was such a fan of the drums and had been since that first visit to Drum Village. I was just just bowled over by what I heard. And I still feel the same way today. I mean, all these years later. And I didn't think it was right that these drums disappear, that this company sort of sink into obscurity. And as it turned out, I was the only, I didn't know it at the time, but I was the only person who ever made an offer on the milestone operation. Nobody else approached him at all, which I was kind of shocked by later on. Yeah. Well, it's funny to learn that later. I'm sure if he was asking for a lot of money and kind of playing hardball, it turns out there was literally no one else interested. Well, I think it also might have had some, I mean, what I learned the further I got into the business and trying to market the drums, what I learned was that there is a sizable and quite a strong resistance to the unusual, which is not meant to be at all disrespectful to anyone else. It's just that there is this global love affair with maple shells and the exotic woods and a lot of metals and so on. But when you get outside of that, you run into this reluctance on the part of most drummers to even entertain the idea that there's something else that might work. And so it's not really surprising to me in the end that that, you know, I was only ever a very small niche player that kind of there's whereas Waldo thing going on, you know, but that was okay with me in the end. I mean, global domination sounds like a lot of work, doesn't it? Yeah, it does sound like a lot of work. But I mean, you did some, you had some domination, you know, so all right, we're in about 1985, right? That's that's about when the, when Tempus started, right? Yeah. Okay, so let's take it from there with and you said it was you and your brother, correct? Well, my brother wasn't involved in the company, but he was Dave was he was he had his own design firm in Vancouver at the time. Gotcha. And so he very generously conceived and created and put together all of the initial brochures and the first first advertisements and so on. I mean, I don't know what I would have done if he hadn't, you know, been there in that sense, because I certainly didn't have those skills. Yeah. And I think that he really did develop a and I look back on the advertising that we did in the brochures and so on. I think he did an excellent job. It was very, you know, it was very it stood out, I think at the time. Yeah. And so he was a good logo, good everything. I mean, it's yeah, I mean, people didn't understand the logo. And, you know, I think that was kind of a I think that was kind of nice in its own way. I mean, you don't necessarily have to ever then be terribly obvious in truth. And I explained this some years later was it was a foreigner album, which had kind of a black cover with this stylized block letter F on the front of it, where the sides, I think of the block letter where highlight with various colors, but you didn't actually see the true F itself. And so that's what we were shooting for with that with that logo. Whereas what some people saw, for example, was Pac-Man. For those old enough to remember Pac-Man. And or else some people saw mountains because, you know, we're in Vancouver. We have we have mountains. So I thought that was whatever it got to get people, whatever it took to get people talking, I think, was probably fair game, you know? Yeah, I see the T. I mean, I think it's awesome. It's kind of that using the shades. And I think there's that design thing where it's like they call it like the Kubert square where it's like it uses shading on the side to make the pyramids for the game. I think that's that's cool. I had not heard. I mean, I know what Kubert is, but never thought of it that way until just now. So that's a nice observation. Thank you. Yeah, we're still talking about it today. So that's how your brother helped. But let me before we even go forward, had you built drums before 1985? Or did you just kind of say I'm going to get into this? I'm a drummer. I know drums. That's a really good question. I think to go back to my early, my, my half drum set without a high hat and yeah, which was the brand name was I think bell tone, you know, one of the one of the big ones or orange or it had once been orange glitter, which had faded in the sunlight. You remember. Yeah. And so I had added on to this some, you know, there was an affordable line in those days called Baxter, which got a couple of floor toms for it in the second bass drum, because I'd seen Tommy Alder, John TV, you know. And so like most of the kids that I knew, at some point or another, I had completely stripped down the drum set, taken all the lugs off all of the drums because they were all mismatched, right? There are different finishes, different wraps, what happened? So we would we would get really high tech and rewrap an entire drum set with them. There was a product called MacTac, which was basically a plastic adhesive backed sheet, which was designed for kitchen shelves. Yep. But it came in black and red and you know, a couple of other, you know, there was just a it's just a flat, you know, there was no gloss to it at all. But it made it made it possible for you to sort of redesign your set in that really primitive way. So I've done that. And I had two 16 by 16 floor toms, and I wanted I wanted to differentiate the two. So I, you know, in my own clumsy way, I cut two inches off one of them to make it a 14 deep by 16 inch floor tommy. I mean, it was not not what you'd call an accurate job. But so I had done that sort of modification, you know, as a as a 14 year old or 15 year old or whatever. But that was as far as it really got in terms of trying to build or modify. I just kind of knew that that was without the tooling to do it. You know, it really wasn't wasn't my wasn't more my forte. So I just got on with playing. But the the when I when I bought the company, I had never I'd been in the milestone factor a few times, but I'd never I'd never had a look at what they were doing. And so fortunately, for me, the chap who at that point was doing the actual shelf fabrication, a man named Perry Baycroft, great guy. He was still with milestone in the end. And he came to work for me for about a well, I think about a year and a half. So when I first took it on, so he taught me the craft, essentially, you know, how to like, you know, from from from beginning to end, how to go about doing this, which I had, I've never messed with those sorts of materials at all. It's quite a it's quite a learning, quite a learning curve. But then, you know, once you've got it down, you can then you can start to experiment and elaborate and dream up new finishes. And new combinations of materials, which is kind of where it eventually went, which is what led me to ultimately the four, the four primary formulations that that existed in the in the end. So on that note of talking about the different materials and all that kind of stuff, why don't you explain a little bit to people who maybe are not familiar with Tempus basically what made you guys different? What were the materials maybe that you started with that were, you know, obviously what you're describing in in the 80s, and we'll kind of just keep going with the history from there. Yeah. So let's go back just briefly to the the origins of milestone percussion and this this drum shop called Drum Village. And next door to Drum Village was a a hair salon and this is relevant. And the the hair salon was also a, you know, supply store, what have you, but the the owner of this, the woman who owned the store, her husband was a man named John Soprovich, who was a plastics engineer of some kind. I think he'd done development work for NASA and people like that, you know. Wow. Yeah. So he was in the store one day and he, you know, he heard Michael sort of tuning up and whacking away on a snare drum. So he wanted next door to find out what all the the din was about. And he and he they got talking about this this snare drum, which was one of the early fives instruments. And I don't know whether you've much familiarity with the early five stuff. I mean, they were great drums, but the the manufacturing process was dumb. And again, meaning no disrespect to Bob Grosso, who I have met with a little on the primitive side and the insides, the insides of the shells were oftentimes weren't even finished. It was just raw, you know, like looking at the underside of a hot tub or something. So John Soprovich said to Michael Clapham, that's all fine and good. But if you were, you know, if you wanted to do it properly, here's how you'd here's how you'd go about it. And I still have the original drawings, sketches, notes that they made on on the hair salon stationary, where they where they cooked all this up where John laid it all out, the the methods and the means of doing this. And so the original milestone drums were all fiberglass. But they were built from the outside in. And so they were built on the inside of cylindrical molds. There's no there's no secret in this. It's the same way as that you would build a, you know, literally build a hot tub or or a or a boat body or a corvette or anything else. It's just a molding process. So the first thing that goes into the mold, and I used to joke with people about this, they would ask how their drums are coming along. I say, well, the finish is done, but I haven't put the shell inside it yet. So you loaded up a spray gun with with the the pigmented or glitter filled gel that that you were going to be working with, and you fired the you sprayed the finish into the mold. And then the next morning you would come in and and lay up as the as the terminology as it you would lay up the fiberglass shell itself with the resins, mats and cloths and what have you. So you were literally working from the outside in. And that definitely was unique at the time. And as I said earlier, I don't think there's anybody even doing that now. It takes quite a lot of equipment to do it. A lot of patience. But that that was how the whole thing got started. And those were the drums that you know, McCracken and Mercer and whoever else had bought and which inspired me. And that's why one of the reasons why I bought the company is one of because they because the sound the drums produced was unlike anything else that was really possible, because of the uniqueness of the approach and the materials involved. So the all of the the first five or six years of tempus instruments or what became tempest drums, I stuck to the fiberglass formula. And that was what we that was what we that was what we pushed. And that's what people liked. Now there was a bit of a hiatus where in nineteen nineteen by nineteen ninety two I had we had a bit of a recession, well more than a bit of a recession and I'd gotten pretty badly clobbered financially and I really had to I had to collapse it put it all in storage and go on to other things not really having a plan for continuing it because I don't know that I felt that I could at the time. So all of this gear went into storage and from ninety two, I think till maybe late ninety four, I didn't produce anything. And through circumstances, which perhaps I'll explain shortly, I was able to put the business back on its feet largely, I think, due to the existence by then of the internet, which had a profound effect on every aspect of my business, you know, being that size along with so many others, you know, life in general. Oh my it was I didn't even understand it at the time. I really didn't. I had gone back to school. I was working on it. I was, you know, at thirty four, thirty five at the time. I finally got around to going back to school, do some post-secondary. I was working on a degree in music therapy. But, you know, I also had family and three small children and a mortgage and, you know, real life consideration. So I was also having to find a way to support myself in nineteen ninety three. I went to work for a company for about twenty years. I managed a group home for three developmentally challenged adult men, which is great. Yeah, that's two had a profound effect on my life. And I got into that because of music. I mean, essentially everything I've done has been centered around music in one form or another or better or worse. Sure. The group home gig eventually led me into work as what used to be known as an SCA special education assistant. I worked with kids with a variety of learning and developmental disabilities in our local school system, which I finally I finally quit that gig just three months ago, actually. So we got sidetracked a bit there. But by nineteen ninety nineteen ninety four ninety five ish. I'm a bit foggy on it now. I was able to put tempus kind of back into back into operation. And now because, you know, advertising expenses were basically zero because of the the internet and word of mouth advertising, which you and I were chatting about earlier on and how incredibly effective that is. Chat rooms and forums and all I really needed to do is chime in now and again and offer some information and perhaps a few corrections to people who are already talking about me behind my back anyway. Well, you got to create a good product, which you've done. I like you think so. Yeah. Focus on as opposed to shouting from, you know, a rooftop saying my drums are great. Yeah. It's sort of slower. Yeah. The word of mouth, but it's 10 times as beneficial as as a lot of self promotion. Ultimately, I agree with you completely. And I sort of, you know, as I went along, I sort of had to learn how to to to use the power of that to my advantage. You know, I mean, obviously, I was a businessman, you have to, you know, you have to learn these strategies as you go. And it was all new stuff because the the internet was new stuff. It was it was it had never been possible before just to let people to let people run with it. And on a, you know, ultimately on a on a kind of a global basis, you know, which was incredibly powerful and quite surprising in its reach. So by 9596, I think, and I don't quite know where the idea came from, maybe because I was visiting my supplier one day and they had rolls of carbon fiber, which I'd never really thought about before. I knew what it was, you know, they used it for hockey sticks and space shuttles, I think. But it turns out that it, it works very well in a drum shell the way I was doing it back then. What it allowed for was a, because it's got greater tensile strength than the fiberglass alone, it allowed for a thinner shell. So whereas the milestone shells were, I guess, maybe a little over an eighth of an inch thick, and didn't need any reinforcing rings, which again was something unique, you know, unless you were dealing with a metal shell, you shells didn't have that kind of structural, you know, the collapse. Just by nature. Yeah, exactly. They just couldn't, couldn't handle the tensions of the heads, especially snare drums. So the milestone shell, again, you know, completely unique in that way. And for me to be able to offer a shell, which was thinner, with the benefit being that basic, you know, I'm no acoustics engineer, you probably know an infinite, infinitely more than I do about this, but the thinner the shell, essentially, the lower the fundamental pitch. Yeah. So if you can build a shell thinner than an eighth of an inch, maybe, maybe shave, you know, 20, 25% off that, then you've created again, another different sounding instrument. And so later on, I kind of took that I keep saying we, which is a bit, it's a bit like the royal way, because it's you, though. Well, it's just a habit, you know, I'm the same way, though, where I don't personally want to, like, point my finger and take credit for anything, which I think even with the podcast, I say we, but it's literally it's only me. But I get that I think that's that points to you being a down to earth guy, where it's like, I get what you mean, it makes it also makes you seem bigger. I'm not sure what to make of it. I mean, I honestly, in all of 20, what did I do it for about 28 years? I think in all that time, I actually had employees, including Perry Bacroft for that first year and a half, I think I had employees for about three years. Okay. Outside of that, I did absolutely all of it myself. And that totaled in the end, my tenure, that was almost seven, that was almost 7,500 instruments. Wow. Which is a fair amount of output for, for an operation that size, I think. But yeah, with with one person, let me ask you to so when I think carbon fiber, I think, I think now modern days, it's, it's, they use it a lot in like cars and certain parts to be lighter. And it's a really expensive material, isn't it? It is. Yeah. You know, carbon fiber bike frames and things like that tend to be quite expensive. There are different, there are different weights of as there are with fiberglass and a lot of other materials are different weights of carbon fiber. And you can buy it as cloth, you can buy it as what's called unidirectional, I think they still call it that. There's, there's, you know, you can buy the extremely heavy stuff, which is more likely to be used if you're building planes for Boeing that, you know, it just different, different needs. But the amount of fiberglass, the amount of carbon fiber, I'm sorry, that I needed for the average drum meant that it didn't disproportionately or unafortably drive up the cost. So the carbon fiber shells, the way I was dealing with it, really were only, I think, about 20%, 25% more expensive than their fiberglass equivalent. And so later on, when I, again, probably visiting that same supplier, and now they had a role of carbon Kevlar, which I had known of, but hadn't thought about using, because it's actually quite difficult to work with. So I tried that too. And again, that made for the possibility of an even thinner shell. And again, with a with a different set of sound sort of acoustic and sound properties. So that would that was fascinating as well. And then the last addition to all of that was the fourth line, if you like, was hemp, which is, which is really just an easy, easy material to work with in the way that I was working with is very, very enjoyable. But again, it was all in pursuit of, you know, what can we create in the way of new sounds here? It's, it wasn't just to be clever or try and be different. It was ultimately the goal was to create something which sounded good. And not not like I'm glad you said it because on the surface, someone would say, Oh, a hemp drum, what a gimmick. But I don't get the feeling at all that that's what you were after. But so with these materials, and I know, well, I guess virtually nothing about carbon fiber, carbon Kevlar, like, maybe talk a little bit about how you take I know you said there's different thicknesses and stuff. But like, just in general, like, how do you take this like carbon fiber, if it was like a fabric, and make it into a rigid drum? I mean, are you wrapping it around a form and then spraying it with like a hardening agent? I mean, I don't I don't I think a lot of people probably don't know anything. How do you make this into a drum? It's a it's a secret. If I told you, I'd have to come and visit you and you'd have to you'd have to pour me a glass of scotch. It's as I mentioned, we all built on the inside of cylindrical molds, right? So you spray, you spray in the finish. Got it. That would generally be done at the end of the day, because then it's got overnight to cure. And then the next morning, what you're actually doing is you're is you're taking fiberglass mat, which is a fairly heavy, well, well, again, you know, different weights and gauges and so on. Matt, which you cut to lengths and widths, and fiberglass cloth or carbon fiber cloth or carbon kebab or hemp, and you cut these materials to the lengths that you need to encircle the inside of the mold. So that's your that's your first step. And then what's actually what's actually supporting or suspending these materials is a resin. In my case, not epoxy resins, which are quite difficult to work with, but isotholic resins. So this is a catalyzed, basically, it's a liquid plastic and you add a catalyst, a hardener. And you can pigment it, for example, all the early, all of the early tempestrums were black on the inside, because it seems sort of visually agreeable and, you know, sleek. Yeah. And it's set nicely against the external finishes, you know, but it turns out that you can also you can you can pigment your resin any number of other colors, sort of to match the outside. If you're dealing with a solid white or a solid blue or a red or something, you can pigment the resin that way, which some people really like. And it also turns out that if you add the same glitter flakes that you're using in your finish to the resin, you can create something very, very close to the external glitter finish running through the shell. So in some ways, the finish could conceivably be said to run right the way through the shell, which, again, doesn't necessarily help the sound in any way that I want, not that my ear could detect, but just a perhaps an unusual feature. Not many companies can say that. So yeah, which that's, you know, we're, we're visual people. We are. And we like our glitters and our finishes and are taking the head off and looking at it. And part of the beauty of it for me being that everything was was built to order. I very rarely built anything that hadn't already been specified by a customer. What that did was that meant that when the customer reached out to me, email or phone call or whatever, and we were discussing what they wanted to see in the finished product, it meant that there were so many different possible approaches that could be taken to getting it exactly the way they wanted it, you know, do you want the finish to go through the shell? How do you want it done? Do you want, you know, all of these different options that that might for some have been a bit confusing because, you know, obviously, most people are not accustomed to being able to have that much say into what's being made for them. Yeah. But for me, it was, it was, well, you know, do you want it white on the inside? Do you want it black, blue? Do you want it to glitter on the inside? You know, you want it? Do you want it to be sort of translucent? Do you want it to be opaque? And again, I think that perhaps that became novel and unappealing in the eyes of the, you know, the people who were my biggest fans, you know. Yeah. But you didn't sacrifice quality for a gimmick is everything that I've understood from reading about it and kind of looking back as it's still, it wasn't like, oh, there's those gimmicky, oh, he glitters on the inside of the drum, big, big whoop. It was still, it was just like bare minimum, it sounds good. And then on top of that, you had some really cool features. Yeah, I think that sums it up well. I mean, to me, the only thing that mattered was the sound. What are we, you know, what are we creating here? And, you know, somebody's going to take this instrument into a studio or out in a live situation, or even if they're just playing it in their home music room, you know, the goal was to give them something which was, I thought, which is why I bought the, you know, the company and why I'd originally had a set built, which I thought was special. Yeah. And which I thought was important. And in the end, that's really, ultimately, beyond all of the rest of it, was the only thing that mattered. This episode is brought to you by Dream Symbols. I want to talk a little bit about the Dream Symbols Recycling Program. The Recycling Program is simple, bring your broken or unwanted symbols, all brands accepted into your local dream dealer, and you can earn $1 for every inch of symbol you bring in towards the purchase of a new Dream Symbol. For example, bring in two 20-inch symbols for recycling and receive $40 off the price of a new Dream Symbol. It's that easy. They, in turn, take the symbols recycled and use them to create new products like the ReFX crop circles and the naughty saucers. Check them out online at dreamsymbols.com and follow them on social media at Dream Symbols. While we're on construction and stuff, let's talk about the hemp for a little bit because, obviously, just from a social standpoint in the world, it being kind of a, I don't know, it's less now, but in the 90s, it's sort of taboo. I know that hemp is, we all know that hemp is different from the marijuana that you smoke. It's more of the rope and the fiber and the paper and stuff. What was that process like of getting the hemp, creating it, working with it, public reaction to it, all that stuff? Well, yeah, all good questions. First of all, it turned out that hemp as a raw material in various weights of cloth and so on is easily and readily available from quite a few suppliers. Because it's used so much now as a textile and clothing manufacturer and so on, there's an enormous market for the stuff and so I was able simply to, I can't remember the name of the supplier now, I'm sorry, but they were so easy to deal with and I explained what I was looking for and obviously the quantities that I was going to be buying were not going to be four or five rolls of this stuff at the time and they couldn't have been more supportive. They just got such a kick out of the idea that I was doing this. So it was not, tracking it down was not difficult and in and of itself, it's not an expensive material. So the hemp shells that I built were the same price point as fiberglass shells, which was nice too. What I will add at this point just briefly is that one of the most common questions I used to get, especially when there were the four lines, how would I describe the relative sound properties of the four lines? Very, very logical. And how does that relate to, for example, other products that are out there? And so what I used to tell people was that the basic fiberglass shell to my ear, and everybody hears these things differently, but to my ear it sounded like the missing link between a high-end wood and a high-end metal shell. In other words, it still had all of the, what I would think of as the most desirable qualities of wood shell, the warmth and all of those qualities, but it had the sort of the articulation and the clarity, I suppose, of what I associate with metal. I've got an old acrylite downstairs, which I love it. It's not something I would play live, for one thing, it's the wrong size for me. But as a sound, and I think that goes back to one of my earliest inspirations was Clive Bunker with Jethro Tull, who I think in truth is probably the reason I became a drummer in the first place. He played an acrylite for many, many years. And yet I didn't want to play metal drums, because they were just too, I think they were just too hard-edged for me. I own a few, but I don't use them. And I also, I had played a lot of wood drums too. And again, meaning no disrespect to any of these incredible manufacturers out there, it just didn't quite fire me up the way I wanted it to. And so when I first heard the milestone drums, that was kind of it, and still is. I rarely play on anything other than drums that I've built. So the tracking down of the material was not a difficult proposition. The end result was that as you went from fiberglass to carbon fiber to carbon kevlar to hemp, you kind of moved from that missing link point that I kind of created, I suppose, as a starting point. You moved slowly further towards the wood end of the spectrum, I think. With hemp being the most wood-like of the four lines that I created. Now again, I mean, we're talking about sound, which is ridiculous. People perceive it differently. Yeah, people perceive it differently. Actually, one of the really interesting things that we did, here's that wee again. Here's that mythical, the royal wee. We were so amused. A buddy of mine suggested that like a taste test, the old Coke Pepsi tab or whatever it was. So at one point, there were two identical five by 14 snare drum shells, one in black fiberglass and the other in a black wrap was a wood shell. And there were two identical, I think perhaps nine by 13 shells. Again, identical black, one of them was fiberglass, one of them was wood. And to trot these things out to trade shows and kind of had them in the front of the booth and let people try them out. Because there were various opinions about whether fiberglass was too harsh or people's kind of preconceived notions about what they might be getting into. And what was fascinating about this, the Tempest taste test as people started calling it was that they would try out these drums, it tuned identically the same heads, you know, same, same wires, same throw offs, all of it. I would say probably, probably 65 70% of the time, the ones that they decided were the warmest, the best sounding were not the wood shells. Interesting. And it was nothing to do with me. There weren't any badges on it. It was no the same logs all around, but let them decide with their own ears. And so I thought that was quite enlightening for me, but certainly for those who came along and had a bash. Yeah, and maybe there's something to it of like your brain is like, I've heard this type of wood snare so many times that you're drawn to something that's a little different, which I'm sure they're all, I'm sure they all sounded great. Every drum that was tested, I'm sure is nice and sounds good. But still, you're kind of like, ooh, that's different. I like that one. Well, you know, I think being different is perhaps exactly the point. I mean, Mr. Estrada, who we spoke of earlier, who I think connected you and me. Yes. And I don't know how big his collection is, but I think it's something along the lines of about 10 tempest drum sets, and something remarkable, like 30 snare drums, you know, and he's got snare drums of all different sizes and compositions and different depths and what have you. Yeah, which shout out to him, Mr. Rodel, Rude Estrada goes by Rude, which is just a cool nickname there. Thank you to Rude for connecting us and coming up with this idea. And this came together very fast because Paul is just on it and very friendly and easy to work with. So thank you to Rude. But, but yeah, that's, that's quite the collection he's got. It is. But I mean, it's, you know, and I mean, he perhaps is a bit more of a aficionado, shall we say, than most. But what I find is that my drums, for example, will be part of pretty diverse arsenals, where you've got a lot of metals and a lot of woods and a lot of different brands and a lot of maybe even acrylics and things like that. And, you know, and especially among players who work a lot in different settings or wind up in studios in different settings. For example, you're probably familiar with Dave Mattox, a pal of mine. And he has a generally keeps a collection of about 100 snare drums because you need 100 snare drums. Obviously, it's the law. I mean, we don't make the laws. We just, but Dave had me build him a couple of shells kind of quite a while ago now. One in carbon fiber and one in fiberglass. And but they were part of, you know, he might turn up at a studio session with with 10 drums in tow and they would all be radically different from one another, just in case he needed or perhaps specifically because he knew that he needed something which only one of them did. So I never did tout my work as being better, only that it was unique, that it was different, that there was nothing else like it because it makes no sense to try and say that a tempestrum is better than a sonar drum or atomic. It's an absurd concept, you know. And so I was always perfectly happy to know that whatever I was creating was going out there and being part of a really cool collection in so many cases. Yeah. Yeah, because those other guys are great. I just, and you got a great attitude about all of it of there's, there's not, there doesn't need to be competition. There's room for all of these people. Like if there was just one or two brands, what's the fun in that? I mean, and we're all, we love to collect. We love to buy drums. We love to try different things. So, you know, as long as you make a good product, then it's great. So then how did the last part of my question, how was it publicly received? Did people kind of, did it take a little bit of like pushing in the taste test and the trying to get people to kind of warm up to a hemp drum or how do you think the public reaction was? Oddly enough, I don't think it was much of a push at all. I think that it was, people were so intrigued by it. And of course there was, you know, there was a lot of joking, the connotation connected with, with, you know, the smokable, but of course they're radically different, they're radically different materials. They have no, there are no similar physical properties of any description. And there was a, somebody came up with the idea at one point that we should build a, we should build a, how long is it going to take me to break that? Just go with it. Just go with it. We built a five, I think it was a five by 10 inch hemp snare drum, which for a very short while was called the BC Buddy, which as a reference to a certain local product line that is popular throughout North America. That's funny. So we toyed with the idea of sending them out in a big baggy with a 20 inside, but I don't think it ever got to that. But the reception was, I don't think it was ever any hesitance on the part of somebody who caught a mint of it. And I think that, you know, this goes back to the kind of customer that I was incredibly fortunate to have. You know, I was going to say earlier on, when you've got this, I suppose we'd have to call it a bias of sorts towards wood, right? I mean, 90% of the drums in the world even now are made out of various forms of wood, a lot of maple. But, you know, Alan Holdsworth used to have this, this wonderful expression that people often listen with their eyes. Sure. Kind of stole that from him. Yeah. And I think that's true. And it's not meant to be, you know, not meant to be dismissive in any way, but the kind of drummer who would end up coming to me had probably already been through a lot of other options and was looking for something alternative and looking for something that stood out. And so there were perhaps in some ways a little more open-mindedness there than somebody who simply was going to buy, for example, Pearl just because, you know, so-and-so played Pearl. And again, that's the endorser, that's the power of endorsement, and it works. And it's, and I don't mean to disrespect that, but I mean, I tried this in the early days with, you know, because Tempest never really had a small number of prominent players who played the drums, and it'll still do, I think, in a lot of cases, which was incredibly generous and supportive of them. Again, only because of what they heard. But I thought that what we would do in about the third year is introduce something called Tempest 2, which was, quite frankly, an attempt to build a another line with much less expensive hardware and foregoing the inner cosmetic layer on the shell and cutting a few other costs. It was an attempt to try and reach the market that might have been kind of the mid-range products that Tom and Pearl were putting out. I think it might have been Tom or Rockstar, things like that. Sure. Maybe not the first drum set with no hi-hat. Exactly. Yeah, not that one. I mean, the Pearl export set, which had been, it was already, I think, in place by the time I bought the Milestone Company in 85, and it was just incredibly successful. It upended the industry. Perhaps detrimentally, sometimes I look back on it, and I think these entry-level sets were so affordable that they kind of hampered the same manufacturer's ability to sell its high-end products. Yeah, but the other side of that is it got people into the drums who maybe five years later would have bought your drum. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. It's sort of a necessary, I don't want to say a necessary evil because I know everyone listening to this is like, I had a Pearl export, but I see, that's interesting, though, to hear that from your perspective as a manufacturer saying, okay, well, people, it diluted it a little bit to then make it, oh, I can buy a cheaper drum set that sounds good, put some nice heads on it, it'll be great. Yeah. But it also, those people then need to, they're going to grow out of it and then buy nicer drums. So it's sort of- And let's face it, I mean, you can buy a set of drums even now for four or $500 complete with hardware and all the rest of it. And it's quite, honestly, when you walk around the NAMM show or the Frankfurt music mess, you look at these products and they're actually gorgeous. Oh, of course. And they're especially more now than ever. Oh, yeah. I mean, they're just beautifully finished, but then you're still getting what you pay for in terms of materials quality and thus the sound that you're creating. And so there's room for us all, really, in that kind of hierarchy, in that terms of marketplace. But the tempest too, lying, I think I set out to, there, I've stopped saying weak, I think I set out to build 100 sets of generally either five-piece sets or five-piece sets with a couple of add-on drums. And as luck would have it, we have a national music store chain up here called Long and McQuade, brilliant, brilliant operation. And they were tremendously supportive of and sold an enormous amount of tempest product in the early days. In fact, the Vancouver store, routinely for the first couple of years that I was in operation, Tempest outsold Pearl Export, which I still find quite remarkable. And unbelievable, really. But the tempest two kits, I mean, I sold all 100 or so sets. There's none of them left now. And did you, so before, all right, Tempest one. Tempest one, yeah, regular tempest. You made those, those were custom order kits. Pretty all of them. All of them. Now, the second batch, Tempest two, was you made standard sizes. Those were like your, and then you distributed those to music stores, right? That's right. Yeah. And also, you know, there was a lot of sales to direct sales to end users, because we didn't, we didn't, we are, we are back. There was not a, there was not an enormous retail network. So, you know, you sold it, sold it any way you could. But Longham and McQuade decided this is brilliant. This could go straight into our rental program. I, I don't know how many of the Tempest two sets Longham and McQuade bought, but they all went into rentals for about four or five years after which they were sold to customers who still have them. So this, this kind of slightly lower budget drum set that was built as an experiment is still out there. People are still playing them. What are we now, 30 some odd years later? Wow. And so that was, that was quite extraordinary too. But what I learned, and I had hoped that this, this mid-level product would entice more interest in the high level product. But here's the thing, you know, it didn't quite work because in point of fact, the, the, the kind of endorsement profile, that sort of marketing strength that the bigger companies had, which would make it possible, I thought for them to, to sell the various lines that they had, I didn't have that. And so it, you know, it was, it was a, it was a wonderful experiment. I had no regrets that it was done at all. And I'm still proud of the fact that those kits are, they lasted this long. I mean, what, what were they? So you might have said this, but what was the material used for tempest too? Was it just fiberglass? Yeah, it was the same essential shell as the high end product, but you know, left out the pigment in the resin on the inside and didn't, didn't use the fiberglass for the finishing cloth on the inside. And I brought in an imported line of assortment of hardware legs and other, other, you know, generic lugs and so on, which you can buy even now from, from manufacturers in Taipei, you know, it's extremely well made stuff, obviously. But that was, that made it possible for me to sell these kits at about half of what the high end gear would go for. Sure. Wow. So a great experiment, but not, not as successful in the way that I had perhaps hoped it would be. So to be the next pearl export or something. Live and learn, right? Yeah, but that's, that's a good, good attitude that you had. So all right, I want to go push forward towards the, I mean, this is, this is one of those episodes where you blink and time is just flying by where it's going fast. But what I want to ask though is, so I want to get towards the end of the company, which, which as we'll learn never really fully, it just sort of dissolved a little bit from what I've understood. But let's talk about, you said there was some big players playing the drums throughout those, you know, that almost 30 years. What, who were some of those players, some of those big name players that we might know about who were using Tempest Drums? If we think of the big names, the household names, the Tommy Alderges, people of that stature, a lot of these guys I did, I did build drums for. Sometimes because I offered them the drums in the hopes of interesting them. Sometimes just because I wanted to thank them somehow for being such an inspiration to me. So there were, you know, quite a few of the, the those guys who I would have built instruments for, but who didn't actually play the drums. But so we, now we're looking at guys like Manny Elias with Tears for Fears, who was the first one to phone me when they were, they were coming through Vancouver, I think in probably the 85 early 86 or something on the songs from the big chair tour and prime time. Yeah. I mean, it was brilliant. I mean, I had been a fan of the band since the first album. So to get this phone call from, from Manny's drum tech. That was my first, that was my first real connection to somebody of that stature. And Manny's got, I think he lives in England, he's still got, I think, all four of the sets that he got from me and a bunch of snare drum, still takes them out, you know, as and when he can, whenever he's doing sessions, not touring so much these days, but Gordie Knudsen, who's been, you know, he was an on call session player at Paisley Park in Minneapolis and has been with Steve Miller for a long, long time. Gordie's had, I think, five sets built by me and just, you know, couldn't have been more supportive. Truly guys like that. So not the household names, but the guys that I think of more as being kind of almost not behind the scenes either, but in that really, in the trenches working, you know, a lot of studio players, I mentioned Dave Maddox and, you know, and, you know, never, he wanted the two snare drums because that's really a, that's really an enthusiasm of his snare drum. Well, just you saying enthusiasm, I was just about to say these guys are enthusiasts or they're interested in just trying different things. And the cool thing is, is it sounds like they all ordered multiple, like they liked it. And then they came back. So that's, that speaks a lot to that. So that's, that's a great answer. Yeah. I used to joke in the, in the end that the, you know, the first one probably should have been free because the number of guys who came back for one or two or three or five or, you know, in, in Mr. Estrada's case, Lord knows how many 30 or something. And, but he's, he's not alone. There's a man in, there's a man named Steve Haulingworth in Ottawa who, not a lot of people know about him, but he's, he's been incredibly busy and incredibly successful as a, as a session player. I think he's got 11 drum sets all under the milestone name and, you know, and it's, it's, you know, it's his, his, one of them is about the, you know, he kind of decided to build himself sort of a, an SS Bozio rig, which is, I don't think it ever leaves his house. I've been to his house and tried to play this thing. It's colossal. Those are too big to take two again. Yeah. You don't take that down to the local pub really. No, man, that's awesome. Okay. Well, so why don't you bring it on home here? What, what made you decide that to kind of throw in the towel on manufacturing drums? You had a great run and, and like I said, very well respected. What happened towards the end? Um, I think to simplify it, I think I was tired. You think about that span of 85 to 2012, when I finally made this decision, very, very reluctantly, I might add, was not an easy thing to decide. But if you think about the, you know, the, you imagine the ups and downs and that the, the battles fought and then occasionally triumphs throughout that time and, you know, small operation working alone. It's exhausting. Yeah, it is. And there were, I think, three kind of recessionary periods, economic recessions. The last one, that 2007, 2008, when kind of the global fiasco that took place. And, you know, my, my, you know, I knew it would, but my business kind of sort of dropped by 50% overnight. There was nothing I could do to, to stop that. I expected it. I was kind of prepared for it. Now, fortunately for me over the coming few years, I was able to bounce back at you know, 15, 18% a year, which was well above the industry kind of average at that point. The joke in those days was that flat is the new up in terms of growth. Not down. Not down, but yeah, flat is the new up. So yeah, people were, you know, the companies were suffering. People were not really buying gears. So for me to rebound as I did, you know, small increments on fairly small modest sales figures, nonetheless, but, but it just got to the point where I knew by early, early 2012 that I had had enough. I really, I really had had enough. And, and I, I truly, in the, in the, in the literal sense of the word, I agonized over the decision for a couple of months. It's tough. It's your baby. It is. And it's, you know, you've fought so hard for it, but it had been, you know, I was, I was very proud. I still am a very proud of, of what we, I, whoever accomplished. But I just couldn't do it anymore. You know, it was time to, to stop and, and try to live life for a while without that. And, you know, my, none of my family, you know, my wife, my kids, none of them had ever known me without that presence. Yeah. That's interesting. Puts you through a lot of, you know, you do a lot of growing. I was 28 when I started the company. Pretty young. Yeah. And so, yeah, the decision was made that this was going to be it. And I think if I remember, which might or might not be accurate, but I think it was March of 2012 when I decided to make the announcement, I didn't want to make the announcement on the anniversary of the company starting, which was April 1st, because I didn't necessarily think people would take it seriously. Yeah. That's the April Fool's. Yeah. Gotcha. Yeah. Because I'm not a fan of April Fool's anyway. So I made the announcement, I think in March, ironically, I think it was, I have this memory that it was about the same time that Davey Jones passed away. So I think I got kind of lost in the shuffle there anyway. Yeah. You got bumped to the second page of the newspaper. I was a huge and I still am a huge fan of the monkeys. Absolutely. So I made this decision and I remember sitting in the office on that morning and having put together this memo for my mailing list and I remember pushing send and how heavy an experience that was. It really, it floored me to be honest with you, the weight of it. But I had to do it. I just had to do it. And I think I put something like a six-month time limit on new orders with the prospect of anybody who still wanted something would then have time to acquire it. And then that would give me another six months to perhaps finish up those orders and dismantle it. And then of course, as these things go, within a short period of time, there were some offers of some expressions of interest in terms of perhaps buying the company. Sure. Full circle. Full circle and some strong interest. But of course, the economics of it just didn't work. And I think in some sense is the danger of it. Again, we come back to that the global love of the already established materials and those products. And I think there's great danger in trying to do something which doesn't fit that niche. So in the end, although we came close, I think there just wasn't any way to have it go further. And so, it eventually kind of not so much stopped as faded away. Yeah, which that's like, sometimes it happens with bands where it's just kind of like, it's just like, all right, it's, I mean, you had a really good run though. And I did. Yeah. You were very early in the boutique sort of drum world, which I've had the GMS drums guys on. Great guys. And similar where I don't think people realize sometimes that like with pork pie and these like you guys were all boutique and small and doing it before it was hip. Yeah, I think so. I think you're right. And I mean, I take some pride in that. And of course, Michael Clapham and, you know, based on John Soprowich's little idea, I mean, he had the vision to start that. And that was in 1972, 73, in a place like Vancouver. We're not talking about LA. We're talking about a fairly, by most people's consideration, a fairly remote place. And who the hell starts a drum company in Vancouver? Well, it turns out three of us did. Myself and Ray Ayotte later on, and my old friend Ron Donette, you know, I was gonna say, that's Ron Territory. Ron Territory. He lives just a few miles south of me. And he's done admirably well. Again, he set out to do something unique. He started with his titanium. And I mean, that was his focus. He very wisely carved out his own territory. That does some beautiful work. So yeah. So yeah, but it got to the point where I just, I didn't want to do it anymore. I, you know, it wasn't as simple as I quit. But then, perhaps it shouldn't have been anyway, you can't just leave people, you know, I'm out of here, you know, you had this, and even now, I mean, I still have some, I still have remaining shells, not too many of them anymore. But every few weeks, somebody comes along, wants to buy something for a do it yourself project. And I'm perfectly happy to see that go out the door. Eventually, though, there will be nothing. And then we really will be not in business anymore. So but it's, it's so, it's so, it's so fascinating to me. And I'm so, I'm so appreciative of the fact that I still hear daily through Facebook or Twitter or for email or however, from, from, from all of these players around the world that, that, you know, still have such strong feelings for a strong attachment to the work that I did. I mean, you can't really ask for much more than that, can you? No, and that's the beauty. That's the, there's a lot of negative stuff that can come with like Facebook and all this political stuff that happens. But the beauty of social media is, is our community, even zooming in further. There's the Tempest Facebook page where there's some really cool photos and just passionate people. So that's awesome. Well, Paul is going to hang out with us for a couple extra minutes and per usual on the show he's going to, we're going to record a Patreon bonus episode where I think the topic is going to be, you know, you're not, you don't just come out of the gate and you're a master at using like carbon fiber and fiberglass. So I want to hear kind of some of the stories about, you know, how you learned this. And I know it's like infamously itchy to use fiberglass and all that stuff. So if you want to check out that bonus episode, which we're about to do, you can go to drumhistorypodcast.com and there's a Patreon link and you can join up there for as little as $2 a month and get that and goes higher from there for more perks. But on that note, Paul, I have had a Magnum Tempest, which is Latin for a great time. I like that. Thank you very much. Also, googled that. I know no Latin. But I see a new line of t-shirts, I think. Magnum Tempest. So thanks for coming on and sharing your knowledge. This is like, I am just, you know, beyond pumped for it. And thank you to Mr. Rude Estrada for getting this idea out there. Yeah. And I've really enjoyed it. I'm, you know, as I said earlier, I'm so incredibly appreciative even now that anybody still cares. And just great pride that I took in my work. And I'm just so pleased to know that there are still so many out there who play the drums. That's all that matters, man. Take them out and play them. Go and have fun with it. Exactly. And they're still holding up. Oh, indestructible. They'll, they'll out, well, my, my sets will outlive me by a long shot. Cool. All right. Well, thank you, Paul. Yeah. My pleasure. Thank you. 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.