 Hello and welcome to the drum history podcast. I'm your host Bart van der Zee and today I am joined by Mr. Rob Beerenbaum. Rob, welcome to the podcast. Thanks, Bart. Glad to be here. I enjoy your podcast, so this should be fun. Oh, thank you. Appreciate it. So right up front, I'll say what we're going to be talking about. You've got an amazing background as you started the drum headquarters in St. Louis, which was 81 to 2005. I owned it. I sold it in 2005, correct? Okay. And then what really, I mean, that's super interesting in itself right there, but what really got my, you know, my interest peaked if we got to get this guy on the show was starting HQ Percussion, which is like real feel practice pads and sound off drum set silencers. Almost like, I mean, real feel practice pads are like a ubiquitous kind of like everyone had one at some point in their life kind of deal. So which I don't know which which comes first in the series of events and all that stuff, but why don't we just dive in and just tell us your story and how all this happened with your background? Sure. Well, like most people from my era, I'm a product of February 9th, 1964, the day that the Beatles first appeared on American television. And that caused me to want to be a drummer. And I think about that every year on February 9th. This year, I started thinking that was like an incredible, organic viral sensation. There was obviously no internet. But what was there? Three television stations, most cities had one or two newspapers, there was radio and there were magazines that come, some came out once a week, some came out once a month. But this groundswell about the Beatles was just incredible. Like 73 million people in America watched that show and the population was under 200 million. So that, you know, if that was today, that would have been well over 130 million people more than ever watched the Super Bowl. So that event kind of catapulted, it just, it changed the music industry. It changed my life and it changed the music industry. And what was interesting is that my trajectory was kind of parallel with that of the music industry, because prior to the Beatles, the music industry was quote, band and orchestra, brass, woodwinds, strings and percussion. And it flipped. That was the big paradigm shift. And it became what's called combo guitars, amps, drums, and then later portable keyboards. So, you know, like a lot of kids from that era, I started playing in bands, did it all the way through high school, did it through college. And I started working in a drum shop in St. Louis in my junior year of college called Mr. Drums. It's long gone. And I only worked there 14 months because I left then to go to graduate school. But I learned a lot during those 14 months, things that I carried on into my business. And I think it's worthwhile to point out the two things that I that I learned. The first one was you can't take advantage of every deal. In the music industry and a lot of businesses, the suppliers offer special deals to stimulate sales, to move dead merchandise, just to maybe gain real estate in a store or today on a website. But you got to be careful about taking advantage of every deal. Because when I started working at Mr. Drums in April of 74, three, I noticed three premier drum sets on the floor. And at that time, the market was dominated by the big American three, Ludwig Rogers Slingerlin. Kretch was a player, but not along the lines of the first three. And then Premier was an outlier. And Sonar was an outlier even beyond Premier. But the owner of the store had just come back from a trip to the Premier factory in England, because he had gotten in on a deal where you bought 12 premier kits, you get one a month and you got a free trip to England. That's a that's a heck of a deal. Yeah, that's a pretty good deal. He paid a little extra and his wife went. But you know, I started in April. And there were three premier kits on the floor, the one from January, the one from February, the one from March. And three, three months later, there were six premier kits on the floor. And before you knew it, we were choking on Premier kits. And I'm all and I'm all for doing what other people don't do and introducing new products, but committing to 12 Premier kits in that market was not a prudent choice. No, I mean, selling one Premier kit a month. And there's again, for all the Premier listeners like Mike Ellis, who did a Premier episode, if you're listening, Premier is great. We love it. I loved Premier. But one a month. I mean, when I worked at music source, selling, I mean, you want to sell kits, but like a lot of people are buying the cheapo beginner kits and things. So I think that don't take advantage of every deal is actually true in kind of like life. Exactly. Exactly. You've got to be careful. I mean, it's, it's, it's enticing. But it's not a deal in the retail world. It's not a deal until you sell it. I mean, buying is really important. The art of buying that everybody talks about. Sure, you have to buy right. But you can buy great. If you don't sell it, it ain't a deal. So, but yeah, back to Premier just for a second, the chrome plating was awesome. They had diecast tubes on the higher end kits. Nobody had them at that time. The drums had a classy look. They were beautiful, but the public was ingrained on Ludwig Rogers Slingerlin. We eventually worked through them, but, but there were a lot of Premier kits there. But the most important thing that I learned there was don't stray too far from your core mission. And this, this store was doing really, really well. There was another drum shop in town that had just started Fred Pierce who's still in business today 50 years later. Kudos to Fred. But Fred was a full-time player and it just moved back to St. Louis and Mr. Drums was really dominant. Somehow the owner got the idea to open a full-line music store, guitars, amps, portable keyboards, PA. And he that that's risky enough, but that kind of makes some sense. So, but he chose a market like 25 miles from where he was across the Missouri River and the farthest west reaches of what's called St. Charles County, which today is well developed. But this was a new development with new homes and a lake. And so the location was suspect doing a full-line music store with suspect and to further complicate matters, he added pianos and home organs. So big, a lot of real estate there. Unbelievable. And the piano and organ business is almost a separate industry from the musical instrument industry. So he took on so much that it killed Mr. Drums. I left, I only worked like I said, I was only there 14 months, but I left the following June and four or five months later, they were out of business. And not not because I left by any means. It was it was I went I went to graduate school because I thought I would, you know, have a professional career and and the store was spiraling before I left because everything we did was that the the new store was in an area called Lake St. Louis. And we used to joke in the store that everything we did was going into the lake. And that's what it was. Yeah. But you could like take the good things and you you witnessed how the industry works and what not to do. I learned what to do and I learned what not to do because the owner was strong on education. He was a talented machinist and mechanic. So he was great at customizing drums and repairing drums. So I learned what I learned what to do, but I also learned what not to do. And I kind of kept that in the back of my mind. Sure. Got a master's degree, started working in a research firm. And after about four years of that, I kind of decided that a bad day around drums was better than a good day around research. So I had been thinking about, you know, opening my own store ever, even back when I was working at Mr. Drums. But a second drum shop had opened in town after Fred Pierce got established and after Mr. Drums closed. And I thought, well, there goes my opportunity because St. Louis can't support more than two drum shops. But this other one was located too close to Fred within a few miles in the Northwest suburb kind of. But I started teaching at this store, Ken Mazzinas, a great guy. He had a really strong educational program. But after a few months there, I realized he really didn't have a handle on the retail component. He really didn't understand it. And I decided I just needed to maybe go ahead and do this. So pre-internet again, I got a map of St. Louis out. I got a bunch of pushpins. And I put a pushpin where each of the two drum shops were. And then I put a pushpin where all of the full line music stores that had strong drum departments were located. Because that was a thing back then. There were some really great full line music stores that had great drum departments. And I mapped it out, put all the pushpins in and just jumping out at me was the central part of the county kind of where I lived and hung out. There were no music stores. And this was like right near a major highway close to the clubs, close to the kind of apartments where musicians live, direct in line with all the major venues where national and regional acts play. And I thought this is crying out for a music store. So I quit my job, my research job. And I told Ken Mosinus that I was going to quit teaching, obviously, because I was going to open a store. And so I opened drum headquarters in January of 1981, which is kind of odd to do it in January. But post-Christmas, I guess, and all that. But it's smart what you did, though, in general. Because sometimes seems obvious, but not everyone has that thought of like, sometimes people would think, I'm going to do this drum store and I live here, so I'm going to do it five minutes from my house. But you really need to look at it and go, no, it needs to be smart. It happened to be fairly close to where I lived and where I hung out. But it just was the right area. And I've talked to other people around the country. I mean, Dana Bentley at Bentley's Drum Shop in Fresno did the same thing. He moved from another city because he knew that that market. And Shane at Drum Center in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, he was living in Portland, Maine, but he picked the market. So sometimes you have to do that regardless of the business. And again, that was more important pre-Internet where you were located because the manufacturers had, quote, franchise agreements and you couldn't open up down the street from somebody and be selling the same lines. So that factored into my consideration as well. Well, how to go. So you opened up 1981. But that's interesting too, because Japanese brands are coming in. Exactly. Ludwig was in a severely weakened position as was Rogers, as was Slingerland. So I couldn't really get any lines right away. I was able to get Slingerland because they were actually distributed by St. Louis Music at the time. You could buy direct from Slingerland, but they were also just distributed through St. Louis Music. It was just coincidental in town. I could pick it up without paying freight. But Slingerland was a little bit more open to new dealers. I couldn't get Ludwig Rogers. I didn't want because they were suffering as well. And I knew that I had to have Tama. That Tama was the buzz at that time. Yamaha was too, but they were really difficult to get to. So I really knew I had to have Tama and it took nine months. I secured it at the June NAMM show. The first NAMM show I ever went to six months after opening. But in order for them to smooth out the market a little bit, I couldn't get the product until September. But that was just perfect timing. It was just serendipity. Tama was so hot at the time with the hardware and the Superstar and Imperial Star drums and the Swingstar entry level. I just really embraced it. And in fairly short order, we became the top Tama dealer in St. Louis and probably the state. That's awesome. And it was just a strong line. I didn't have Pearl. I didn't have Yamaha. So I really threw myself into Tama. It's kind of a bet, like a gamble I feel like with music stores where if you have a brand that like I used to work at a drum store here in Cincinnati and around the corner was a guitar store that I believe Carvin, I think, was the guitar line, if I'm not mistaken. Carvin Hans, yeah. Yeah. But that was what they went all in on. It was no Fender. It was no Gibson. It was nothing. And it was like you are hanging your hat on that brand where sometimes it pays off, sometimes it doesn't as much. Clearly you picked, your gamble paid off. Well, I got lucky. Tama was so hot at the time. And I just cultivated a relationship with the rep. And it took time because the other drum shop in town had Tama. But, you know, it wasn't that close. And then far up in North County, there was a full line dealer just doing fantastic with Tama. And there were a handful of other dealers. But yeah, that's a good way to start. But eventually you, especially if you're a specialty store, I can see a full line shop trying to specialize in only certain brands because they can't have everything because they've got to cover so many instruments. But a drum shop really, you have to have, you have to do everything your competition does and you have to do everything they don't do. And that and once the Guitar Center became a force and they moved out of, you know, California, Texas and Illinois where they were, where they first focused, once they started moving out, that was my, that was my model. I had to have, I had to have and do everything they had and did. And I had to do everything they didn't do. Yeah. Yeah. Well, like, all right. So this is probably a random question. But with all of your experience and your success and your kind of following your gut and being right, what's something you would say to young younger drum shops today with a little bit of advice with all your experience that you see them doing now where you go, man, I wouldn't maybe do that, you know? Well, I kind of have three business mantras and two of them apply to any business and one of them only applies to businesses that sell product. But the first one is sweat the details and the big things will fall into place. There's a lot of really creative people out there who have great ideas. But oftentimes they don't have the wherewithal to see them through because they're visionary types and they don't know how to build the foundation. And a lot of times these people have someone with them, either a partner or someone else who sweats those details. But if you sweat the details, the small things, the big things will either fall into place or it'll be a lot easier to achieve them. And the second one is especially in the music industry, which people don't realize how tiny it is. The musical instrument industry itself is minuscule related to clothing, sound, you know, consumer electronics, computers, whatever, it's tiny. And the drum industry is a subset of this tiny thing. I've learned that. Yeah. I mean, it's small. When you look at the other than Yamaha and Roland, when you look at the gross sales of some of these companies, which we think are fantastic, most businesses in consumer products would sneeze at that. That's their weekly or monthly sales are equivalent to the annual sales of musical instrument companies. So the second mantra is don't burn your bridges because you might have to cross them later. It's a small industry. Everybody knows everybody else. People on the manufacturing and wholesale side move around. You don't want to alienate somebody at company A because in six months, they could be a company B. So just don't, you know, I'm not saying you have to acquiesce and sacrifice your ethics for sure are your values, but just don't burn the bridges because you're going to need to go, you're going to need to cross them at another time. And the third thing I tried to live by is you can't sell from an empty cart. You've got to have the merchandise. And my goal was for people to think I, or, you know, I need this. I'll go to drum headquarters. I didn't want them to think twice, is drum headquarters going to have this or not? They're going to have it. Now, obviously we didn't have it every single time, but I didn't, I wanted to, to nurture that among the consumers. And today it's even more important with the internet because of the immediate delivery offered by Amazon and the extremely deep inventories, even though it tends to be more focused on things like, like Sweetwater and Musicians Friend and, and others, you know, they don't have the broad range that special, specialty stores have, but they have very deep, immediately available inventory. You can't expect people to, it's worth, it's, it's so much worse today. You can't expect people to wait. You've got to have the gear. So that's where maybe specializing is important, where you deep in two brands, you get really deep in snare drums or really deep in cymbals, if you can't cover the whole gamut, but you got to have the gear. So those kind of three, those three things kind of drove me every day. Those are great. And I think that's, like you said, it's kind of cross business. And I do see that though, where on some of the big brand, you know, retail websites, you go and you're looking for a specific kind of more boutique brand and they don't have it. But then these drum shops do who sell online. So now you're obviously in the world of online sales and all that stuff. But I think that's, that's extremely smart. And it's, it is funny how small our industry is and, and how word does spread. I mean, seriously, you'll just get a message about, did you hear this? And it's like, exactly. No, no, we, we used to joke, Tom, I would sneeze and Pearl would say, God bless you. And that's just the way, that's the way it is. And you know, something, especially with the, with the overseas companies, and it's true of the American companies as well. Sure, they compete, but they're all talking to each other. They're all in communication. The blood isn't as bad as, as people might think, but between, you know, one company and the other. Sure. Sure. Well, all right. So then let's, I want to make sure we, you know, would have plenty of time to talk about HQ and everything. But like, so were you doing clinics in your shop and everything? Yeah, yeah. Education in general is really important. We, you know, I went through three locations all within this, within a mile. And by the time we got the first location at one teaching studio, it was a converted little house that, you know, drums take up too damn much space. It's not like jewelry, where you can put 10 million dollars of jewelry in a, you know, a thousand square foot space. So we had to get out of that house and we moved to another spot that had two teaching studios. And we expanded that spot to get to three. And then when I got to the final location, we had four studios and about 220 students a week. Wow. So education was really important. And I did open a second store in 1997 and that only had two studios. It was smaller, but it was about 25 miles away. And we had about 130. So we were teaching over 350 lessons a week. I come from that's a background of education. I taught drums. I have two degrees in education. I worked in educational research. I valued that plus it's a, it's a business stimulant. Yeah, I was going to say that's how you pay your bills is like the consistent. They're coming in every week. They need sticks, they need heads, they need practice pads, they need books, and then they need a drum set. And so yeah, the education component was important. The clinics, I was always into the clinics. I thought it was a cool marketing vibe. You can't make money on clinics. You don't make money on clinics. You can't plan on it. There's just no other way to get three, four or 500 drummers in the same room feeling good about drumming, drums and your store than a clinic. So if you spend 10 grand, you could have spent that 10 grand on the radio and had less impact. So clinics, to me, were critical. We did, we did a variety of types. You know, you do the big ones in outside venues that, that are, you know, two to 500, though we did have some in the six and 700 range. And then we do the in store masterclasses with 30 or 40 people are the real high level masterclasses with, you know, with like a Steve Smith or something with maybe eight or 10 people, kind of the thing Todd Suckerman is doing now. So yeah, we did, we did probably five to eight events like that a year, I would say. Wow. What was your, if you have to choose out of your entire, you know, 81 to 2005, what was your favorite one that sticks in your mind? Well, there are many, but the one in the earliest was Simon Phillips with Dom Famularo. It was actually our second clinic, our first major clinic. And when Tom asked me to be part of that, I felt quote, you know, we have arrived because there was only seven or eight dates in the country. And we had 380 people, 1980, November 83. And it just blew people away. That's awesome. He was Mr. Tom. I mean, literally, his pants would say Tom. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, Simon was, was incredible. That's great. But nobody knew who Dom was. Dom at that time was only doing school clinics on Long Island. And he was on behalf of Long Island Drum Center, which had five stores at the time. And Long Island was a strong Tom a dealer. And to Thomas credit, they saw Dom's potential. And so they put him on this clinic tour with Simon the first time he was ever outside of Long Island doing a clinic, first time he was virtually ever outside of a school, except I'm sure he did. He opened some clinics for Long Island Drum Center in New York. Nobody knew who Dom was. Nobody was there because of Dom. There were 380 people there. I introduced Dom. And in five minutes, he had the audience eating out of the palm of his hand. Yeah, in 20 minutes, they were screaming for more. And that started a long, long relationship with Dom. He did. He came to the store once or twice a year for a number of years, doing master classes, doing full clinics, teaching, um, helping our instructors. Um, that that Simon and Dom click people today still drummers today still tell me that clinic was like a watershed event in their life, just not as a drummer, mainly as a drummer, but just not as a drummer. They were so inspired by Simon's playing by Dom's presentation. And they were the right age, maybe 14 to 18 or 20 at the time. Exactly. And invariably, I still get texts or emails or bump into somebody, and they're still talking about that 40 years ago, 40 years later. But it's Ringo effect. It's what happened with you as a kid, watching a solo event. It's like, it's just, it catches you and it just, yeah. And Dom has been on and is the greatest guy and glad he's feeling better and his health has gotten better. But also it's just, that isn't, this is a whole other topic, but that's an interesting career path to go the, I'm going to be an educator clinician. He created, I mean, there were, there were major clinicians before him like Roy Burns, but he virtually created that, um, what they call them drumming's global ambassador, but he virtually created that position. And, and I didn't see that for a minute, but when I was standing off side stage, when he was doing his clinic, I thought this guy is something special. And if you want to segue into HQ percussion, this is the springboard right here. Like I said, Dom just really had a lot of impact on people. And one of the teachers at drum headquarters, Mike Earhart, who passed away a few years ago, he said, I got to take lessons from this guy. He was just smitten with Dom's technique, his concepts, the exercises he handed out, his presentation, his personality, the whole package. So, you know, he talked to Dom after the clinic and Dom said, sure. So Mike went to Long Island, spent a weekend at Dom's house, took lessons from Dom, probably 18 hours a day, whether they were in the car or in Dom's house, but also at Long Island Drum Center. And Mike came back from Long Island. This was probably early 84. And he was just fired up, obviously. And he was a great dedicated teacher anyway, with up to 40 students a week and playing gigs and owning a recording studio. But he was an exceptional individual. And he said, he came back with this round gum rubber practice pad. No name, no nothing, no label. And he said, I want you to stock these practice pads because I'm going to recommend them to my students. And I did, he said it's from a company called Casino Percussion. So I had heard of it, I knew about them. And it was owned by Jerry Ricky, who owned all the five Long Island Drum Center. So I did a little research and I said, Mike, do you really think people are going to buy $25 practice pads? This was 1984. And which is, I mean, that's, I mean, I'm glad you always have to use Google, but that's a lot of money. The choice was Remo or those cheap vacuum Gladstone style pads. Those were the two choices at the time. So Mike said, and he didn't intend this to be leveraged, he said, well, if you don't want to stock them, I'll order them from Jerry. Well, that was the magical word. I said, no, no, no, I'll get them. So I ordered three and we sell them. I ordered six and we sell them. I ordered 12 and we sell them. Four years later, I own the company. But there's no branding on it. There's no. Well, what happened was after exactly, it was round. It had gum rubber. They had the model with the neoprene on the bottom, no name. So about two years later, maybe let's say around 86, Jerry changed the shape, made it eight-sided. Now, at that time, you got to remember Simmons was just beginning to explode in the market. Their pads were six-sided, their electronic drum pads were six-sided. So a shape like that in the consumer's mind meant forward thinking, cutting edge, new. So Jerry, he's a creative sort, he made it eight-sided. He thought that was kind of an image that people would think positively about. And he came up with the name Power Play. So for a couple of years, they were called Power Play and they were eight-sided. So once I started ordering these pads and getting closer with Dom, who was teaching at Long Island Drum Center, I became close with Jerry. And Long Island Drum Center is still going strong with just the one location now run by Jerry's Eno Precussion. He had the five stores and he had this idea of starting what he called the National Drum Association. At that time, PAS was really focused on education and orchestral marching, a little bit of world and a little bit of drum set. It was nothing like it is today. And he wasn't trying to compete with PAS, but he wanted to start this organization. And he had a great idea, but it really never materialized. But he said, why don't you buy Casino Precussion? And we were good friends at the time and he gave me this incredibly ridiculous price. So I flew to New York and when I got there, I realized that drum headquarters was the aberration. The company was, I hadn't even asked for any sales figures when I bought it. So we get there and I start looking through the books and I realize that they're selling a few things to stores in New York and New Jersey and maybe a couple other pockets around the country and drum headquarters was kind of the aberration outside of New York and really outside of the five Long Island Drum Centers, which were selling a lot of the product. So I loaded up a U-Haul truck and my wife flew up and we drove back to St. Louis and I had gotten a little space in the basement of a friend's architecture practice and didn't want to use the name Casino Precussion. It had no meaning to me and I came up with HQ percussion from drum headquarters. We used to call it drum HQ and I wanted to keep them totally separate but I wanted to have it in the family, so to speak. Didn't like the name Power Play. It sounded one dimensional to me. So we came up with the name Real Feel and then they had these sponge drum mufflers, which they just called drum mufflers and they only had six through 18 inch round discs. They didn't have cymbal, hi-hat, or bass drum. So we renamed that sound off, drum set silencers and we eventually developed the bass drum, the cymbal, and the hi-hat. So when I got the ship, when I got the truck, brought the truck back and we loaded everything in, we had some inventory to sell but we had to learn, we knew nothing. I knew nothing about manufacturing and this was rudimentary manufacturing. I don't want to blow it out of proportion. It was rudimentary but I knew nothing about raw materials. You were making them though. Yeah. Like they were, they're not made in China or something. No, no, no. So I knew nothing about it. So I had to embark on learning about raw materials, how to source them, how to make the products. I felt like I had a good handle on how to market them because being in retail, I understood what appealed to the store and I also understood what manufacturers did that endeared themselves to the retailer. So I thought I could handle the marketing end but I knew nothing about the production or the raw materials. So I got out the yellow pages again, pre-internet and I started looking for rubber suppliers in St. Louis and there were more than you would think and they're all in these gritty, funky, industrial neighborhoods. So I picked three that just happened to be close to each other in a central part of the city and I called on all three of them and this is another major business lesson. So I go in there, I know nothing. I don't know what the materials are that we need. I don't know their specifications, density or nothing. I don't know anything. And I do know two things though. It's got to feel good under a pair of drumsticks and it's got to look good. Well, those are two things that are foreign to rubber suppliers because people that sell rubber and sponge, it's concealed. They're selling to automobile manufacturers, furniture manufacturers, they're making grommets and gaskets and seals for machinery. It doesn't matter what it looks like and it doesn't matter what it feels like. No, because it's covered by something. So I go into these three places not knowing anything and to add to that equation I've got a ponytail. Two of the people I could tell just are not taking me seriously. I also couldn't tell them how much I want. I just couldn't tell them anything. The third guy took me seriously and I got a bid from him within a week or so, I guess, by mail and I understood it. It made sense to me. I couldn't get a bid out of the other two places. I pushed and I pushed and I pushed and finally one of the two sent me a bid that was so vague. It was just a knee jerk. Let me give this guy something and move on with my life. Would you be too small to even like be on their radar? Yes, I think it's a lot of things. They didn't want to deal with someone who was clueless. They didn't want to deal with these challenges of it's got to feel a certain way and it's got to be consistently, cosmetically appealing. I guess they thought they had enough business, but the third guy took me seriously. We used to joke about that because he stayed with this supplier, our rubber supplier. He stayed with that company the whole time I owned HQ Percussion for 16 years and eventually we were buying $500,000 a year worth of rubber, neoprene and sponge. Why? Because the guy took me seriously. We would laugh about this because his company made millions of dollars over the year from HQ Percussion. He made a lot of commission. We worked our way up to being their third largest customer. I'm sure we were far away from the first and second because it was probably Chrysler. There was a Chrysler plant in St. Louis. There was a Chevy plant, but we worked our way up to the third largest customer they had and the sales guy, our account manager, I mean, he said it in a beautifully simplistic way. He said, well, that's my job. He basically did his job. The other two didn't do their jobs and look what he, you know, so. Yeah, that's awesome. To use a baseball analogy on opening day here. You can't get a hit if you don't swing the bat. So this guy swung the bat and he got a grand slam. Yeah. You know? Yeah. Wow. And another thing is this company and this individual named Ken himself, they became true partners in HQ Percussion. You hear that term thrown around, you know, our business partners, manufacturers say it about retailers. It's a lot of lip service. It's just another way of saying customer. But this company was truly an extension of HQ Percussion. They got educated on what we needed and they would reject. This is the gum rubber comes in in these huge sheets. And if they saw undulations on it where it's going up and down or cosmetic imperfections, they would reject it and send it back to the manufacturer because these local rubber suppliers, they really aren't, they're not rubber manufacturers. They're die cutters. Sourcing it and getting it in the right. They're cutting it. So we had to buy all these dies. That's what their job really is, is die cutters and sourcing the material, dealing with the manufacturer. The manufacturer wouldn't talk to me. I was way too small. Yeah. Because the manufacturer, I mean, these, then we're talking like international global monster companies. But they were, you know, our supplier was buying from these manufacturers for most of their customers. So it got to a point where our volume was such that our local supplier, our die cutter was able to go to the manufacturer of the gum rubber and convince them to clean the machinery before they made our order. So what they would do is at the end of the day before our order was being made, they would shut down that machine at three o'clock, let's say a couple hours before closing two o'clock, whatever, and they would clean the machine and then they would come in the next morning and run our order. So that's really dramatically reduced the foreign material that got into the rubber. And they paid, they started because when they were getting stuff sent back that wasn't cosmetically or physically right, they started learning the manufacturer how to make our order. So that local supplier was really a true partner. They did so much for us. Yeah. I mean, do you, I feel like nowadays there are people who make pads in America and there's all kinds of things like that, but it just seems like everything has gotten so much more expensive and things go overseas and it seems like I guess it was a different world then where things were manufactured more here. Yeah, there were not as many pads that today there are so many gum rubber. I mean, there were gum rubber practice pads before us. A guy named Ralph Pace made some practice pads, set the pace, practice pads in the 50s and 60s. Yeah, if I can pack kits and things like that, they would like unfold. Yeah, right. And they would gum rubber. And I think what became the real feel was probably patterned after that. But we became really particular about the, it's called durometer of the rubber. That's their measurement. And we had to get the right thickness. And they just learned how to make what we needed. We never would have achieved that without this die cutter supplier we had. Sure. And then we needed the bases made, the particle board bases. I didn't have a wood shop. So this company, this gum supplier, they recommended us to one of their companies, one of their customers who made wood products and had a wood shop on their farm and they were making our wooden bases. Man. So you get all the pieces then. So you'd get your top, the gum rubber and then you said the bottom was neoprene. Well, there was two major blank surfaces, gum rubber and neoprene, which is real hard. And then we obviously introduced the brush pads. So we, our supplier had to source that material. But the biggest challenge on other than, so finally I got the raw materials kind of together. And so when I came back from New York with all this inventory and supplies, there was this can of adhesive. So I thought, okay, that's what they use. And that's what they were using. That's what we'll use. It was this white, thick adhesive kind of looked like Elmer's glue and an industrial can. And we, you know, we painted on the entire surface and, and glue the pads. And we started having problems with adhesion. It wasn't holding. And I learned that rubber is a difficult material to adhere to other surfaces. Yeah, especially because it's taking a beating. Well, even, even the material itself, it's got plat, what's called plasticizers in it. And the most important thing is in the, in the, at the end of the manufacturing process, they put a thin layer of talc on it or it would stick together, you'd have this four by a sheet of rubber stuck to, you know, folded over stuck together, you couldn't even get it. So the talc repels adhesion. So we were having problems with the gum rubber coming off the base. Gotcha. So our supplier said, well, what about pressure sensitive adhesive called PSA? They said, we can install that onto the rubber onto the big sheet and then cut it into your eight sided shape and your different sizes. And all you do is peel off the release paper and stick it on the base. And we thought, this is a beautiful thing. We don't have to be dealing with glue. We don't have to be painting it on. I mean, it was really about the same cost because they were installing the, we had to buy the PSA, they were installing the PSA, but the product, but we could like rapidly increase production. And we were getting, you know, demands on that because the, the volume was increasing. We couldn't keep up with it. So it's all by hand though. So it's someone takes it and peel it, they slap it on the wood. Exactly. But that's a lot easier than having to paint glue onto something and slap it around. And so that we thought that was our savior. So we went for the PSA and it started failing. So this was a two or three year process. I mean, we had product out in the market and it wasn't every single one, but it was enough failing that we had to solve this. So again, our gum rubber supplier stepped up and they connected us with a major glue, international glue manufacturer that I will say was not 3M, but another major one. And they sent out an industrial engineer and he looked at our product and he looked at our wood, our particle board bases. He looked at our gum rubber and our neoprene. We gave him a bunch of samples. He took it home to his workshop and he experimented with all kinds of adhesives for a week or so or maybe longer. And he came back with a recommendation. And my, my nondisclosure agrimothedario is far expired. So I can tell you that this was what's called a CE adhesive, cyanoacrylate ester. It's similar to what you find in super glue, gorilla glue, whatever. A major difference though is it has no preservatives because and preservatives can break down the bond as well. So you go buy a tube of super glue in the hardware store. How do you know how long it's been since it was made? It could have sat at the manufacturer for two months. It could have sat at the distributor for six months. It could have sat in the retail store. It could be a year old. And preservatives make that possible for it to just live forever. Right. But preservatives aren't really good for the kind of bond that we needed and for manufacturing. So we went ahead with this huge industrial company and they wouldn't sell to us. They then referred us to one of their distributors who happened to be in St. Louis. And we were buying basically 15 pounds every 15 days. So it came in a pound bottle. So every 15 days, we got 15 bottles. So 30 pounds a month, $100 per pound was the cost of the glue. This was incredible. This was like 10 times the previous. But we tested it. And I mean, we tried to pull the gum rubber off the base. We would get a pliers and try to pull it off. And the wood would come with the rubber. We solved the bonding problem right there. Incredible. But we were spending $3,000 a month on glue. But we had the best bond in the business, so to speak. So we discovered that the consistency of the glue, plus the fact that it was so darn expensive, we could not paint it across the entire surface of the gum rubber. It would have been way too costly and it just wouldn't have worked. So we came up with a spider web pattern kind of that we used probably one third of the glue that we had previously used on each pad, maybe 25% as much. But nonetheless, we had this spider web pattern that covered the entire surface and was especially prevalent along the edges so it didn't flip up. And that's what we started using. And we gave them out to teachers at Drum Headquarters. We gave them out to the employees at HQ Percussion. We gave them out to some customers and everybody reported this is the same as any real feel. It's fantastic. I don't know what you're talking about. So we made the decision. We went ahead and we signed the contract and we started using that glue. And I get a call one day from Joe Morello. Everybody knows Joe Morello had some of the greatest technique in history. And most people know that Joe didn't mince words. So I answer the and he was one of our endorsers and I I answer the phone and he doesn't even say hello. He just says, what the hell did you do to those pads? I can hear voids and feel them because of the spider web pattern and not only did he have an incredible touch, but he had an unbelievable ear. Nobody prior to that, nobody after that. And I'm talking hundreds of thousands of pads that sold ever said anything that Joe Morello knew that we did something different. Geez, I think it's past Joe. He was in some rarefied air. Yeah, unbelievable. Yeah, that was that that was that was a phone call. I'll never forget. No, no. And it's just a Joe thing. But I wonder if his loss of his sight had anything with heightened other senses. I think it could. I mean, the man, you know, he was a child prodigy on violin. He played with the Boston Symphony at age nine. Didn't start playing drums till 15. But he was a consummate artist. Yeah. And he was the only person who could feel or hear the difference on that. Did you change it? Or we couldn't. We couldn't. I'm just saying. But it's interesting how changing that pattern to not smear it all over, but to do the interesting pattern can be a cost saving cost saving thing because at scale at all. Right. The real the real cost saving then came. And I can say this publicly now, Mitch McMichon, who's the president of Minel now Minel USA, owned a company called TreeWorks Chimes. He still owns it. So Drum headquarters was buying TreeWorks Chimes and Mitch became a good friend. And he knew about, you know, we talked about manufacturing stuff and he knew about the glue. And the and it was $113 a pound at this point. And this was early on early again in the internet. So Mitch starts Googling. And he finds me a glue that's $13 a pound. Wow, that was made in Taiwan. So there's a US distributor, a Taiwanese family, and I contact them in California and they send me a sample and we do the whole test again, where we run our spider pattern and we glue them up and we give them out to teachers and players and employees and we try to pull it up with the pliers. And I requested what's called an MSDS from the manufacturer material safety data sheet, which gives the specifications of what's in the product. Yeah. And I'm no scientist, but I poured over this thing for a few hours. And I basically came to the conclusion that it's about 95 plus percent, the same glue that we're paying $113 a pound for. So you're $100 less. Yeah, a pound. Yeah, we're going to save three, we're going to save. Yeah. Yeah, 3000. Yeah. So I had a contract with the other supplier, which fortunately was up in a few months. So we finished out that contract and we switched over to this other glue. And again, we used that, that was probably, I'd say mid to late 90s. So we used that for another 10 years without any issues. But that was another lesson. Yeah, shop around. I mean, you know, it's you can, the amount of savings you can have from, but thank you to the internet too. It's a different era. Yeah. Yeah, the world got smaller. Right. So I still thank Mitch to this day for saving me $3,000 a month. Yeah, seriously. But how was business? So I mean, what was the, you know, kind of the run from beginning to when you sold it? Right. I mean, it really became super popular. Yeah, it was, well, we took it slow. I mean, we didn't do a press release for a year, and we didn't do an ad for a year and a half. We improved the manufacturing, we improved the raw material sourcing, we improved the product, we came up with the catchy names, we labeled them, we contacted dealers. I obviously knew a lot of dealers from just being on the retail side. And I made it clear from the very beginning that there was this line, and it was a thick, firm, hard line between drum hit quarters and HQ percussion products. We did not sell HQ percussion products through drum hit quarters at a wholesale price. We sold it in the same range that the other retail stores sold it because we didn't want to compete with our customers. And we knew some reps, and we knew the reps in the Midwest, but they knew other reps. So we kind of had a rep network in the beginning that was taking the product into the stores. And then we did a serious advertising campaign that started around 1990. And we were in modern drummer, every single issue until I sold the company. Yeah, I always saw it there. Consistency was the key. And I had seen that through drum hit quarters. You see a company make a splash, and then they go away. You see a company start with a product. Now, maybe the product wasn't wasn't viable, but they start with a half page or a full page full color ad they blow their advertising budget. We started with a sixth of a page. We had a cuss a drum hit quarters customer who was a great advertising person. And he came up with these fantastic headlines, like it's the field that counts. I came up with it's the teacher's aid. So we had one it's the it's the field that counts. And we had, you know, six or eight of our endorsers. We built up this endorser stable. And that was kind of rare for a practice pad to have an endorser. Yeah, but it's it makes sense. Anything can have an endorser. And I have found with with getting advertisers on the podcast and things like that, that sometimes if someone buys one ad, it's like, you really do need to have some consistency and should almost get like a month or something. But but I think back to modern drummer. And I think of like, like forks drum closet who has sponsored on this podcast, ironically, but but it would be the guy jumping and pointing. And it's like, I remember that every single thing about think about Coca Cola. Yes, do they ever stop telling that they're there? Anheuser-Busch? I mean, they've got more competition than they used to. But, you know, they don't Coca Cola doesn't stop telling you that we're here. And we just never stopped. And the ads, the ads were much that the ads were way above the quality of a company our size, still not the level of Siljan and Pearl and Tom and Piesty and all the others. But but they were playing with the big boys. They were quality ads done by a professional. You know, who charged us, but he was a customer and a drummer and he really loved the project. So we did that. And then we started advertising the sound off. We made some connections with PIT at Musicians Institute, Percussion Institute of Technology. They had a store there, and it was sold in the store. All the teachers there were using them at SOF at University of North Texas. You know, they started showing up, you know, you see drummers, you know, in modern drummer, they're doing an article in their backstage and the guy's playing on a real field. It all just kind of snowballed. So it was a combination of the reps taking them into the stores, our relationship with the dealers, and the ads and the endorsers that got people's attention. Yeah, but the big picture, though, you can advertise something all day long. But if it's not good, word will spread in our small industry. Exactly. The product was good enough to support it and actually put your kind of money where your mouth is. Because otherwise, you do see that where brands advertise and it's not whatever that creative a product. You're totally right. We knew that, I mean, yeah, you can't toot your horn unless you have something to toot about. So we had to, you know, the product had to look right. It had to be consistent for the dealer. It had to be packaged, you know, shipped and boxed and packed correctly so it didn't get damaged. It had to be shipped quickly. We were diligent about that. The faster you ship, the faster you get reorders. So, you know, all those things are really, really important. Yeah. Well, what happened then? So you led that, you did sell to Deidario. I think I'm saying that right? Deidario. Yeah, Deidario. I didn't add once and I called and heard them say it on the phone and then hung up and that's it. So Deidario, how do you, how did that go? How did that experience go? I kind of felt that after about 15 years that we had really taken it as far as we could take it. And there were people that could do it better than us in terms of manufacturing and packaging. And we, you know, the competition was starting to surface a little bit. And the overseas production, we would see copycat pads. So on this shape, we had a trademark on the shape, on the eight-sided shape. And we stopped copycat pads coming in at customs. I had a patent trademark attorney and she, I got wind of something through somebody that a shipment was coming to a certain distributor and it was a real field knockoff. And we actually stopped them at the border. Wow. So the competition was increasing. We were making a pad for Zilgen at the time that they called Z-pad. But I just thought, like I said, we had taken it as far as we could and that I thought that I would explore selling the company. One other thing that contributed to that was, so Guitar Center was a great customer for HQ percussion. It was kind of funny. When I had my drum headquarters hat on, I did everything I could do to beat them. And when I had my HQ percussion hat on, I did everything I could do for them to buy as many real feeling sound offs as possible. And they did that for 12 or 13 years. And eventually, they replaced our products with Vic Firth knockoffs. And Vic was a dear friend. Yeah. Yeah. Because of price. It was very similar. Because of price. Yeah. So first, they dropped real feel. And then about six or 12 months later, they dropped sound off once Vic got his production up. And at that time, Guitar Center was about 15% of our business, which is healthy. It's nothing like some of these companies when it doesn't have to be Guitar Center. You know, there's a famous story about Rubbermaid was too committed to Sears. It was like 30 or 40% of their business and Sears cut them off. And Rubbermaid almost went out of business because they had too much invested in that. So in our case, Guitar Center was a lot of business, but it was only 15% of our gross. Incredibly, within a year, we recovered all that lost business. Wow. And I'm not really I know why on real feel real feel was an established name that people asked for an established brand that people asked for by name. And if they went to a store and the salesperson tried to sell them on something else saying it's the same thing. Sure, a number of people would would respond to that. But majority of people would go somewhere else and get the real feel they were just it was like imprinted they had to have the real feel. Sound off was more of a commodity. So I can understand that the sound off being hurt. But generally speaking, we replaced all of our lost business within a year or so. And that proved to me that it was a really resilient company. And that was should be valuable to to a buyer. Plus, I didn't think that would happen a second time. So I didn't want to tempt fate. Yeah, you got lucky the first time. Yeah, so I just I just thought it was time. I really I really thought we could we really couldn't take it any farther. And I first reached out to Zilgin and Promark, two companies that I had a long history with and knew all the principles very well. And they both were very interested. Zilgin actually very seriously sent their CFO down for an entire day. He spent three or four hours with my accountant. We spent a lot of time together. But both Zilgin and Promark backed off because they had some other corporate challenges. Again, not to get away from their core business. They had some corporate challenges that they needed to attend to. And there wasn't any big regret on their part. But both of them have mentioned mentioned to me later that they wish they could have pursued it. And I didn't want to play this. I didn't want to have a cattle call and play this one company against another. So that's why I didn't even though I held the Dario in high regard. That's why I didn't contact that I thought it'd be enough to deal with Zilgin and Promark in the beginning. So when when they both declined, eventually after a month or two of discussions, I went to the Dario and the person I talked with, who I knew very well at the time, John Roderick, the manager of that division, said obviously we're this is on our drawing board practice pads. It fits right into our model. They're going to at the time all they had was Evans within percussion. They had nothing else percussion wise. They didn't own Promark yet. So because he because we knew each other, he put me in touch with the CEO at the time who I didn't know. And that was who they wanted to negotiate because they, you know, Dario has extremely high standards. They were an ISO 9001 company at the time they had to follow all those protocols and needed to be totally objective. So I started meeting with the CEO and he made at least he made one trip down. We had to be kind of surreptitious about it. But yeah, he made a trip down because it wouldn't be odd for the CEO of the Dario to visit a drum shop. But we spent a lot of time after hours at the HQ percussion facility and they were unbelievable in what they requested of me. For a while I thought this is crazy because they wanted to know down to the drop of glue what it costs to make every product. Something I had never done. I did this whole thing from my gut. Yeah, yeah. That's next level. I mean that is like, I've had things with work through video and audio stuff where it's like once you get to a bigger company, it's like, oh, this takes six months to get something through the chain of command. But I realized in the middle of this, even if they don't buy the company, they made me peel away so many layers of the onion that if they didn't buy the company, I was going to know so much more about HQ percussion than I knew when the process started. But fortunately, fortunately, they decided to go ahead and it was, I had met with my attorney a little bit but mainly my accountants and they have been through this with other clients and they told me some of the horror stories and how rough this can be and you might get a deal where the contract says it's got to require this kind of sales or growth or the deal's void or the deal gets discounted, whatever, none of that. It was just it was a wonderful, mutually respectful experience. I couldn't say enough about the company. Cool. Well, it's a success story. I mean, you did it. You saw a product. You made it better. You got criticism from Joe Morello. You kept going. But really, it was a big success. And I mean, you worked hard with both of your kind of big endeavors that you did and it paid off and it's just cool to hear about that. It's like a business success in our industry. That's about sweating. That's about back to sweating the details. But the reality is, Didario bought the brand names. I mean, sure, they bought the brand names and the reputation. The reputation, they are very capable of maintaining because of their customer service. But they bought the brand names and they cut down the learning curve. They just hit, I mean, they hit the ground running. And because of their reach, I mean, we had 12 foreign countries. We had just distribution in 12 foreign countries at the time. Maybe 15, maybe 20% of our business was overseas. But Didario has so much worldwide distribution and leverage on their distributors that, you know, you've got the Evan's Drum Hedge. You've got the Didario strings. You've got the planet waves. Now you're going to distribute HQ percussion in this country because the regular HQ percussion distributor can't have it anymore. Or there's 20 other countries where we never were. So I would say, I would say within three to six months, they probably increased our sales by 30% just by leveraging their worldwide distribution. Good for everyone. So yeah. Man, unbelievable. This is like, this is the kind of information that you can't get from anyone else except you who was there and who did it. And it's just an amazing story start to finish. So, wow, I'm sure you are. You should feel very proud for doing that. And I'm sure now you can sit back and kind of look at it all. Yeah, I did that. I mean, believe me, this wasn't a solo project. I had drum headquarters and HQ percussion. I had incredibly dedicated long term employees. I had employees for 10 to 25 years, 22 years. We had teachers for 10 to 20 years. I just had a bunch of great guys who, you know, ate, slept and drank drums. And that was really the key. Yeah. Wow. I think that's like a good way to wrap this up. I think you've covered the story beautifully. And without too much info as we kind of wrap up, you actually originally reached out with some clarification about DW, Tama, Camco stuff with me and Vincent Ward from Vitalizer Drums who's been on before. Vincent's going to come on again and do another episode soon. And he and I will cover that info and all that stuff. But Rob, this has been awesome, man. Like I said, I can't get this info anywhere else. I want to just mention too, because I'm sure my friends at there's a vintage practice pad Facebook page where I hope they're listening. There's Beth Harman and Mark Beecher and Michael Windish and these people who love practice pads. So there's really a big community of practice pad fans and a lot others. I'm sure I'm forgetting some names, but I'm sure they're getting a kick out of your info because it is really drum history. It's practice pad history. It's a lot of stuff. So I hope they enjoyed it. Rob is kind enough. It's been a while since I've done one. He's going to hang out and we're going to do a bonus episode, which is going to be on Patreon. And Rob has, which I haven't heard the full thing. I got some small details. Rob's got an amazing story about being invited to the Yamaha factory in Japan and then creating a drum set. And it was 9-11, like September 11th, 2001, which was a famous day obviously for that terrible reason. So we're going to talk about that. If you want to hear that and like 70 other bonus episodes, go to patreon.com slash drum history podcast, I believe. Go to the link in the description and you'll see it there. So thank you for being here, Rob. I appreciate it. My pleasure.