 Hey guys before we get started today I wanted to explain something so it doesn't seem jarring later on in the episode. Nick White is going to be playing some of his really cool sound effect instruments for us and he has a microphone that is recording those at his house. You're going to hear it kind of flip between the phone recording and his microphone picking up the actual instruments. So I just wanted to explain so it makes sense when you hear it. Welcome to the Drum History podcast. I am your host Bart van der Zee and today we are talking about trap drummers with Nick White. Nick, how are you? Doing great. How are you, Bart? Good. Good. Thanks for being here, man. I'm excited to have you because you have such a cool collection from what I've seen online on Instagram as the weekly trap drummer and you describe yourself as a classical percussionist and your website vintage percussion sound effects is just a really cool resource for everything trap drummers. So this is great. Yeah, I kind of got into this by accident and it's really become a huge fashion of mine. Well, yeah, I was going to say, so let's talk about what a trap drummer is. But before that, what got you into this? Because I mean, this is a very niche kind of thing. So what got you into trap drummers? Well, like a lot of percussionists and drummers, I started out as a kid as a drum set player and I got into percussions, I was on the snare drum and I went to college and got my masters and got a multiple degrees after my masters in percussion. And I think that was definitely an easy segue into this because it's very much related. But I was actually working a summer job here in Chicago at Century Mallet, which works in this beautiful 1912 factory building with a giant clock tower here in Chicago. And it's the original Deegan building. And if you're not familiar, Deegan is really famous company that made some of the best live phones, black and steels, vibraphones. Cool. And I was working there for a summer. And I thought I wasn't getting paid much. And in the door came one day was a giant fiber trap case. And I opened it up and it was like Christmas for me. It had a pencil blocks, old cave, zildjian cymbals. It had a nickel over brass lovewood snare. And it was filled with all these strange exotic instruments I've never seen before. And I asked my boss at that time if I could take some of those instruments home instead of getting a paycheck that day. And he said yes. And I was immediately hooked. That's awesome. It's blown up. It started out as just collecting, you know, just auction websites and putting things on my shelf. And then in the past two years or so it's turned into performing with sound effects instruments and performing trap set with silent movies and performing trap set with you know, small 1920s jazz bands. That's a perfect transition because you just said sound effect instruments. So that's a great way to describe it. Why don't you explain to someone who has no idea what a trap drummer is, what that might be, including what trap is short for, where they worked, what era, all that stuff. So give us the whole rundown of what a trap drummer and trap instruments are. Sure. Well, I'm really obsessed with early drumming, that being the 19 teens and the 1920s. And the word trap is short for contraption. And contraption means, you know, an instrument that is kind of handmade or an instrument that is really just kind of a wacky mad scientist type of an instrument that percussionist sometimes encounter. But drummers these days, very rarely encounter. And when I talk to a drummer, I first of all have so much respect for what they do because I'm not the very best drum set player. But a lot of them have kind of over the years with evolution, have lost touch of what being a drummer in 1916 was really like. And being a drummer in 1916 was more like being an all around percussionist. I have instruction books from that era of, you know, how to play a drum set or trap set, sometimes they would call it trap outfit. And there would be a chapter on tambourine, there'd be a chapter on triangle. There was an entire paragraph on how to play the ratchet. Nice. And they talk about cowbells, they talk about, you know, different cymbals and I would say the biggest difference in drumming in the 19 teens especially would be the availability of jobs and the type of work the drummers were doing. If you think about everywhere that you hear recorded music in your day to day life, every radio station, every elevator with background music, every restaurant you go to has background music, every movie you go to has music. If you take that all away and go back 110 years, there really is no recorded music being provided to the public. They of course had, you know, gramophones back then, but they weren't used as background music in restaurants often. So imagine everywhere you hear music and just replace it with a live band or live musician. So I think it runs the gamut of, you know, picture houses, what we would call movie theaters, vaudeville stages where people were just seeking entertainment of any sort. Even if a vaudevillian clown was performing there would be a trap drummer there to provide the funny sounds and the crashes for every time he was doing physical comedy. I'll talk about that a little bit later. Vaudeville and movie theaters were the big ones, but also burlesque circus and proper theater, where all places where trap drummers were in very high demand. And nowadays when we talk about a circus, we think of either zero or one circus that are still around, but back then there was like 50 different regional circuses in your state alone and they're all hiring drummers and there would be like 25 different picture houses in Chicago alone. And they're all looking for sound effects and drumming to kind of enhance the entertainment of their show. No one really wanted to go to a movie theater that had a little old lady playing piano. They wanted the full show. Cool. So to then further expand on that a little bit, so obviously with what you said with silent movies, because that's where I kind of think of it most is if it's a silent movie, it's obvious, but there's no sound. They are creating the sounds. So it's sound effects. So like I'm sure you have in your collection would be bird whistles, the police ratchet, the gunshot sounds. All of these things were created synthetically. Yeah. Silent film really needed a touch of life. If you think about really old photos where they would sometimes have a black and white photo and they would add a touch of pink to the cheeks. I don't know if you've ever seen that before. This was the sonic equivalent of that. This was adding a little bit of color and real life feeling to a art form that was a little bit limited. People didn't like to see black and white photos. They had never seen a color photo, but they realized and were aware that it's lacking in human experience and human touch, and to make it as real as possible was nice. I will say to a modern listener, a lot of these sound effects don't necessarily sound real, but if you take away digital technology and try to make that the sound of a bear growling with just organic materials from 100 years ago, it's really not easy. Take it with a grain of salt if you hear a sound effect today that sounds a little funny or goofy, but in the early days they would try to do things literally. If there was glass breaking, there was an article in a trade magazine that said, just bring a bottle and smash it during the right moment. It wasn't until later years that companies started making instruments to make that sound because obviously, there's some danger with that. The instruments were the best people could do to provide that reality. I think a good side note to put it into perspective then is these were made by Ludwig. These were made by the big players at the time and they were featured in the catalogs. As long as you're looking in a catalog and you see snare drums or a bass drum, you'd also see bird whistles. You'd also see different blocks and different sound effects. These were readily available to people to purchase because this was their job. Would you say, are there more drummers playing, quote unquote, just music or are there more drummers working in this vaudeville sound effect world? Or is it a crossover of you do a little bit of everything if you're that kind of a drummer in that day and age? Yeah, I would say the latter. If you look at the Ludwig drum catalog from 1912, it actually has William and Tia Bould's professional resume on there. It reads really funny to modern eyes. It explains that William played with the Chicago Symphony for three years. He also explains that he played and toured with a circus for a number of years. I think they all just got all the work you could. Everyone was a freelancer. Everyone was just like, I'll work anywhere. I'll do any type of work available to me. And lucky for them, that type of work was widely in demand at that time. It seems like a really cool time. I was going to say, it seems like there's more work at that time for drummers than there is today. Wow, because there's obviously benefits to every era, but these guys seem like they were making money. And I should have said earlier that if you want more information on this, you can go back to the very first episode of Drum History, which was with Kelly Ray Tubbs, who I know you know, Nick. She spoke very highly of you in your collection. And there's information there about how it transitioned to the end of that era, and they were out of a job. In our episode with that one, she was talking about how I just thought it was neat to think about these guys traveling. I've tried to look more into this. This is a really hard topic to talk about sometimes, because none of us were alive back then. And the best that I can go off to is photos and some of these old catalogs. I would say that horses are still on the street during this time, but cars definitely exist. And from what I can tell from what I've read, most of these drummers were getting around in a street car. The entire jazz band, for example, might have access to one car. Gotcha. And there's actually, I read once in a leather drummer, that there was a drummer kind of doing a testimonial for leather drum cases, and they explained, and leather drums explained that his entire band had packed up, you know, their Model T, and they'd gotten the bass drum in there, the saxophone in there, the banjo in there. It's kind of all like leather belted on to the Model T, and they were going down the street at high speed, and the bass drum flies off of the Model T and rolls down a hill. And the drummer provides a testimonial and says, my leather drum rolls 50 yards and crashed, and I opened the case and it was in perfect condition. That's funny. I guess it's a big enough problem for them to publish it and tell other people that like, hey, if this flies off of your Model T, you'll be, you'll be okay. I'm sure Kelly had talked a little bit about how, you know, a lot of drummers look back at these old snare drums and these old stands, and they said, why would you build a snare drum stand that light? And it's really a matter of having to carry stuff around. Like, I think they had a better sense of things than we do. They, the Ludwig drum pedal, the very first one, bragged that you could take it apart, fold it and put it in your coat pocket. And that they would frequently use that as a selling point. Things being really easily portable. A lot of people know the Wahlberg and Ajay, I think it's called the Cariol bass drum. It's a bass drum, kind of cut in half that opens up like a trunk. And you put all your stuff inside it and then you, you know, put the bass drum in its case and then you have all your stuff, your snare drum, your cowbells, your ratchet, your cymbals, your sticks. Everything is inside this bass drum, which is inside a case. And then you leather strap that over your shoulder and just get on the streetcar. Wow. That's extremely convenient. And I think almost, you know, time has turned where like you get the like 80s and 90s kind of huge thick stands. And I think there's kind of a push now more for like lightweight flat bottom kind of stands and compact kits and stuff. So they were definitely onto something back then. I would say the hardest part of being a percussionist is moving stuff. Yeah. Yeah. I don't have my own crew. And it is, it is really hard, especially when I do a silent film and I need 5,000 sound effects. I need, you know, luckily I can bring two cars. They didn't have that luxury back then. But yeah, even a lot of people are fighting after getting a very collapsible bass drum, which was a bass drum that somehow folded into like an attaché style case that was very convenient to move around. And I wanted one, you know, purely for the ease of like going to some of my gigs. It's practical. Well, okay, so that's a good turning point there. So you're doing this, you do performances where you use all of these instruments live. And I know you have some stuff prepared for us today. I would love to hear more about these individual instruments and what you use to do the performances and what, let's say, a everyday trap drummer would have been using back in these early 1900s. Yeah, sure. So I've tried to kind of break it down into some categories. In general, there was, there was two categories. There's different types of movies, so there would be different types of sounds. The movies that I play with most frequently are kind of slapstick comedies. Those used by far the most sound effects, and they're the films that benefit the most from kind of some goofy sounds and some slapsticky things to actually, you know, get more laughs. But more serious films, you know, like hour long, they call them like two realers, you know, a two real drama would sometimes be more serious sounds. So you'll hear the difference. I break it down into transportation, weather, animals, explosive sounds, ringing sounds, and comedy slapstick sounds. So yeah, to start with the first category of transportation, you have to take into mind that transportation was a little bit different back then. I already talked about streetcar. Yeah. Why don't you explain with that what each kind of piece looks like for us? Oh, this is basically a huge fight bell. Can you picture that? And then another form of transportation and probably the most commonly featured in silent films would be train. And I think, you know, 20% of my collection is just train whistles and train sounds. But I'll give you an example of a train going by. That was awesome. And believe it or not, they even had a sound for the air brake on the train. So how many different things was that right there? Because I imagine you've got the hand with like a spring, because I mean, if correct me if I'm wrong, it's a box with a spring with kind of a square piece of metal that you can ding on, right? That is a Ludwig and Ludwig train imitation, which they made from around like 1915 to 1930. And it is a, your Kaggle box with 14 springs in two layers, top and bottom. And you have a scraper that scrapes, you know, it's like it's like the meat in the sandwich where the scraper goes between the upper and bottom layer of springs. And the box kind of amplifies the spring. So basically like a screen door spring kind of stretched out really tight and a scraper that goes against it. And the box amplifies and then it has a bell plate, which is just like a really big thick plate of steel. And that's the train bell, which would go off when the train is departing. And then the train whistles. Oh man, it sounds just like it. This one in particular is one that I believe does sound a lot like it. Like some obviously like you said, they're like a little bit more of a stretch, but this one I think is genius. This one is the biggest and the heaviest to bring around. Drummers had options. Wahlberg and Auger made two different other types. One is literally just sheet metal folded up into like a pyramid shape. And it sounds like this. That was the really early days like 19 teams when they would just use a big heavy wire brush and a piece of sheet metal. And then later on, Wahlberg and Auger invented this thing that looks like another box that kind of resonates everything. And a dimpled sheet metal surface that kind of looks like a cheese grater. And a big, not like a drum set brush, but like a really thick wire brush. And I like to use this one the most. Yeah, that's really believable. There's skill involved. Like with what you're doing and actually speeding up and sort of matching to picture, there's definitely some skill involved with this. Oh yeah. It can be done badly. It's like anything. Yeah, really. Even the train whistle just kind of blowing into it doesn't sound as realistic as kind of like, I'll show you like a more realistic. Yeah. So moving on with transportation. A form of transportation we no longer use. You can guess what it is. That's a horse. I think if I had a dollar every time someone made a Monty Python coconut joke, you know, I'd be a rich man. Yeah. This one was made by Ludwig and Ludwig. And it's basically a marble slab with kind of a woodturners version of coconut halves. It's more of a professional, you know, it's made of maple. It's carved out. And it's essentially the coconut halves. But even so you look more professional. Yeah. Yeah. And I had actually learned from a video of the man who used to run sound effects at Disney of how to properly do this. Like, you know, a horse starts walking like left, left, right, right, left, left, right, right. And a horse has four legs. So you have to do a triplet. Yeah, you're right. There's some thought going into that. Everything can be done badly unless you work hard. And then the horse, the horse whiny, I think they're we need to call them. I'm not sure how to pronounce it. Both sound bad. But that was another Ludwig and Ludwig instrument that was, it's kind of like a duck call. It has like a lead, just like a clarinet, but it's made of brass. And then a long tube. So it looks a little bit like a tiny metal clarinet. And this was supposed to be two things. This was supposed to be a cow ball, BAWL. And if you added some technique, it could be a horse. That's great. I'd have to say that's probably my favorite thing to do. Yeah. So the cow ball. So what does this look like? I've never actually seen one of these. I had a lot of them actually. Another one, it's just like a piece of brass piping. And at the top of it, it has kind of like a reed. Looks like a clarinet reeder. Did you know about these things? It looks like a duck call reed. And funny enough, frequently when I'm trying to buy these things, I'm competing with people who collect duck calls who are getting in my way. And they think it's the most like rare exotic duck call. I try to tell them, no, it's made by Ludwig, I swear. Yeah, it's a drum thing. Yeah, this one sounds like you got a cow bell. That's awesome. I'll get into animals a little bit later. But I would say the newest creation here is an instrument by Walberg and Ajay that creates the sound of an automobile. I already had, you know, like the klaxon horn and the, you know, the bulb horn. But this actually, it's really going to be hard for me to explain how it works. But it's basically a machine with a crank. It's a giant wooden box with gears and cranks. And you turn the lever, you crank the lever, and it just makes this awesome sound. I'll give you an example. Oh, that's awesome. You have to keep in mind it's supposed to sound like an old Model T car. There's actually a Charlie Chaplin scene in a movie called A Day's Pleasure where you need a drummer making a sound. He's trying to get his car started up and he's kicking it and turning the crank on the front engine and he just can't get it started up. And it'll start up for like two seconds and then quit. And then he'll try again two seconds and quit. And he's just like kind of having this like comedic misfortune of like trying to get his car to start. And in the movie, the audience member only knows that the car is the engine is running because it shakes a little bit, but they have these problems in movies of, you know, like how the heck is the audience going to know when the engine is starting and not. Yeah. And it would be, you know, his arbitrary would be to kind of like have an expression on his face of like, wow, it's working. And that would really help the audience figure it out. But also, you know, adding the sound every time the car starts up, you throw in a. And then it putters out. Yeah, it really just like makes the scene work. Now, let me ask you then, would there be, I don't know if notation is the right word, but would like for a Charlie Chaplin film, would this be up to the drummer to kind of be on the fly and say, oh, this is going to make this scene better? Or would they have like notes that would say, hey, in this movie, he's going to try and get the the engine going and it's not going to work. So do it for about two or three seconds or how would they know? Later on in the mid 20s, they would have what they would call cue sheets. And it would have the orchestra's music, you know, the clarinet part, the trumpet part, the trombone part. And they would occasionally write a trap part for only like really important scenes where like there was a really dramatic single gunshot. But most of the time this was not notated at all. And what amazes me still is how little it was rehearsed. When I get ready for a film, I make an Excel chart. I write down Buster Keaton Falls. And then on the other side of the Excel chart, I write bass drum cake. And I kind of study it to perform the movie. I really have to memorize that. But I have the luxury of clicking pause on my laptop and practicing this 100 times. When you were working in a picture house, your availability to, you know, practice was, you know, you had to work with a projectionist and they generally played the movie all the way through. So there was one motion picture magazine that talked about this problem of drummers kind of being behind the ball a little bit, because they hadn't rehearsed. And they highly recommended that you rehearse at least once. They recommended you watch the movie at least once before the show. So that was their rehearsal. Yeah, you'd like to see the movie one time. But generally, if you're doing this all the time, you know, just muscle memory would both see in both hands where every instrument is. And if you see someone take out a gun, you know, you get your sound ready. So that makes perfect sense. Okay, that's good to know. The next one is animals. I would say this is the goofiest and the funniest category of sound effect. Maybe the most common one that you see in trap cases was the bird whistle. There's not a lot of times that you in the movie, you have to see a bird clear and center in the in the shot for that to be warranted. And there would actually be magazine articles in motion picture world that complained that, you know, my trap drummer is such an idiot, there's a love scene with like a couple kissing, and there's a damn bird in the background. And my trap drummer is like blowing the life out of this totally distracting the main point of that scene. So yeah, all this is to be done gracefully. And that, you know, a lot of times trap drummers were young boys, really? Yeah, is there a reason behind that? Maybe they're probably cheaper to hire. I have a lot of photographs, none of them look older than 25. And if you were doing a big film with like four trap drummers, we're gonna man like four different instruments, it'd be really easy just to hire, you know, back then they would call a boy, hire a boy to do the the extra thing that you couldn't get your hands to. But generally, it was it was drummers with, you know, they would they would say like, you know, like the hands of the canopy, you know, I've got an octopus that has a hand, you know, someone who could play everything at once. Speaking of octopus, I'll get to some more animals. Another bird whistle, you would have barnyard animals like a rooster. You would have a chicken. Nice. You would have the cow, like I explained. There's even an instrument called a calf. Similar to the cow. A small cow. It's literally the same instrument. It's the same instrument, just a little bit smaller. A baby cow. Yeah. Yeah, there's a sheep. These are all reed instruments. They look like little metal tubes. And they just have a little brass reed on the inside. Another one in the same category. And this was more of a comedy thing, was a baby cry. And these are very common. That is awesome. I used it in at least one movie that showed an entire nursery of babies crying. And I own like five of these things and I handed them out to friends in the audience. And we did an entire chorus of babies during the nursery. Oh my God, man. I have a two week old baby right now. So this is giving me, this is a nightmare for me. So in terms of animals, it was also, these are called friction drums in the percussion world. But they're literally like single headed drums with a casking head and a string coming out the center of it. And then a leather cloth that rubs against the string. And what they would do is they would put violin rosin on the string. And when you pull the leather across the string, you'd get the roar of a lion. Man, that's cool. I'll do one more. Yeah, that's a great one. Yeah, that's a really cool one. And then the mini version of the lion's roar actually made the sound of a dog barking. And I've used that in a lot of comedies, themes where you can literally see the dog's mouth moving like you really need to have to make it realistic. Yeah, now let me also ask you this. So I think I heard Kelly in episode one saying that people would also buy the bird sounds and some of these animal sounds to use as a hunter. Would that be a part of Ludwig's market? Would they actually sell them to people who were hunting as opposed to just being like a company that made bird calls for hunting? Were they serving both markets there a little bit? They weren't serving both markets, but there was a crossover. Like for example, the duck call that I'm holding was sold by Ludwig and Leedy and all these companies, but it was it's literally a duck call. And my car horn was sold by Ludwig, but it's literally a car horn. Got it. So that was the crossover. And it got everywhere. This was a duck call, but they would use it in a silent film. Like I once did a Mickey Mouse cartoon that had these ducks quacking, but also in 1920s jazz, they would add kind of funny novelties to music. And I have at least one recording called Barney Google where either the drummer or the trumpet player would pick up the duck call and kind of add this amusing, you know, verse into the music. And that would kind of be like a midnight at the club kind of funny and amusing thing to throw into your jazz music. Yeah. Oh, that makes sense. And it obviously has kind of the Donald Duck sound effect, which probably came from that same era and took on a life of its own. Yeah, they were wild back then. I can't imagine taking that out anywhere in the musical world at all right now. But I think I took what I said directly from a catalog. They said, like, you know, at the late night hour on the third set, you know, break this out and the audience will really have a laugh. The catalogs would say score a hit and they would put hit in parentheses. Like, well, that's such flying to say a hit. A hit. Yeah, exactly. You need to put it in parentheses. Wow. That's awesome. They do sound very believable though, like the lion. I mean, these things the engineering that went into making them is pretty cool. That's something that's interesting to the people who actually invented these things. And I can tell that they must have valued these instruments because the only train whistles that are made today are like 50 cent cheap toys. Yeah. And the train whistle that Ludwig and Ludwig made in 1922 was so complicated that I do a lot of woodworking and I can't imagine making this. Like the Ludwig four and one whistle, for example, is my favorite. It has what they're called plungers. Each pitch can be lowered and tuned and it has this like stopper basically. And you move the stopper up and down and you can change the pitch. Cool. And the reason you want to do that is just because like, you know, the higher pitch would be a train, the lower pitch would be like a steamboat. But they made this train whistle from one solid piece of maple. And I am still kind of figuring out how the hell they made it sometimes. They would make it from one solid piece so that there was no like air leaks. And the inside of it has like kind of like bellows. It has like a leather fabric that the air blows through it and it's just like so complicated. They were just trying to make it sound better. Yeah. And the cool thing about this one is you can turn each, it has a train whistle that has three pitches and you can turn each one off. So I'll show you how that sounds. It's four and one because you could pull all the stoppers way down and get a really low pitch. You're like ocean liner and so on. And then you could put the stoppers all the way up for a train and then you could turn each pitch off with this little metal stopper and just have one pitch and then pull another stopper out and have two pitches and then pull all three out and have three. And if you turn off the bottom two, you only use the top one and the top one is a cuckoo whistle. Wow. That's a lot of value. I mean, if you're going to buy this, you get a lot of bang for your buck for purchasing this one item. It costs the equivalent of $95. But the idea was it's your, you know, it's a lot of different sounds in one instrument and that was again with the saving space. I have three instruments on the table that are taking up a lot of space and the Ludwig four and one whistle was meant to say space. The ocean liner, the train whistle, and the cuckoo. All three different instruments that take up a lot of space. I'm sure people said, man, these are, some guy looked at it and said, wow, I could make this better and I could make this smaller. That's genius. Yeah. It's just really different from what we're used to these days. Yeah. Yeah. And I guess I kind of skipped over those sounds when I talked about transportation, but the tugboat and the ocean liner are very large wooden whistle. Yeah. Those sound great though. Those are really cool. So I guess I'll get into the next category. Sure. So explosive sound is another one. Every time there's, this is one that the screen really needs. There's a giant explosion on the screen and there's no sound except the guy next to you eating popcorn. Then it's really anti-climactic. Yeah. So when I play films, I think the easiest, cheapest way to make a sound is something explodes. I'll just hit a bass drum and a crash cymbal. It's practical. But if there's something, yeah, that was, that's generally the go-to instrument when you're playing trap set. If someone falls down or someone gets punched in the face or something explodes into a million pieces, just whack your crash cymbal. And if you had very little money and very little space, that would work. But if you had more money and more space, there might be explosions that need to be more realistic. I did one film where the title was Seven Years Bad Luck. And the entire point of the film was the protagonist accidentally smashes a giant bedroom mirror. And he spends the rest of the film having Seven Years Bad Luck. And I had to think of, how can I realistically, you know, make a sound for this giant mirror breaking? And I know what they did back then. Wahlberg and Auger made a machine for it. And I didn't own one. And nor have I ever seen one. I just had a picture in a catalog. And I took it on as a summer project to build my own. I got pretty nerdy about it. I built it really to specification. And it's, you know, like beautiful solid oak and stained brown and finished. And it's basically a crank instrument that looks like a bingo drum, if you can imagine that. A hand crank that just spins this drum. And the outside is covered in mesh wire. And the inside is just filled with glass. I'll show you what that sounds like. I would say this is the most fun instrument to play. I just did a movie with Buster Keaton and Fatty Arbuckle. And there's a bad guy. And Fatty Arbuckle tries to stop the bad guy by lining up like he's a bartender. And he just finds every bottle he can find behind the bar and smashes it on the head of the bad guy. And because they're like Hollywood props, you know, the actor is like completely unaffected. And they kind of use that to their advantage to be funny. Like this guy is just continually getting, having bought, I countered it. It was 19 bottles mashed over his head. And, and the bad guy like, you know, is not even paying attention like nothing's happening. It would sound like this when I performed it. That's awesome. So you turn one crank basically to get the glass kind of moving around per bottle breaking. Yeah. And if I wanted to, I could really bother your cat and just do a continuous glass breaking sound. That makes me think of like, you know, like, like a dumpster getting emptied or like a garbage can getting flipped over that's full of bottles or something like that. It comes in really handy. I'll tell you like, there's so many comedies where they smash his face over someone's head. Yeah. To go to. So those are in the category of explosions. Another explosion is a gunshot sound. And I know Kelly Ray did a video with William one of the third, but they have this thing called a surefire machine. And that just fired blanks. That was an ingenious machine. But most drummers couldn't afford one. They were $10 back then, which and you can do the math, but it was most instruments cost between like 50 cents and you know, max $3. So a $10 instrument was really expensive. So a lot of drummers, like I actually learned about this stuff just by, you know, having the same dilemma. I just did a Western theme show where I had to think of like, how am I going to do this movie must have had like 1900, like gunshots, just nonstop gunshots. And if you use a real revolver that has six, and if you use a surefire machine like the Ludwig has, it has only 16. And you have to reload the blank cartridges. And so I said for like, for, you know, 250 gunshot, what I did was I like rigged a drumstick against my snare drum and like mechanically clamped it on there. So the one drumstick was permanently in rim shot position. If that makes sense. Yeah, that does. I basically like, I clamped a drumstick to the hoop, and I would take a mallet and just whack it. That sounds and I did that from my gunshot. That's awesome. There's actually a George Stone catalog in 1912 that sells revolvers. Really? That was generally the way that people went around doing western movies with gunshots. They would just have a gun in their crack case. That would fire blanks, I would imagine, obviously, so you're not shooting a real bullets inside of a thing. Yeah, they would fire blanks. And I have two photos that I blew up and framed in my little man cave here, and both photos of the trap drummers have guns in their collection of sound effects. I would say the middle, the middle instrument, if you didn't want to, actual guns were expensive too. I would say the cheapest way besides the rim shot was this instrument I have called a shot pad, and it looks like a leather seat cushion. It's really just stuffed with padding, and it's a leather upholstered top, and you have a slapper that looks like a yardstick, and you just slap the leather seat cushion. That sounds believable. Well, you're convinced. That's good. I'm convinced. Are you okay? Was there gunshots? No, everyone's safe here. Okay, good. I'm marked safe. Good. I was worried. In terms of explosions, I guess if you want to call this an explosion, that's just a pop gun. Yeah. You know, cork, cork. Like champagne or something. Champagne cork? Yeah. And there's movies I've done with champagne corks popping. Sure. The biggest explosion sound that I have is this Walberg and Auger machine that's about four feet tall, and it's basically a giant, you know, 57-pound ratchet. It's called a crash machine, and I think if you hear the sound without a contact, it sounds a little weird, but if you imagine, you know, this scenario came up a lot in silent comedies of like a train somehow crashes through a house. Like, I don't know. I can't explain to you how that happens, but imagine a giant locomotive just smashing into a house, and then you would use a sound effect like this. Yeah. That makes sense. It sounds like a locomotive smashing through a house. And the cool thing about this machine, I actually rescued this from a Toronto antique shop, and it took me a couple years to figure out how to get it to Chicago. But it's called, it's another combination statesaver. This is three machines in one. It's a wind machine. I don't know of all, if everyone listening knows what a wind machine is, but it's basically another spinning, like, you know, bingo style drum with a crank, but it has a canvas stretch over it. Cool. And then another bingo drum type crank underneath it was a rain machine, which is, this literally is a bingo drum, like with the wire cage and everything. And it's filled with little rocks. That's neat. And that's the rain machine. The cool thing about it is if you have two people, you can do the wind and the rain together. So they're independent cranks that you can do. This is like everyday life stuff for people. It would be elements and, I mean, transportation, animals, weather and explosions, there's nothing more every day than that. I hope, hopefully not every day explosions, but you know what I mean, where this is what's in the, you know, this is what would be in the pictures. I mean, we couldn't provide every possible counter strike, but if something was important to the scene and important to the plot, you would want to have the sound there. Yeah. I think the most obvious thing I should mention in weather, there's, I know one person that owns one of these things. There's something called a Thunder drum. And it is a five foot by five foot rectangle, like shallow drum. It looks like a frame drum, but it's square. And it's five feet by five feet. And it has a giant cast skin head stretched over it. And it's basically the like growliest, deepest, lowest pitch bass drum you could possibly hit. And that when you would whack it, it would just sound like boom, just a thunder strike. That's awesome. And the person I know who found this actually found it in a silent film house that was going to get torn down. Wow. That is a hell of a thing. So they had it in the rasters. Yeah. They had it in the rasters along with like a big spender sheet, which is a giant sheet metal. And they would just use it any time they needed it. They just kind of had it around. God, that had to be expensive to make. I mean, and talk about impractical, I mean, like a five foot by five foot square drum, that's not, you're not moving around with that. Yeah. That was generally more for like proper theater. And making sounds like that goes all the way back like to opera. Like hundreds of years ago, they used, you know, realistic thunder sounds and lightning sounds. And a lot of these things got invented back then. I don't want to get too far back. The last realistic sound is ringing sound. And I would say this is the most needed in a movie where I did one movie with Harold Lloyd, where the plot is that he owns a doctor's office that gets no customers. And he's sitting at his desk staring at the telephone and it's just doing nothing, just dead. Business is dead. And then an important part of the scene is the song finally rings. And in a silent film, they didn't know if you were going to have a trap drummer or not in your movie theater. So what they would do was they would show the little bells getting, you know, like an old song like had little bells and electric ringer. So they'll show on the screen the little bells getting run. But to have a telephone ring in a movie and have no sound is probably the weirdest thing not to have. So I had a little electric bell set. Cool. And I have two D batteries connected to it. But back then, the battery that you needed to connect to it was the size of two coke cans stacked on top of each other. And the cheaper version was like a little bicycle bell. This is a bicycle bell that's kind of built with gears and spring inside. It's more like an alarm clock. But this is actually a bicycle bell. And I got it from a man whose first teacher gave it to him. And he used it in silent films any time there was a telephone. And that's much easier to carry around. Yeah, that's really cool, though. It has that same kind of like that people have ringtones that sound like that, like an old school phone. I don't know about you that my ringtone sounds like this. That's awesome. So another ringing sound would be like bells like church bells, firebells, cathedral chimes. A lot of drummers back then would have like a set of chimes in their kit if they could afford it. Let me try to think what another ringing sound is. Flaybells, the comedy sounds were really extensive and really funny. I think probably the most often used thing is the slide whistle. And in movies when someone's like falling off a cliff or someone's like slipping and falling in the butt, I'll go. So these are the comedy sounds that I use very frequently in movies. Little noise makers, a siren, a slapstick. Very cartoony. Everything sounds very loony tunes or something. Oh yeah, I've even done the thing where the guy gets bonked on the head and then I go, sees birds. Yeah. And that's all from cartoons. I usually make the correction of people that all this is before cartoons. Cartoons was actually taking from this. So it's kind of backwards. Definitely. Oh, this one's really weird. I should talk a little bit about what companies made these things. Sure. Yeah. But there's something, another small Crank's instrument, they would call them machines. Is this Wahlberg and Ajay machinery imitation? And the catalog says a lot of things that most of us don't know what they are, but they would say it's for a Derrick or a like hoisting an anchor on a ship or any type of heavy machinery. That's cool. Yeah, anything with a little crank on it is the most convenient. Especially if you need to do something really quick with one hand. Every time a comedy where someone falls on their butt, I very frequently, if I don't have a lot of time or I will have one hand, I use the ratchet into the base drum. I go, Oh man, that's cool. It's all about showing the motion. This is a down sound. And this is an up sound. God, it makes me think of like a bean hitting the head with like a frying pan or something, you know. I've seen it all, man. I bet. Wow. So many cool sounds. So obviously, as the manufacturers, like you said, we've got Ludwig and Ludwig, Wahlberg and Auger, who's a big one who isn't quite as well known nowadays. They're still a company. And I'm actually talking about doing a whole episode with them because they're, I believe they are owned by someone who's keeping the history alive. But but besides those two, who else is making this stuff? Well, Wahlberg and Auger was by far the biggest one. No one came close. They made everything. And the weird thing is they didn't, they didn't make them under their own name. I don't know why they chose to do this, but part of the reason they're not as well known these days is because they would frequently sell things generically. They would let Ludwig sell their stuff without using the name Wahlberg and Auger. And they had a brand name that they use called perfection. The company might be Wahlberg and Auger, but a lot of their catalog covers say perfection. So that was kind of like their, you know, more catchy name to use was perfection. Well, and as what I've seen too, is that even the drum sets they made didn't have badges. They were made generically and the actual Wahlberg and Auger brand would be on like the bass drum hoop, which a lot of times those would get lost or something. So I've seen people say that I think I have a Wahlberg and Auger drum set, but it doesn't have a badge on it. Yeah. Well, I, I've frequently wondered why they did that. And I really think they were just trying to do more business. I think there was a lot of dealers back then, like a Fred Gretz manufacturing company was a dealer in instruments. They sometimes made instruments in the teens and 20s. They were importers and dealers. And they would buy something from another company and slap their name on it. And they would do that with Wahlberg and Auger. I have a boat whistle that says Fred Gretz manufacturing company and the badge, but it's actually a whistle made by Leedy. So Ludwig would, in their later days in the 20s, sell train whistles and call it the Ludwig train whistle, but it was made by Wahlberg and Auger. So I think they were making more money by selling things for people to use generically. They pop up in like one out of every three episodes I do. Someone talks about Wahlberg and Auger. So they've definitely got a big footprint in the history of drumming. So cool. It's definitely the hip company. It's the hip company to talk about. Yeah, that's true. It's the cool, the cool company. That's the big company that made almost everything. They were like, I'm really good friends with Lee Vincent who studies early Boston drum manufacturers. And I always wondered why he was so focused on one city. We both lived there at one point. But besides that, drum companies for some reason in the Massachusetts area just were totally different than anywhere else in the country. If you don't know, Wahlberg and Auger is from Worcester, Massachusetts, which is really not that far from Boston. So I kind of throw that into the mix of this like Massachusetts, like spink tank of like drum companies that really like kind of things totally different from the rest of the country. Companies like George Stone and Dodge and Note's and Nikolai and Stromberg. And for some reason, they just went above and beyond in terms of making sound effects also. The drums were different and innovative, but there's sound effects. Note's and Nikolai and Wahlberg and Auger were the only company that would make like a five foot tall like rain machine and like, you know, a giant wind machine. And Note's and Nikolai made a cranked machine that was the sound of like million gunshots going on. These like really complicated machines. Other companies like Ludwig and Ludwig, I'm actually talking to you about 75 feet away from the original Ludwig and Ludwig factory. I live just down the block from where it used to be. Cool. It's a condominium now. I know. I think Bill Ludwig B3 was saying that and I know Gretch, their original location is now like condos or something as well. So that's at least it wasn't torn down. Yeah. Yeah. And I live literally one and a half minute drive from WFL so that used to be. And so companies like that in Chicago, they really focused on their main inventions being the snare drum and the bass drum pedal, but they had a small collection of really nicely made sound effect instruments like with these train whistles I've told you about. Yeah. And Liddy had its own wooden train whistles and it had its own, you know, they would generally sell the generic stuff that Waldberg and Arget made, but they would have one or two things that they especially made that was really nice. Like this Lion's Road I showed you was something that only Ludwig and Ludwig made. And I'm really nerdy about all the company. There's so many companies. I only have like one or two things made by notes and Nikolai. I've got a few things made by Dodge. I've got a few things made by Yerkes, which was a company that only made sound effects. A few things by Duplex. A lot of people are familiar with the Duplex snare drums. Duplex made a ton of traps in like the early days like 1910. They made this chicken. They made a rooster call. Yeah, they had a full outfit. Duplex made a full outfit of traps. So it goes without saying that this was obviously an industry. Like this was not like a kind of like a little gimmicky. Like we make little, you know, stuff on the side, but this was a full on industry was creating these trap instruments. It was an industry that existed all the way from like 1905 until the 30s. It definitely fizzled out in the late 20s really badly. In the late 20s, you were pretty much playing jazz set if you were a drummer. You weren't really doing the movie so much. The first silent film with sound, and they called them talkies, was in 1927. It was already fizzling out before that. All this stuff had its heyday in the 1910s. It's almost like they were putting more work into making the sound effects than they were into making the drums. That's interesting. Well, I mean, that's a pretty long time. Industries come and go in less time than, you know, in 15, 20 years because you think now there's booms of industries popping up and they're gone within a couple years. So they definitely had a good run. I'm glad that we have someone like you who is actually keeping this alive. And I know there's multiple people around the country and around the world who are doing that. So your collection is really just a way to preserve this. It seems far-fetched. The history would be lost if it wasn't for what you're doing. Oh, thank you. I think that's a good transition to let people know where they can find you because your website, I mentioned at the beginning, but your website has just unbelievable pictures of everything that you have. And maybe if people are in your region, in Chicago, they can see you perform live. So why don't you tell us a little bit about where they can find you and what you got going on? Sure. My website is vintageprocussionestoundfx.com. I have a new Instagram account that's steadily growing called weeklytrapdrummer. I have a Facebook page for my website. And I perform silent films here in Chicago with organist Jay Warn and the Silent Film Society of Chicago. Cool. Yeah. And I try and share your stuff as much as possible just because it's, again, like someone would look at something like a bird whistle and say, that's not drums, but it's absolutely an incredible piece of drumming history. So man, I mean, this has been a deep dive into all of it. And like I said, if people want to learn more about the ups and downs and less of the technical, check out the first episode. But I love how we can go into it and that you've shared all of this stuff with us. And I can highly recommend that people go to your website. And I'm sure you'd be happy to talk to anyone who has more questions or wants to get into this for themselves. Sure. Maybe we could talk another time about. I'm looking at the clock here to spend an hour and a half. I had all these low boys and snowshoes, pedals, maybe another time. Yeah. No, and that kind of falls into the more of the symbol world, which is something I'm definitely working on. I've got spoiler alert. I've got Zilgen coming up, which I personally had like a thing in my mind. I was like, I can't do any other symbol stuff until I talk about the history of Zilgen first and get that done. So yeah, I'd love to get that down the road. But yeah, for the sake of keeping this under a two hour episode, I think, I think we've done it, man. So again, we have been talking to Nick White from vintage percussion sound effects.com. Check them out there or at weekly trap drummer on Instagram. So Nick, thanks again for being here, man, and I'm looking forward to hopefully meeting you next time. I'm in Chicago, which will probably be in May for the 30th Chicago drum show. Yeah, of course, I love it. Thank you, Bart. It's been a lot of fun. All right. Thanks, Nick. Talk to you later. All right. If you like this podcast, find me on social media at drum history, and please share, rate, and leave a review. And let me know topics that you would like to learn about in the future. Until next time, keep on learning. This is a Gwynn Sound podcast.