Product Review: Beetle Percussion Last Pad, Single-sided/concert

Early last year, I had an opportunity to put Beetle Percussion’s Last Pad through its paces. At the time, there was only a double-sided, marching focused version available. It was designed for modern marching drummers, able to take very high tension. You can read that review in two parts here, and here.

Eventually, after multiple experiments with that pad, I passed it along to a drummer with more experience playing modern, high-tension drums for further testing. Then, I turned my attention to other pads.

A few months back, I was offered the chance to try out the newer single-sided version of the Last Pad, designed for lower-tension concert and traditional marching practice. I readily agreed.

The single-sided Last Pad arrived this weekend, and I assembled it.

Beetle kindly sent the pad with two coated heads, one in single-ply Ambassador weight and the other in a heavier, two-ply Emperor weight. Since I already have a few pads with Ambassador heads on them for concert work, I chose to assemble this with the Emperor head.

The Last Pad comes with everything needed for assembly, including:

— Valchromat base, pre-drilled

— your choice of a lower-profile S-Hoop or a regular triple flange hoop

— all the necessary tuning bolts, nuts and washers

— a 14” insert consisting of 1/2” dense foam laid into a Valchromat base, designed to fit under the drumhead and on top of the primary pad base. You can order inserts made with recycled tire rubber if you wish, but the foam insert is necessary to make a lower-tension concert/traditional pad.

— a 14” head (not included in the base price, but you can buy one from Beetle for an extra charge or use one you already have)

You’ll need a standard drum key and a 5/16” open wrench. Beetle sells these as extras, too, if you don’t already have them.

The Valchromat primary base comes in multiple colors by request. My primary base is orange, and the insert (which is unseen once assembled) came in blue.

At left: the underside of the primary base, finished with foam discs for a nonskid experience on a tabletop.

Below: the top side of the primary base, inlaid with the same recycled tire rubber used on other Beetle pads.

The insert is inlaid with dense foam that, when placed under the drum head, provides a buttery feel that’s ideal for lower tings and coated heads.

Remembering my experience with the double-sided Last Pad and how the insert could wiggle slightly off-center, I put down a small rolled piece of clear tape between the primary base and the insert to keep it centered during tensioning. (Once it’s tensioned, the tape won’t affect the function of the assembled pad.)

The primary base comes pre-drilled to receive the tuning bolts, nuts and washers. I assume that two washers are used to provide greater strength and stability, with the larger washer going in first, followed by the smaller washer and then the nut. The holes of the washers have different inside diameters, so pay attention when assembling.

I took my time, using the overturned box as an assembly surface. Because everything came pre-drilled, assembly was very straightforward. However, you need to take your time and be patient because there are twelve nodes of contact. Tensioning and tuning properly will take longer, and you’ll want to make sure the insert doesn’t wiggle around while you put everything together. (The tape helps a lot with this.)

The holes are drilled to take counter-sunk washers on the bottom, and the elongated ovals make it easier to set up the tension bolts while you work your way around the pad. Once you assemble everything hand-tight, positioning each tuning bolt in or near the middle of the oval is straightforward.

After going around enough to ensure that nothing rattled anymore, I put the pad into a concert snare stand and began tuning more assertively. My concert stand of choice is a vintage Hamilton stand that is strong and heavy. The arms don’t line up with the cutouts in the primary base, but that’s not a problem here. A stand with three arms of equal length and distance will match up with the cutouts easily.

When it was all done, I tried it out. First, I used marching sticks:

Then, I turned to some concert sticks and tried some buzz rolls and a lighter touch:

Finally, I tried some brush strokes:

The foam insert definitely makes you put in a little more effort and thought to “pull” the strokes out of the head, just as you would when playing a traditionally-tensioned field drum or a snare from a drum kit.

That’s a feature of playing lower tensioned drums, and not a mistake. Anyone used to chopping on Kevlar will have to adjust their approach accordingly.

At some point, I may swap in the Ambassador head and try that out but honestly, I am so delighted with the feel and response of the Emperor head that I’m going to hang out with it awhile.

If you’ve been on the fence about the Last Pad, it’s worth the money and the time you’ll invest in it.

If you’re focused on marching snare and you chop on Kevlar, get the double-sided version and put different heads on each side. If you’re looking for a really fine concert or traditional pad, the single-sided is ideal. 

(Note: Beetle Percussion does not pay me to test and write about their pads, or to help market them. Now that they offer hoodies, though, I may just have to buy one.)

Happy drumming.

Brandon’s Demo: Beetle Percussion Last Pad (singlesided)

Here’s a really nice demo of the Beetle Percussion Last Pad, provided by Brandon Graves.

If you remember a couple years back, I reviewed the double sided Last Pad, which was really designed for modern marching drummers and capable of taking extremely high tension. It was really not a pad that applied to my uses, and with Bradley’s blessing I sent it along to another, younger drummer for further testing.

Meanwhile, I’ll soon be taking delivery on the singlesided version of the Last Pad, which is designed to be optimal at a lower tension and is more suited to concert and Mylar marching work. Since I don’t yet have my pad, I thought I’d share this video from Beetle artist Brandon Graves to whet your appetite.

(NOTE: Beetle Percussion does NOT pay me — or even ask me — to post these articles or to hype their pads. I do so because I believe Beetle makes some of the nicest and the most sustainable practice pads in the industry, and I think they’re worth your consideration. That’s all.)

I expect to receive my Last Pad within the next month or so. Remember that these pads are craftmade one at a time right here in the US, and as with all things Beetle, they're worth the wait.

One of these things is just like the other: waxed canvas stick bags

Because I like to point out naked emperors everywhere I find them, here’s this week’s interestingness.

First, Meinl’s waxed canvas drum stick bag. Very nice, waxed cotton canvas with padding, reinforcements made of synthetic “pleather” and stitched well all around. More than enough pockets for all the sticks and mallets you’d need for a gig. Very attractive and pretty durable bag, and if you care about such things, it’s vegan. (That’s worth something here in Portland, which has more vegan restaurants than you can possibly imagine. Vegans like appreciate that.)

The bag comes in multiple colors, including black, khaki and green.

Very attractive and available at all your favorite big box music retailers, including Sweetwater, Music & Arts and Musician’s Friend (which may be all the same thing with three different names and coverage regions, but that’s not in my wheelhouse.)

It retails for $120.

Then, there’s this lovely number from Third Floor Bazaar, a single drum/percussion warehouse retailer based in New York. Jonathan Singer, the proprietor, has a doctorate in Percussion and teaches part-time in addition to his duties running the retail business. He ships all over the country and overseas, and has a legion of loyal customers who border on outright fandom (disclaimer: I’m one of them).

Jon offers a house brand called Name Brand, which began with cymbals made by independent cymbalsmiths and has expanded to various accessories, including a lovely stick bag made from waxed canvas and synthetic “pleather.”

If you look closely, it’s the same as the Meinl bag. Not similar, but nearly identical. Same size, same construction and design. Meinl’s snaps are embossed with the brand name and the hooks for the shoulder strap are a bit bigger. I haven’t seen the Meinl bag in person, and it’s possible that the canvas used is probably made from a slightly thicker material. I don’t know. But when nearly every other aspect of these bags is essentially the same, it’s hard not to notice.

It’s also hard not to notice the difference in price.

Meinl’s bag retails for $120.

The Name Brand bag retails for $45.

Now, obviously, neither Meinl nor Third Floor Bazaar are making these bags in-house. If they did they’d have to sell them for so much more money it would be stupid. But it wouldn’t be hard to guess that the bags are being made in the same factory overseas. Indeed, even if they’re being made in two different factories, both of those factories are still overseas (likely in China, because with few exceptions — and almost none of the cheapest exceptions exist elsewhere in the drum industry — China makes nearly everything now), with one closely copying the design of the other. China isn’t known for worrying about things like protecting intellectual or physical property designs.

I’ve gone on before about all the pitfalls of manufacturing overseas, marking up prices obscenely and selling the products here in the US. I won’t beat that horse again here. But if you actually need a drum stick bag and you don’t want it to be made of animal products (petroleum doesn’t count, because dinosaurs have been gone a long time), you could do a lot worse than this Name Brand bag.

I bought one because I needed a stick bag, didn’t want one made of leather, and I trust and support Third Floor Bazaar. I’m sure as hell glad I don’t live in New York, because I’d be visiting that place every week.

So what’s my point here? I do have one and it’s this:

If you’re going to buy drums and parts and accessories, make sure they’re things you actually need and will use. Count to ten before you spend the money.

Where possible, repair what you have, or buy used (Third Floor has you covered there, and so do lots of small drum shops around the country). 

When you need to buy new, support a small business rather than a big box conglomerate, because the profits will stay local and support the little guy, rather than pad the bottom line of a bunch of shareholders.

Thanks for coming to my TED talk. Happy drumming.

Drum Pad Redux: Offworld Percussion

Several years ago, in the early days of the pandemic, I came into a couple of used pads from Offworld Percussion. The first pad, an Invader, wasn’t my thing. Designed by and for drummers accustomed to marching with high-tension Kevlar snares, the hard black rubber was very responsive, but felt jarring to my hands, accustomed as they were to Mylar heads with lower tension. The pad was well-made, with Offworld’s patented “Darkmatter” poured into a hard plastic shell that acts as a very stout rim when the rubber sets. But it was also very heavy for a rubber practice pad, and I tripped over it more than I actually used it.

The second pad, an Invader with a blonde gum rubber surface, was more to my liking, but it was also heavy, and redundant with several other pads I had at the time.

Eventually, I sold them both, and moved on.

Fast forward to now. I had an opportunity to consider Offworld pads again, thanks to a guy in central Oregon wanting to sell a Tapspace pad, and also thanks to a gum rubber version of the BYOS pad that went on sale. Over a period of about a month, I was able to buy the used a Tapspace pad and the BYOS pad, plus a couple of pucks to insert into the BYOS pad.

Here’s the Tapspace pad. I bought it used at a significant discount, and it cleaned up nicely. The rubber feels similar to that of the V3 rubber pad I’d had five years ago, but because this is a singlesided pad it weighs far less and is easier to manage. Plus, it comes with a small oval of hard Darkmatter so you can have different playing surfaces on one side. The feel is responsive without being mushy, and I like it a lot.

The underside of the pad has a fiberboard base and an outer ring made from recycled rubber. The rubber is playable, though not large enough to be practical. (More recent versions of the V3 with Darkmatter come with a bottom fully cover with this recycled rubber, instead of the entire pad being Darkmatter top and bottom. It’s a lighter pad than the earlier version, and while I appreciate that I still don’t think the Darkmatter pad is for me.)

Last year, I’d fitted a heavy platform to a marching snare carrier so that I could carry a practice pad on the march, as part of my physical therapy for dealing with Long Covid.  The setup worked well enough, but the metal platform alone weighed over eight pounds. Adding a pad to that made whole thing very, very heavy. I decided I’d need to research a lighter weight solution. 

At first, I tried a Offworld Visitor pad, with a lighter weight attachment available from Offworld that attaches to the J hooks on a snare carrier. The pad was small (with an 8” gum rubber playing surface) and very lightweight, but not exactly what I was looking for. 

So I turned my attention to the larger BYOSphere pad, which was designed in partnership with the BYOS crew who play and teach on high-tension Kevlar drums. It was first made with Darkmatter, and optional laminates could be purchased. More recently, the BYOSphere pad was offered with a gum rubber surface (for which laminates would not apply). 

The BYOSphere pad, like the Visitor pad, comes with a hollowed out section underneath. This recess accepts various magnetic “pucks” and other accessories that allow for different sound effects and for use on a stand or with a knee strap. (These pucks also fit the pads in the Aurora series.)  when I installed the BYOSphee pad on the carrier attachment, I was pleased that it fit exactly the way I’d hoped, and at the proper distance from my carrier.

Obviously, you can’t use the sound effects pucks at the same time you place the pad on the marching attachment or on a stand; but on a tabletop or another pad these sound effects are a lot of fun. I chose the two different sound effects (snare and shaker), and the dampening puck, to cover everything I might need.

The pucks that a pad can rest on come with threads for either an 8mm thread, or a 1/4” thread. I got one of each, the former for the marching carrier attachment and the latter for an old cymbal stand.

They work like a charm, though you do need to be careful not to get carried away with your rimshots.

The “snare” pad consists of tambourine jingles embedded into it, with an adjustable center washer to allow for more or less vibration when struck. (There’s also a shaker puck filled with metal ball bearings, that sounds very different from the “snare” puck.)

I’m pleased with how all my purchases and experiments have turned out. I’ve kept the Visitor pad, and for now it sits on my cymbal stand puck. (I don’t know if I’ll keep it but for now it’s small and handy.)

I use the BYOSphere pad on the marching carrier, and also on a flat surface. 

Offworld has the Aurora series pads and pucks, as well as the various versions of the larger V3 pad, available at their web site. The Tapspace version of the V3 pad is available directly from Tapspace, which also sells drum instructional materials.

Happy drumming.

Vintage Corner: Sam Ulano’s King Size Pad

Sam Ulano was a jazz drummer and drum teacher based in New York. He wrote and published many instruction books that are still in use today, and one of his quirkiest claims to fame is the one gig he played for the band PiL (Public Image, Ltd, with John Lydon before he founded the Sex Pistols).

Sam taught numerous drummers over a fifty year period and designed his own practice pads and practice sticks. His sticks were made from sections of metal conduit, and were designed for use on heavy rubber practice pads. You can find a couple of his pad designs in YouTube videos, like this one.

(Photo stills, enlarged, from the video)

Note the construction and size of the pad, with gum rubber set into a panel atop a blue wooden box.

I’d assume the handle is for ease of carrying, and that the box is hollow for resonance (though perhaps a drawer could be opened on one side to store a lesson book). I’ll need to research further to find better photos and information about this particular pad.

In other videos, Sam is shown playing on a big, flat pad. Here’s a photo still of that style of pad, taken from another video (with low production values, but you can still see the pads he and his student are using).

I acquired one of the flat styled pads this week in an online sale. This pad had previously been offered by another seller, at a price I couldn’t afford at the time. Six months later, it showed up for sale again, this time from a seller of random vintage items. I watched the listing for another six months and finally made him an offer that we could both live with. 

The pad is well used and probably dates from the 1960s or 70s. 

The top side is a panel of thick, pure gum rubber, of the kind available between the 1940s and 1960s, inset into a wood frame. It has a great feel even now, but the rubber has disintegrated with use and time. If I play on it, tiny crumbs of dried rubber flake off. I’m researching a way to preserve the rubber and make it safer to play without damage.

The bottom side of the pad has a much harder black panel of rubber that resembles the stuff found on the earliest versions of the HQ Real Feel pads. It has rebound, but is much harder in feel and tone.

The whole thing is supported by a thick wooden frame that measures around 13” x 11”, with playing surfaces measuring 12” x 10” — making for a very big practice pad.

I’m very glad to add this to my collection of vintage pads. I’m hoping to stabilize the gum rubber so I can use the pad regularly. Stay tuned.

CB700 snare drum: an underrated gem

Although I’ve pared down my drum holdings considerably, I still hold a place in my heart for CB700 drums from the late 1970s and early 1980s, the period of time when I was in high school. CB700 drums were a common fixture in many school band rooms back then, because they were solidly built and affordable by school districts. For awhile, CB700 drums and parts were made in the same factory as Pearl drums, but their manufacture jumped around a bit over several decades. The latest generation of CB drums were made in Taiwan, and then in China.

The CB700 drums came with beautiful lugs that came to be called “wristwatch” lugs for their shape. The center of the lug was finished with a shiny panel that came in silver, blue or red, with silver being the most commonly available. 

I acquired this CB700 snare drum a couple of years ago, put it in the closet and promised I’d get to work on cleaning it up. I finally pulled it out last month. I took it apart, tightened all the bolts, cleaned up the shell and the lugs and replaced the heads and snares. As I went around the lugs, I noticed that some of them were missing the polished aluminum dots. 

I reached out to a friend who’s a CB drum enthusiast and collector, and asked him where I might find some replacement dots.

He cheerfully replied that he’d be happy to send me some. He apparently knows how to cut them from aluminum sheeting, and polish them in the process so the polished side shines. He had a bunch and slipped some into an envelope. They arrived a few days ago, carefully wrapped in blue painters tape and sealed in a cardboard sleeve. He advised me to clearcoat the shiny side to protect them before installing them.

The weather here had been quite cold, so I thanked my friend and advised him I’d have to wait until it warmed up enough for the paint to dry.

Yesterday, the temperature warmed up to the high 50s, so I laid out the dots on the tape, sprayed a light clearcoat and let it dry overnight.

This morning, I applied the new dots to the bare lugs using a tiny drop of super glue for each one. They’re dry now, and the drum is complete. And beautiful.

Not bad for a drum that cost me twenty bucks.

Adventures in Unsustainability, Part 150: "Made in China" means we don't have to look behind the curtain

I know, I can sometimes be like a harpy screaming into the wind on this stuff, but if it didn't matter I wouldn't make such a fuss.

Drummer buys the newest version of the Carlos Botello signature pad, made in China and branded for Salyers Percussion (who, if you remember, doesn't actually make any of their own products).

Takes delivery, opens box and discovers that the pad has been wrecked already. 
He's paid almost $100 for the pad including postage, and is understandably annoyed.

He shares his experience on social media and in less than a day, the owner of the company jumps on and promises he'll make it right.

Suddenly, other drummers are hopping on, singing the company's praises and talking about what a standup guy the owner is.

If that's all we ever see, fine.

But this business model actually encourages consumers to not look behind the curtain, to not ask how the sausage is made. And this is why it's such an insidious thing.

The pads are made in China now, probably by Hanflag, which makes pads and other drum products for more companies than I care to list here. They are made in the thousands and shipped to music stores around the world, starting in the USA because that's where the real madness about marching-forward pads first took off and remains huge.

Because they are now mass-produced in such great quantities, it's no big deal from a consumer standpoint if a pad arrives damaged. Simply call the company, send photos and ask for a replacement. When the pad is made in such large quantities, there's no need to send the actual pad back, and that's probably the case here. It's a simple matter to replace it by pulling another off the stack in the warehouse. Customer gets replacement pad, which is probably okay, and he's happy. He and his buddies will continue to laud the company, boosting their image and their sales.

Fine. But what happens to the damaged pad?

That's probably up to the consumer.

If he's handy, he could remove the rest of the damaged soft rubber rim and even replace the silicon surface with something else, and keep or give away the repaired pad to a kid who's short on funds.
That's certainly what I'd do.

But very often, the truth is that nothing happens to that original practice pad. If the buyer is asked to bring it back to the retailer, the retailer will make some notes, arrange for a refund from the company, and very likely toss the pad in the dumpster.

Do you see where this is going?

Salyers and their ilk don't care.
They don't have to care, because they are having their pad mass-produced as fast as possible so they can sell them hard to as many drummers as possible.

But go wide-angle with me for a moment.

The marching arts activity is popular with high school and college-aged young people. But it's not exactly growing exponentially right now. School budgets have been slashed, music teachers have been laid off and music classes have been cut from the curriculum in nearly every state in the country. Overseas, the marching arts are very popular now in places like Japan, China and the Phillippines. But they are generally making their own drums and accessories. School bands exist in Africa too. But in places that have seen a lot of political and material disruption, kids are practicing on homemade pads, or simply on blocks of wood. They're not laying out a hundred bucks for a high-zoot pad from the US.

Add to that the disruption to the marching arts movement here in the US, with DCI trying desperately to reboot a shrinking and increasingly expensive summertime activity, families struggling to keep up (or quitting because they can't afford to send their kids back), high schools throughout the country resorting to marching in old uniforms and using old instruments because that's what they can afford to do.

What you see on YouTube and TV, and in wealthy suburbs with a solid tax base, are the cream of the crop, and make up a very small segment of what's really happening in school band programs across the country.

So at what point does it no longer make sense to mass-produce practice pads that will fall apart because they were cheaply made to begin with?

The whole thing has gotten really, silly, and really sad.

And that is why I lost interest in most modern, marching-forward pads. They don't represent reality, and they actively discourage the more mature thinking that is required of people living on a rapidly heating planet. 

Eighty years ago, our grandparents who drummed practiced on wood blocks with a hunk of rubber glued on top. They focused on technique and chops. They got good. 

Sixty years ago, Remo Belli made a practice pad with a Mylar head that felt a lot more like a real drum. It's what I and many other drummers of my generation learned on. By today's standards it's considered junk, but in reality it was such a good pad that Remo is still manufacturing them -- and their replacement heads -- today.

Thirty-five years ago, fancier rubber-on-wood and rubber-on-fiberboard pads entered the market. THe earliest models were not much different than their WWII forebears, except that they were the size of a drum head so you could practice zones. Zones had become a thing for marching snare drummers. Those pads weren't horribly expensive when they first came out. But as DCI drum lines grew more visible and more famous, suddenly more young drummers wanted to use the same pads those drum lines used, and the beginning of the marching-forward pad market was born.

Today it's out of control in many ways and for many reasons. You can read why in my earlier posts.

I've been selling off most of my modern marching pads. Unless they were craft made in the US, I've mostly lost interest in them. And although I may be shooting myself in the foot here, I secretly hope that there will be a great shaking out of companies selling Chinese-made pads while discouraging consumers not to look behind the curtain. We now live in an age where we can't afford to perpetuate so much willful ignorance without sacrificing our environmental and human future.

Stop worrying about whether your pad is "cool" or not. If you need a practice pad, buy it used or make your own.

Just drum on something. Make noise. Make rhythm. 

Make music.