Want to make your own practice pad? PadParts.com can set you up.

I wanted to make my own Pad Parts pad, so I did.

Base: 11” green ForesCore.

Side A: 10” x 1/4” gum rubber.

Side B: 10” x 1/4” recycled tire rubber.

To apply the gum rubber, I lightly sanded the facing surfaces and used the Medium Weight super glue available at Pad Parts. Carefully spread, weighted down overnight and allowed to dry another two days in a well-ventilated shed before bringing it inside.

To apply the recycled rubber, I lightly sanded the ForesCore side, and dampened the recycled rubber facing side. Then I applied Gorilla Glue — a better choice for porous or textured surfaces — and followed the same weighting and drying steps.

For reasons I can’t define technically,  like the sound and feel of the recycled tire rubber more on the ForesCore (which I think is similar to Valchromat used on the bases of Beetle pads) than on solid wood. The smaller 11” size is easy to take along in a messenger bag or backpack and sits nicely on my lap, a tabletop or a snare stand.

And I saved money by putting together my own pad.

Color me a happy customer.

Want a nice pad? Do the labor yourself. PadParts.com will set you up with everything you need.

The recycled rubber comes in different thicknesses and is meant to provide a harder, faster surface for those who march high-tension snare drums.

On solid wood, as found in the craft-made pads from Beetle Percussion, the feel and sound are a little bit jarring, and harder on the hands because there’s very little shock absorption and the vibrations travel all the way up the sticks and into your hands.

On the ForesCore base, which I believe is related to the Valchromat base that is found on some Beetle pads, the sound and feel are a little more forgiving, allowing for a greater range of uses, styles and sticks. I like the way my Artifact Etude concert sticks feel on this pad, on both sides — something I wouldn’t enjoy as much on my Beetle Pine Pad with its solid wood base.

PadParts.com is the official side hustle from the same folks that make Beetle Percussion pads. The variety of base materials, playing surfaces, thicknesses and sizes allow for a wide range of possibilities so you can come up with a practice pad to suit your specific needs. PadParts also offers various industrial glues to provide optimal adhesion for your pad. If you have questions about how to work with these materials and glues, just reach out to PadParts.com and ask for instructions and suggestions. 

And remember, when using industrial glues, wear gloves and eye protection, work in a well-ventilated garage or outside, and allow to dry weighted down for twenty-four hours before bringing the finished pad into the house. 

Happy drumming!

Evelyn Glennie practice pad

I just acquired this little pad, a two-sided affair that was apparently designed by Dame Evelyn Glennie.

Glennie is a Scottish drummer and percussionist who is known for her total-body approach to performing, for commissioning new percussion works throughout her five decade career, and for being deaf since childhood. Her first drum teacher taught her to hear music with various parts of her body, and she performs barefoot in order to better feel the resonance of the instruments she plays on and with.

I’d heard of Evelyn Glennie, and admired her work from afar. We’re close to the same age and I loved that a woman had gained so much fame through her hard work in what was still considered, in our youth, a “man’s” field.

Some years ago, when my Sweetie worked as the program annotator for the Oregon Symphony, she scored two tickets for us to see Glennie perform with the Symphony. It was a glorious evening filled with sound, movement and wonder that I’ve never forgotten.

One of Glennie’s philosophies is that the practice pad is another musical instrument, and should be approached and used as such. That philosophy may help to explain the design of this pad.

I haven’t been able to find any literature specifically about this pad, though I was able to locate a video in which she demonstrates her philosophy and demonstrates it with this pad.

The actual pad measures roughly a foot long and about eight inches wide, and each side has three small discs of rubber or foam. Each rubber disc measures 3 1/2” diameter by 1/4” thick, and each foam disc (on the obverse) measures 3 3/4” diameter by about 1/2” thick. All of the discs offer varying degrees of rebound.

The base appears to be some kind of compressed wood particleboard, dyed red and stamped with Glennie’s name on both sides. (I assume the shape connects to the Loch Ness Monster, a nice nod to Glennie’s Scottish roots.)

While the pad is very small and the playing surfaces smaller, it works fine on a flat surface like a table top.  Adding a drum mute underneath reduces unwanted bumps and resonances, though experimenting with those resonances could also be fun.

I’ve reached out to Dame Glennie through her web site, asking for more specifics about when and why this pad was designed. The video is almost ten years old, though the pad may be older than that. I hope she will respond and help fill in the blanks. Meanwhile, it’s a really cool little pad and I am glad to have it in my studio.

I’ll post an update if I get a response.

Pad rant umpteen: growth gets growthier, junk gets junkier, and we all lose

Remember this post? 

Well, it has hit the fan.

First, RCP, makers of the Active Snare Pad, have gone full-bore Chinese mass production and simultaneously churned up a new perversion of the idea of Manifest Destiny. They’re now offering pads with Christian messaging, which are being made by people working for pennies in awful conditions in China, to be sold mostly in the US. 

In and of itself, I have no real quarrel with Christian messaging. It’s part of the oxygen in this country and I can do nothing about that, so it’s a hill I choose not to die on. But having these pads made overseas by people with no other options to eke out a living is, to my thinks, basically awful.

Then, Carlos Botello jumped ship from Beetle Percussion earlier this fall to become an artist endorser at Salyers Percussion, a company that doesn’t make any of their own products but has become a juggernaut in the hyped-out marching world. He told Beetle to stop making his signature pad, and signed an agreement to have his pad produced and sold by Salyers. 

The difference in the pads is obvious, and astounding. 

The Beetle version, made in the USA, featured a laminated rubber surface and recycled rubber rim mounted on a Valchromat base, with a foam layer on bottom for working out fingers and wrists. The Salyers version, made in a Chinese factory, offers a laminated silicon playing surface with a soft rubber rim that circles half the playing surface, mounted on an MDF base. The pads sound and feel different and the evidence is found in multiple videos. The price difference between the two pads is about thirty dollars, which tells you that (a) Beetle was slightly underpricing their pads in order to compete in the marketplace, and (b) Salyers knew that it had to offer their version at a lower price, but still has to squeeze all the profit it could out of what is an inferior, mass-produced pad.

(Below, L-R: Beetle Botello pad, Salyers Botello pad.)

It’s sad and a little ugly all around. And it’s a battle that craft makers won’t win as long as we conduct business in a grow-or-die economic landscape where marketing supersedes quality — and quality control.

Which is why I’m going out of my way to make my own pads, refurbish old pads, and support businesses like Pad Parts that want to encourage drummers to build their own practice pads.

There are too many pad brands, too many pad models, too few actual mass-producers and therefore too much redundancy for the pad market to be sustainable in the long term. And I’m pivoting so I can do the research to back up my concerns about the waste and borderline fraud inherent in the marching-focused pad scene. We’ve reached a point where the waste has to stop.

The latest homemade pad: it’s like an obsession

I think I keep making pads at home because it’s some kind of obsession.

It may also be a quiet rebellion against the mountains of mass-produced crap that companies like Hanflag, Evans and Vic Firth keep churning out of unsustainable materials like silicon, MDF and plastic.

The truth is that my dozens of homemade pads, made and given away over the years, won’t make a real difference in the scheme of things. They certainly won’t compel the mass-producers to change the way they do business. (Which is why their insistence on shouting down my uncomfortable questions on the socials confuses me slightly. What have they got to lose when most of their teenaged buyers aren’t paying attention to anything but the hype?)  But I continue to make them out of found and repurposed objects, mostly because doing this brings me joy. When I pass along one of my homemade pads to another drummer and learn that they love using it, that gives me more joy still.

(Jay O’Brien, a percussionist based in New Jersey who plays with multiple orchestras and keeps a full private studio, is currently using one of my recent pads, a 1/2” rubber slab on a small cutting board shaped like the state of Oregon. He says it’s the perfect size to keep on a trap table onstage as a warmup tool before concerts, and I am thrilled.)

This pad was made using a gum rubber sheet on top (purchased as a 12” square, 1/4” thick, and cut down to a round), a piece of yoga mat on bottom, and both are glued to a solid birch base that was originally the top of a lazy Susan for someone’s dinner table. The top surface is a nearly perfect practice surface that isn’t too loud but offers a nice rebound for Rudimental work. The yoga mat material provides a great nonskid surface, and doubles as a practice surface for when I want to really work out the fingers and wrists. Solid wood as a base offers more resonance and ring than a fiber board like MDF or Valchromat, and takes a little getting used to. But making the adjustment isn’t hard, and the solid wood provides a durable base for the practice pad.

The wood came from a thrift store and cost me a couple of bucks. It probably dates from the 1970s, and the dark stain adds a nice visual appeal.

I applied the yoga mat to the bottom, not bothering to remove the label. I sanded it lightly before glueing on  the yoga mat, and let it dry overnight.

I sanded the top side of the base lightly, and also lightly sanded the side of the gum rubber being glued against the wood for a better adhesion. Again, I weighted it down and let it dry overnight in a well-ventilated shed.

The rubber sheet was 1/4” about the thickest I’d attempt to cut by hand with industrial shears. The edge is a little bit rough, but I chose this method rather than trying to hold the rubber in place while cutting with a carpet knife. I was simply too afraid of having the knife slip and ruin the rubber or slice my hand. I can live with the result.

If you choose to make your own practice pad, always apply the glue in a well-ventilated space that’s not in the home — in the summer, I work outdoors and in the winter, I work in a shed next to the house. 

In each case, I use a medium strength super glue that’s readily available at many hardware stores. You can also buy it online at PadParts.com, where you can also find a variety of base and playing surface materials that come precut in a choice of sizes. If you prefer everything neatly trimmed, just order the parts there and you’ll be very pleased with the final result.

This pad measures about 11” across, with top and bottom surfaces trimmed to about 10” across. The slightly smaller size means it fits easily in a backpack; and at less than four pounds it’s light enough to take anywhere. I’m pleased with how this one turned out and will likely keep it.

Vintage Corner: Leedy practice pad, 1930s-40s

I have a fondness for the older, larger tilt pads that were popular between 1930 and 1970.

I’m especially excited about pads dating from the first half of this age spread. They tend to have a slightly steeper tilt angle and a larger rubber playing surface. The reddish rubber surface tends to keep its rebound for a reasonably long time if it’s stored indoors and taken care of. If it’s left outside, the rubber degrades quickly, becoming unplayable.

Dating some of these pads can be challenging due to any or all of the following reasons:

— Pad designs from this era tended to be similar across multiple companies, and were not changed often;

— Available materials were similar, due to availability of both materials and types of rubber processing;

— Major drum companies changed hands multiple times between the mid 1930s and the mid 1950s, meaning that branding had to change along with ownership. Good examples of this include Ludwig, Leedy, WFL, George Way and Camco. There are others.

Thanks to the efforts of the fellow who created and maintains the DrumArchive web library, hundreds of pdfs of historic drum catalogs and fliers can be examined and the pictorial evidence found can help confirm what started as a hunch as to the year a pad was made and sold. A recent deep dive into the archive helped me determine the maker and age range of this pad, which now makes it one of my oldest vintage pads.

I obtained this pad last spring, and couldn't figure out who had made it or when.

The reddish rubber on top is likely original, though that's impossible to prove. Also, there's no decal on the wood anywhere. So all I have to go on is the design, including the size and shape of the wood panels and any distinguishing features.

The bottom panel has a circular cutout that appears to serve as a sound enhancer.

The rear-facing support panel has carved-out sides that add some flair to the pad's appearance. 

If you turn the pad over, the bottom is made of a very thin fiberboard, which covers the sound hole. Presumably, this fiber bottom has no function.

Or does it?

Going into the Drum Archive, I looked through multiple listing of Ludwig catalogs, and found nothing resembling that shape or style.

But when I turned to catalogs from Leedy Drums, I discovered that they had made this very pad, including the shape of the support panel, the sound hole and the fiber bottom -- which was actually designed to be a second practice surface. Leedy sold this model as their "Two-Way" Practice Pad.

Drum Archive has Leedy catalogs starting in 1933, and my pad appears in every Leedy catalog from 1933 through 1949. The next catalog on file dates from 1953, by which time the company was called Leedy & Ludwig. Conn owned both companies and merged them by 1950. (In 1955, Leedy was sold to Slingerland Drums, and Bill Ludwig, Sr. bought back the Ludwig Drum Company and merged it with what was left of his own WFL Drum Company. By 1965, Leedy was on the wane, and was completely subsumed into Slingerland the following year.)

Earlier versions of the Two-Way pad appear to have been made with a lighter color of rubber, but since everything was printed in black and white there's no way to confirm what color the rubber was unless I find a much earlier version of the pad. I'd guess that either the white rubber was replaced, or more likely the reddish rubber came into use during World War II because high grades of rubber were being rationed.

This pad still sounds and feels good, though the rebound of the rubber is slightly lessened with age. The fiber bottom is intact and I have tried playing lightly on it with skinny sticks, but I won't make a habit of this. It's similar to the fiber that was also being used for drum cases for decades, though perhaps a little bit thinner and now a bit warped in the center. I'm glad it's still there. Now that I've been able to date this I can determine that it's among the oldest pads in my collection. I can't really estimate its age much beyond a range from between 1933 and roughly 1949, but that still makes this pad between 76 and 92 years old. That it's still in quite playable condition is remarkable, since practice pads of this era were generally among the cheapest items in a catalog and among the most abused by school drummers. When one survives in such good shape, that makes it a real find.

Pad Parts is LIVE!

Want to make your own practice pad? 
Want to choose from a variety of different surfaces, textures and thicknesses, and a variety of base plate materials?
Now you can.
PadParts is LIVE and taking orders.

I've ordered materials for an 11" pad with 10" playing surface, big enough to really chop on and small enough to fit in my bag. Top will be gum rubber, bottom will be recycled rubber and the baseplate is a dark green ForesColor (a kind of Valchromat). 

(Disclaimer: PadParts is owned and operated by the folks at Beetle Percussion, makers of the most sustainable practice pads on the market.)

All bases and surfaces are precision-cut. Bases come with a chamfered edge for a neat finished look and reduced snags. Pad Parts also sells a couple different kinds of industrial glue -- use sparingly and in a well-ventilated area -- so you can make you own sturdy practice pad at home.

Check it out and place your order soon!

Test driving the Ludwig drum

Sweetie is out for awhile, which gives me time and space to chop on the new drum. First exercise is a warmup I wrote. Second is something I found online, don’t know who wrote it but it’s fun (and challenging to time the Fivelets right!).

I tried this with a few different pairs of sticks, and found that I like the Ludwig 3S sticks best. 

Big, fat drum. Big, fat sound. Big, fat happiness.

#ludwigdrums

#ludwigsticks

#rudimentaldrumming

#TeamMylar