Dating vintage practice pads

Some key points for those looking at old pads:

— Brown gum rubber may have been lighter tan. The only way to verify this is to peel back an edge and peek. Gum rubber that hasn’t been exposed to sunlight will retain more of a tan color. (If you accidentally pull off the gum rubber too far, simply glue it back. Spread a thin coat and roll a drum stick across the top to spread it evenly, turn over and weight down until dry.) 

— Mass produced, or homemade? How to tell? While it’s not an exact science, it’s worth noting that in the mid 20th century, a lot of Americans still knew how to work with simple hand tools and many did their home minor home repairs. The wood finishing here is just rough enough for this to possibly be homemade.

On the other hand, lower-grade wood was reserved by drum companies for things like practice pads, and the nicer quality planks 

That said, the small matching “feet” on bottom, and the clean cut of the round rubber and the edged wood top and bottom panels, both suggest that this may have been made in a local factory for a music store to sell. I’d guess a smaller, local outfit made it because of the lower overall standard of the wood used. (Most homemade pads wouldn’t be edged, and I’ve yet to see one with matching feet.)

— The larger 9 x 7” sized pads became less common in the late 1950s, as bigger drum companies sought to streamline pad manufacturing by offering fewer models. A smaller, standardized size would reduce the material required and cut costs. 

A pad that has no label or stamp can be harder to place, but I’d feel comfortable estimating this to be a smaller-scale, mass-produced pad from the late 1940s to early 50s. Happily, the rubber still feels great to chop on.

Vintage Corner: 1950s pad from Kitchen & Company, Leeds, UK.

This was a lucky find on eBay. I knew nothing about the design or the original company, but it was so unusual that I knew I wanted to add it to my collection. I contacted the seller and asked if she’d be willing to ship to the US, and she was delighted to calculate the cost.

It arrived today.

Based on how hard the rubber playing surface is, even accounting for its age, I think the pad might have been meant for pipe drummers. I have another pad of similar vintage (made in the US) using similar rubber and it’s only slightly softer than this. The pad itself measures 12 inches across. The arms extend out beyond the diameter of the wood base, but the placement of the softer gum rubber feet attached underneath suggest the pad could be used sitting atop a standard 14” snare drum. Despite its age, the gum rubber feet are still quite soft. I haven’t yet tried this on top of a snare drum, but that’s coming.

The age of the pad is unclear, but some clues suggest at least a rough decade of the 1950s:

— the wood is beautifully finished and stained like good furniture.

— the feet are the pure gum rubber found only on pads from the early 1950s or earlier.

— the badge is made of a thin white plastic, in a shape and size and with black embossed lettering, that is very similar to the badges used on Carradice bicycle saddlebags of the same era. (Carradice switched to cloth badges in the 1960s. I know this because when I worked in the bicycle industry, my shop sold Carradice bags and I’m familiar with that company’s history. I still use a Carradice bag on my bike today.)

I’ve reached out to a Leeds-based newspaper to see if they can help me research the history of R. S. Kitchen & Company. I will keep researching and report back with whatever I can find.

This is really unusual find both for geographical and historical reasons, and I’m thrilled to have found it.

I don’t own a set of pipe sticks (nor do I a know how to play in that style), but here’s a demo anyway.

Brush pads: extremely, painfully specialized

While the specialty pads that get the most press are focused on the marching arts, there’s a subset of practice pads designed for practicing brushes on.

When I was in college, my Dad played piano bar at a downtown nightclub. Very occasionally, I’d bring my brushes with me, and Dad would pull out the Yellow Pages, open them on the bar and let me quietly keep time while he played. The opened phone book had a great surface for brushes.

And it was free.

Since then, several drum companies have produced brush practice pads, with varying degrees of success.

Here are just a few that I’ve tried:

1. Remo Brush-Up pad. Designed with input from Ed Thigpen, a renowned master of brush playing, this was essentially a stiff rubber frame with a Remo Fyberskyn surface laid over a foam rubber mute. The pad worked as advertised, and was very quiet, but sold poorly and was only in production for a few years. If you can find one for sale online today, expect to pay several hundred dollars for it.

2. Brush Up pad by One Beat Better. This was  panel of wood with rubber nonskid strips on bottom and a clear textured coating on top. There was also a partial rim so you could practice rim rolls. Designed with input by Sherrie Maricle, this was a really nice practice item, just small enough to fit on top of a snare drum. It appears to be no longer available at this writing. 

3. Ahead 14-inch Brush Pad. Basic and useful, with a rubber side for stick practice and a textured side for brush practice. It just fits on a snare drum, or on a stand or tabletop. And it’s still available.

4. Attacktile by Evans. A recent entry into the market, this is an Evans rubber practice pad, based on MDF and topped by a rigid, textured layer. The playing surface is nice for brushes, but for some reason Evans chose to make this pad in a ten-inch size — not really large enough to practice full brush strokes. Also, the rigid surface has shown evidence of coming away from the base after a month or less of use, showing that the adhesion may need some more work. With adhesion improvement and a 14-inch size, this might be a really nice brush pad, but in my opinion the design needs some work.

5. Percussion Practice Pad by Pete Siers. Siers, a drummer and drum teacher, designed and made up a batch of these pads from Formica tile and at this writing is selling them online. The pad fits on top of a snare drum, but is also rigid enough to sit in a stand or on a tabletop. While the shiny side is the one intended for brushwork, I’ve found that the underside also works for a slightly different feel and sound. I recently acquired one of these and like it a lot. 

If the price of a brush-specific pad seems prohibitive — and I can’t blame you — you can look around for an old phone book. Or, since those are getting a lot harder to find in the Electronic Age, a 14” square or round of corrugated cardboard also works very well.

History lesson: the first Remo practice pads

The very first plastic drumhead was introduced to the market by Marion "Chick" Evans in 1956. It revolutionized drum heads overnight, leading the drum industry away from calfskin heads into a new age. Belli followed up very shortly after that with heads from a space-age material called Mylar, which proved wildly successful. Remo's heads were branded “Weather King” because they were nearly impervious to changes in temperature and humidity.

Belli founded a company around the new technology and along with drum heads, he began producing practice pads to show off the potential of the new material. These two pads date from 1958 and 1961, respectively. (Remo’s web site has a neat little timeline where you can see changes in the company logo, dated by year. It’s helpful to collectors in dating historic Remo products.)

The earliest Mylar heads were a tiny bit thicker than the tunable ones that followed. Still very resonant, but not quite as floppy-flexible. Stapled into the wood frame and stuffed with some kind of muffling foam that literally disintegrated with age so that now, they are just annoyingly loud. It feels like Formica if Formica had more give to it.

By the mid-1960s, the pads would become tunable, with metal rims, tuning screws and replacement heads — perhaps an early foray into sustainability, though no one was using that word in 1965. The late 60s saw plastic rims replacing the metal rims. This version of the tunable pad was the very first drum pad I learned on as a kid. I played that pad from 5th grade through my second year of college and three replacement heads along the way. While numerous other pad designs have supplanted the Remo pad, that pad is still in production today and literally millions of kids are still getting their start in drumming on one of those. It holds a dear place in my memory, and in my pad collection.

#knowyourhistory 

#sharethetradition 

#practicepads

Nothing but practice pads here.

I’ve spent the last couple of weeks taking a thorough inventory of my practice pads, both to accurately date them and also to determine if there are any holes I’d like to fill in the collection.

Bearing in mind that some pads I’d had earlier and sold when money got tight won’t come my way again, I’m refusing to cry over spilled milk by mourning their absence, and just Be Here Now. I know the guys I sold those pads to, and know they’re all in good homes. If I can find replacements for one or two, great. If not, oh well.

I did some straightening up in the studio and managed to get most of my pads on one wall. It’s a work in progress which will help as I dive into to further research for my history project.

It helps to be able to see them all when I’m looking for older pads, so that I can remind myself of what I already have and don’t need any more of. (How many more rubber-on-wood tilt pads do I need? Unless it’s a Slingerland Radio King, cloud badge model, I’m set for now.)

That said, I do have a few more of those older tilt pads coming my way this week and next, from a couple of drummers who are a good ten to twenty years older than me and who are downsizing. We connected in DrumSellers.com which is an online marketplace devoted to older vintage stuff, and which is also connected to the historic site Not So Modern Drummer, the drum history lesson side of things. NSMD and DrumSellers are owned and managed by George Lawrence, a drummer and longtime drum historian, and a heck of a nice fellow. He’s invited me to write an article for NSMD about practice pads, and I’ve agreed to do so later in the summer.

But first, while I take this deeper inventory I’m also trying to figure out how to compile all the information I’ve gathered so far, and organize it into something coherent. Much of it has been collected in the form of shirt articles here on my blog. Photos and illustrations exist mostly on my laptop, mostly in a 

Argue folder called Practice Pads. I’m looking at hours of painstaking searching and culling the pictures and then deciding what material from the blog will serve as a good foundation to build upon.

It’s been quite awhile since I embarked on a serious research project, and there are many more tools at my disposal now than there were back then. I’ll need some time to figure out which I can use efficiently, and which will simply take too long to learn how to use.

Knowing that at some point I, too, will need to downsize myself, I’m being pickier about what pads I bring into the house. Ideally, I’d love to find the Henry Adler convertible pad, but that’s so rare now I don’t expect to find one for myself. Otherwise, I’m mostly hunting for older pads with some history and some “beausage” (beauty through usage, a term coined by Grant Peterson at Rivendell Bicycle Works) attached to them. I like pads that come with provenance, with stories, attached to them. It’s that history which makes a pad much more interesting.

One of the pads that’s enroute to me is from a drummer on the NSMD list, who’s sending me a very old pad that belonged to his drum teacher, and who in turn had studied with the great drummer Roy Knapp. I’ll show and tell when it arrives.

This week, it’s hunkering down with my laptop and finding everything I’ve stored on it.

Happy chopping!

Future Vintage? RCP Premium Pad

When this pad was released six or seven years ago, I was mildly curious. The RCP Premium Pad was the company’s first offering, and a clear response to the Xymox Reserve Pad. Xymox’s pad was popular with HS and college marching drummers, but the company had serious issues with delivery and many hundreds of customers paid for pads they never received. One of those customers was the son of RCP’s founder.

RCP’s Premium pad is of a different design than the Xymox Reserve pad. For one thing, it weighs much less. It’s also made of a high-strength polyurethane that resists chipping and is much more durable than the thin rim found on the Xymox Reserve pad.

The Premium Pad offers a playing surface made of woven carbon fiber and aluminum. Underneath this you can choose from three different rubber or foam-rubber inserts of different thicknesses, each giving a slightly different sound and response. I haven’t been able to find out where the pad was manufactured.

The pad was priced comparably to other pads of its kind, roughly $100 for the 11” and $120 for the 13” size.

I wasn’t doing a lot of research on modern pads at the time, so I had only a passing interest.

A used 11” Premium Pad came up for sale at a price I could justify, so I bought it. It arrived earlier today.

Since my collection now includes more modern marching-focused pads (including a Xymox Reserve Pad), I was glad to add this to the stack. 

Below are photos and videos of my pad.

The rim is held in place with anodized aluminum bolts that fit a drum key. They’re meant to be just slightly more than finger-tight, just enough to keep everything together; and provide NO adjustable tensioning. 

Underneath the woven playing surface you can choose from one of three different inserts: tan gum rubber for a firmer feel, gray foam rubber for a medium feel, or orange foam rubber for a softer feel. The different between the inserts is subtle, but discernible.

I tried the pad with each of the inserts before finally settling on the orange insert, which provides good articulation and a nice response for the kind of playing I do. A pair of videos below provide a sense of some difference in sound, but really the greater difference can be felt in response as you play.

First, with the gray insert:

Then, with the orange insert:

Finally, with the gum rubber insert laid on top. (The pad doesn’t work well with more than one insert under the carbon layer at a time because of the precise fit involved.)

Interestingly, this pad apparently never sold in the same quantities as the Xymox pad did, even with Xymox’s horrible business practices. Eventually, RCP introduced what they call their Active Snare Pad, which is a Chinese-made HUN M-12 pad that’s been rebranded for several companies (including Salyers and others). It’s considerably more affordable than the Premier Pad, sold far better, and became the flagship of RCP’s pad line. Eventually the Premier Pad was quietly discontinued.

I emailed Robert Pettry at RCP to find out the timeline of the Premium Pad, and here's what he share with me:

BH: When did this pad enter the market?
RP: May 2018.

BH: Who designed it and why?
RP: Father and Son Brian and Robert Pettry designed this pad after a bad experience with the company that starts with X. We wanted to over a superior high quality product and offer good customer service and fast turnaround.

BH: The pad does not appear at the RCP web site, and I'm wondering when it stopped being offered.
RP: After Covid we saw a large increase in material cost from our US Supply companies and the cost to keep producing them was way to higher and we didn’t want to raise the price any higher then they already were. Following there we started outsource some of our manufacturing to keep cost down not just for us but ultimately for the students that buy our practice products. We started by partnering with HanFlag to be the first company to bring this pad to the US Market. Since then we have create a number of original RCP Product Designs. One of the most popular being our trademarked Pizza Pad. 

BH: When did you discontinue the pad? 

RP: May 2022

BH: Are any spares (laminates, inserts or lug bolts) still available?

RP: We have taken them down from our website but we do have a backup supply of hardware and laminates. 

	So I am glad to have found a used one at a good price to add to the stack. The bolts are still working, though kind of beat-up. I may reach out to buy replacements from them.

RCP Drum Company can be found online at their website, with links to Facebook and Instagram.

Getting super drum-geeky: Percussive Arts Society

So, in the interest of furthering my historical research and connecting with other drum history geeks, I signed up for a membership in The Percussive Arts Society (PAS).

Since retiring, I've been casting about for Something To Do.

I can't sing properly right now (and don't know if I can sing at a professional level again, more on that later). I have more limits on my physical energy than I used to, and I don't want to spend my so-called golden years (UGH -- that monicker just makes me SQUIRM) just sitting around.

SO I decided to go down the drum history rabbit hole and pursue deeper research on my favorite drum topic. What comes of it I can't yet guarantee. But I'm diving in.

I'm hoping that PAS will help connect me with other drum history geeks.

I am also entertaining the notion of attending PASIC. It's just a twinkle in my eye for now, but if I COULD attend some November, who'd want to meet me there? I'd be looking for cheap housing and food (and seeing how public transit in Indy is, because I'm THAT gal) before I take a leap.

Anyway, I'm not committing to anything, and it might not happen for another year at least. But it's in the hopper.

If any of my Drum Geek people want to chat about possibilities, please contact me here or on Facebook Messenger.

(photo: from 1960 Ludwig drum catalog)