Vintage Corner: Slingerland Deluxe Practice Pad #958, circa 1960's

Here's a really nice vintage pad from the early 1960's or so, from Slingerland. The Deluxed Pad # 958 could be used on a tabletop, or fitted with screws for attachment to a dedicated stand (very much like my older Radio Kind model from the late 40's which I acquired with a stand).

  This pad came to me without a stand, but with the little rubber "feet" intact.

The playing surface is lively and has plenty of rebound.
And the solid oak plank construction has a pretty nice finish, too.

It's just slightly smaller in size than my Radio King, but sounds terrific and, with thicker and livelier rubber, feels better.

Note: When demonstrating older pads, I try to use a stick size more appropriate to the pad's period. While I practice daily with my Jeff Queens (my go-to rudimental/marching stick), I don't want to destroy an old pad! Here, I opt for a smaller stick and get a great feel and sound. On a vintage pad that's sturdy enough for more regular use, I might go as large as a 1S stick if the pad warrants it; but most of the time I'm content with a 2B concert stick.
Happy drumming.

Cappella returns: sticks and maybe (hopefully!) pads, too.

So a few weeks ago I signed up to receive emails from the Cappella Drum Company, as they had announced plans to restart stick manufacture. A few days ago, I received an email from CJ Cappella, whose grandfather started the company.  As before, Cappella will focus primarily on custom drum sticks. To that end they’re asking everyone on their email list to respond with type of sticks and desired quantities.

I had asked about practice pads, because I’ve long been a fan of their “Rite Touch" model with the lively blue rubber surface; it’s perfect for the Mylar crowd.

I asked about the possibility of bringing back some of their old pad models, like this 12-inch model (made of the same blue rubber as the mini-pads previously discussed in this group).

I hope I’ll get a positive response. Stay tuned.

And if you'd like to get your name on the email list, drop a line to: cjacappella@yahoo.com

#Cappellasticks

#Cappelladrumpads

(Photos and video: 12" Cappella "Touch-Rite" pad. Blue rubber playing surface feels very much like the much-loived first-generation Real Feel tan pad. This one lost its sticker years ago. If I can obtain another I may try and replace it, just for fun. Cappella was never really known for anything besides their sticks, which had a devoted following; but I'm a fan of this pad and its mini-sized version as well.)

BONUS:
Just to see who actually reads these posts to the end, I am offering a Pad Collectors' Special: The first two people who contact me at http://beth-hamon-music.com/contact will win a FREE, NOS Cappella mini (4-inch) "Rite-Touch" pad (see photo below) to add to their practice pad collection. This is the miniature version of my big pad above, and it feels great. Nice to toss in a backpack for a little chopping-on-the-go, or to keep in the bag as an original from the Cappella archives.
(If you miss out, I will have four more pads available after that for $12 including shipping, so let me know if you want to buy one.)
Cheers, and happy drumming!

An old dream, renewed with fresh energy: NARD

When I was a freshman in high school, I learned about the National Association of Rudimental Drummers, an organization devoted to promoting and recognizing education and excellence in rudimental drumming. It sounded totally geeky and cool. I decided to make it a goal.
I spent weeks practicing the first thirteen rudiments (slow-to-fast-to-slow again) and preparing a solo from the NARD Solo book ("Modern Syncopation," which remains a favorite today).

Unable to find a NARD member who lived close enough to me for an in-person audition, I arranged to do a a cassette audition, recorded and proctored by my band director. After weeks of practice and four attempts at a quality recording, we sent off the best tape, a completed membership application and a letter of provenance from Mr. Bish to the address on the membership application in late October 1977.
(Below: A blank application, just like the one I filled out)

And then I waited.
I waited so long that I feared my packet had gotten lost in the mail.
Almost a year later, I got back a thin envelope. I figured it was a rejection letter.

Instead, it was a letter informing me that NARD had been formally dissolved as of December 1977, and the former secretary was writing to offer his thanks for a “very good” audition tape, encouragement to keep drumming, and regret that there was no longer an organization to admit me into.

I was disappointed, and encouraged. If NARD had still existed, I would’ve been admitted.

(This was not the kind of encouragement I got from my nightclub musician father, who felt that rudimental drumming was a waste of time. He wanted me to become a jazz drummer or, better still,  a symphonic percussionist. I didn't want a career in performance, but in music education. He didn't really get it at the time, though in later years he would warm to it.)

In this letter, I was told by an experienced drummer that I was good and that I should keep drumming -- exactly the encouragement I longed for.
So I did.

Now, over forty years later, NARD exists again to encourage today’s drummers in the pursuit of musical excellence and beauty.

While talking about our shared geeky love of drum practice pads and rudimental drumming, I told my story to the president of the organization, Mark Beecher.
He'd seen some of my many drumming videos, and invited me to sign up as a member of NARD at long last. Today, my packet arrived in the mail, not so thin or small.



It’s not the same organization, and that's okay.
I’m not the same drummer.
And my reasons for wanting this have evolved as well.
I’m no longer interested in bragging rights — here in the lefty radical landscape of Portland, there's no point in bragging about ANYthing conected to military history — but instead I’m much more interested in the the musical and technical traditions of my chosen instrument, and in further democratizing drumming for anyone and everyone who wants to pursue it.
I’m humbled to be recognized by fellow drummers for my continued pursuit of the craft and love of rudimental drumming, and encouraged to keep rooting around this rabbit hole simply for the joy of it.

While COVID has stripped away, or muted, so many  of my other pieces of musical identity, it has given me time and space to return to MY musical roots and remember the joy. To remind myself that we don’t “work” our instruments, we PLAY them.

(From the NARD web site)
Mission Statement:

The purpose of the National Association of Rudimental Drummers is to protect and preserve a system of standardized rudiments as an anchor for all marching, concert and drum kit drumming.

As stated by Wm. F. Ludwig in the Spring 1936 issue of The Ludwig Drummer:

"It is the purpose, aim and object of the N.A.R.D. to standardize drum rudiments and to encourage their adoption by all earnest students of drums; also to dispel the erroneous idea that the rudiments are only for the drum corps drummer."

#playdrumseverday
#makemusic
#rudimentaldrumming
#diddleseveryday
#NARDdrummer

Full review: Boso bamboo drumsticks, 2B

 Today I received the second pair of sticks from Boso, size 2B. After reading about Boso's ability to make thinner sticks heavy and fatter sticks light, I was hoping that I'd feel a noticeable difference with a thinner pair of sticks.

Sadly, I found the smaller sticks to be really disappointing.

Even with the advice to approach these sticks differently than wood sticks, I found the 2B sticks to be so light that it felt like playing a jazz or a 7A. I found the light weight unnerving.
Even playing them for up to twenty minutes, I could not make the adjustment necessary to really enjoy playing with them.

I set them aside and picked up the Marching sticks, which I'd tried previously.
To my surprise, I found I liked them more. Their fatter diameter was a welcome change, even if I still wasn't crazy about the smaller barrel tip. The Boso Marching sticks felt the way I'd want a heavier woodn pair of 2B's or 1S's to feel.

Then, just to be sure, I picked up a pair of 5A sticks made of hickory. This is the size I generally like to use at my drum kit.
After reacquainting my hands with those, I picked up the Boso 2B's again.
And hated them.
I just could not make the transition. The Boso bamboo sticks were too light for the kind of playing I like to do.
So I put them back in their packaging and set them aside.

Here are photos showing the difference between the Boso 2B and Marching sticks.
The 2B sticks are much narrower, and for whatever reason, Boso favors a small barrel tip on their sticks that I'm not crazy about. FOr a 2B to be a good concert or practice stick, I'd like it to feel heavier and have a slightly bigger, round or acorn tip.

 

 

 

 

I won't spend the money to send them back. More likely I'll just find someone who wants them and move them along.
But they did help me understand the bamboo Marching sticks better, and I'll keep those as an alternate pad stick. I think they'll do well on my softest practice pad.
If nothing else, the experiment has helped me get clearer about what I like, and that's always useful information to have.

Happy drumming.

Full Review: Boso bamboo sticks

 My friend Don sent me a pair of these sticks after he'd tried them and liked them himself.

I spent about an hour last night and another couple of hours today hanging out with them and researching their web site for information.

Boso sticks are made from bamboo, sourced and manufactured in China.

The sticks are available in two different densities of bamboo plus a laminated combination of the two, in the basic sizes most drummers use: 5A, 5B, 7A, 2B and Marching. Don sent me a pair of the Marching sticks and right away I knew they were different.

In all photos, left to right:
-- Vic Firth Jeff Queen solo stick
-- Rogers 1S, circa 1970s
-- Boso Marching

The Boso stick is 17" long and has a diameter of .710, with a very short taper. The feel is VERY lightweight when compared to similarly-sized hickory stick, and that's part of Boso's point. The company was founded in large part to provide a longer-lasting, more flexy alternative to traditional hickory sticks, from a material that could be more sustainably grown and harvested.
Bamboo has proven its durability and sustainability in the home-building industry with applications in flooring and furniture design. Boso sticks attempt to prove those same qualities in drumming.

A note of caution: Bamboo sticks do not feel or play like wood. Before picking up a pair of Bosos you need to forget a lot of what you know about drumsticks, and just open yourself to a different experience. My friend advised me to grip the Bosos "about 80% of your normal grip and really feel the action."

I haven't played with these long enough to form a solid opinion yet. At this point, after only a couple hours' exploration, I still tend to favor my old reliable Jeff Queens. But I am open to other possibilities, and I'm even open to changing up my approach to playing if it's beneficial for both my hands and the planet.

At first blush, here are some observations:

1. The bamboo construction is clean, even and close-grained. The feel of the stick in my hand is pleasant and much lighter in weight than my usual hickory marching stick.

2. The tip is quite a bit smaller than that found on a typical wooden marching stick, and this does change the response and the sound. I think this could be a good stick for indoor drumlines and perhaps even some concert applications where the score calls for "field drum," though that might also be fulfilled with Boso's 2B stick.

3. It does take some time to adjust to the very different feel of this stick. In the videos below, I compare the sound and response playing the same pattern of three different sticks (in the same order as shown in the photos above).

And here is another video comparing another figure, using first the Jeff Queens and then the Bosos.

(Yes, that's a first-generation VF Stockpad; and no, it's not for sale.)

I'm not ready to say this is or isn't my new go-to stick. I think I'll need a lot more time with it before I can know either way.
What I can say is that this stick has promise, especially for younger players who are still developing their muscles and whose hands might benefit from a lighter approach to playing in marching settings. I also think it would be interesting to get a pair of Bosos in the 2B sizse and try them out in non-marching applications.
While I applaud the company's attempts at greater sustainability, the fact that these sticks come from overseas doesn't address the large carbon footprint involved in bringing them to US and European markets. If the company were based in China, that might change things (though it could also mean that drummers in North America would have less access to purchasing the sticks here).
The web site indicates no office or warehouse location, though it gives a New Jersey phone number for the company's founder/owner.
I suspect that even after ten years, this remains a smaller company (compared with the giants like Vic Firth and Promark, whose products ship worldwide). Still, pursuing new materials for drumsticks is always a welcome idea, and could bear fruit over time.

I'll try to order a pair of 2B and see what happens. The sticks appear to ship directly from an overseas warehouse, so you could be waiting awhile. Still, I applaud anyone who wants to try and make sticks more sustainable, and for that alone it could be a worthwhile experiment.
I'll continue to play with these and report back in a few weeks.
Happy drumming!

Full review: Star Sticks, Drum Corps model

Sometimes -- not often -- I will buy something purely on a lark, out of sheer curiosity.
That was the case with these drum sticks, made and sold by Ukranian company Star Sticks.
The company sells their products on Etsy, has a Facebook presence, and they have their own web site in Ukranian (Google will translate it for you but be warned that translating Ukranian to English is tough even for a computer).

I sprange for a pair of their "Drum Corps" sticks, because they were being offered with free shipping to USA, and the ten dollar price wasn't bad. Plus, they were made out of a wood called "hornbeam" in their literature.
After Googling "hornbeam" to discover it was real ("Hornbeams are hardwood trees in the flowering plant genus Carpinus in the birch family Betulaceae. The 30–40 species occur across much of the temperate regions of the Northern Hemisphere." Thanks, Google!), I decided to place an order.
I figured that, coming from the other side of the globe, I'd treat it like ordering a pad from Xymox: hit the "return" button and then forget about it until it arrives.

Then, to my surprise, a package arrived today, only three weeks after I placed the order.

I opened the package, and checked them out right away.

Mindful of the advertised manufacturing process, I expected a stick that would be a bit harder than hickory. I didn't know much about the wood so I couldn't be sure about weight.

(below: from Star Sticks Etsy page)

At first blush, the sticks looked pretty good. The imprint was clear and the white paint fully covered the stick A closer look revealed that the sticks had been dipped in the paint and the ends had not been "trimmed" of excess paint drippage -- something I hadn't seen on American drum sticks in decades.

I hefted the sticks in my hands to see if there was any noticable difference in weight, and was surprised to find that there was a slight difference.

This would likely mean that, when I tried to play with the sticks on a drum or pad, I would hear a slight difference in pitch.

In fact, when I began to play with the sticks, the difference in pitch between the two sticks was nearly a full scale step, far more than I had expected.

You can hear if clearly in the video below.

It's too bad. The sticks feel nice in my hands; at slightly smaller [Length: 16 59/64" (430 mm)
Diameter: 669" (17 mm)] than Vic Firth's Jeff Queen Solo sticks, it would have been a welcome alternative for drummers with smaller hands.
But since sending the sticks back would be costly for an individual like me, I'll keep them and chalk it up to another lesson learned. I hope the company (with whom I've shared the review) will take my notes into account as they continue to develop their products and build a larger following outside Ukraine.

Drivers in practice pad design and development.

 

In the hopes of actually sparking some thoughtful discussion here, I'm tossing out a short list of thoughts/observations on what might have inspired practice pad development. Because a drum will always remain a membranophone -- a shell of some kind with a membrane stretched over one or both ends.

But a practice pad can be made out of all sorts of things, to serve various purposes or meet the demands of a particular drumming technique.

So here we go:

1. Drumming technique: Drum instructional manuals have been published for mass consumption since the early 1900s. Technical approaches to drumming changed not only with the times, but with the playing surface, as the common material progressed from calfskin to Mylar to Kevlar and carbon-fiber.

Is there any pad (make/model/era) in particular that seems especially purpose-built in this regard?

2. Branding: Especially after the initial copyrights on some designs began getting licensed to other companies, other companies flocked to re-create these pads in their own image, without changing the mechanical design much at all.

Witness the multitudes of slant-platform, rubber-on-wood models of the 40s through 60s; the many copies of Remo's tunable pad and most recently, the number of companies who've paid to use Xymox' "snare sound" feature in their own marching-specific pads.

I'm not sure how to begin researching the manufacturing trail of all these pads, though it's easy to guess that a handful of manufacturers made the same pad for a few dozen drum companies in many cases.

One example: RCP's "Active Snare" drum pad features the "snare sound" found in the Xymox pads, but with an adjustability feature that seems not to have been patented by Xymox. I own one of these RCP pads and it's fun to mess around with. Recently, I found its Chinese origin point at Alibaba.com, a global wholesale jobber of all sorts of things -- including practice pads. You CAN buy this same pad, without RCP branding and at less that half RCP's price, directly from Alibaba -- IF you buy in minimum quantities of several hundred and pay for shipping. In short, you'd need to be a retailer and able to move a bunch of these to make the effort profitable.

3. In-house manufacture: Taking back production, which some newer companies like Beetle Percussion have done, insures better copyright protections, higher quality control and greater control over distribution of the pad -- but at the expense of high quantity sales. Beetle still make their own pads in the USA and sell directly, and through one select retailer, meaning that when models come back in stock you better get one right away, or wait a few months for the stock to be resupplied. Beetle markets their pads as craft-made, one at a time, which justifies the higher price-point. (I have been invited by Beetle to test and review one of their pads, which will arrive sometime after the first of the year. I look forward to it!)

Relatively few companies seem willing to take this on. It will be an interesting trend to watch, especially as new materials are experimented with in practice pad development.

(Below: Beetle Percussion 13" practice pad)

Restore? or Leave alone? When to meddle in the vintage stew

So when is it appropriate to leave a vintage pad alone simply because it’s vintage? And when is it appropriate to repair a vintage pad to make it playable again?
This is definitely a case-by-case situation. But I’d offer my own personal parameters as a starting point for discussion.

1. I’d consider repairing an old pad if:

— it looks like dozens of other pads of similar design;
—there’s no identifying logo, decal, badge or distinctive design element to set it apart;
— it’s identifiable as one of thousands manufactured;
— you didn’t pay much for it;
— it meets at least three of the above and someone would enjoy playing it.

2. I’d leave the pad alone if:

— it has a logo, badge or distinctive design element that sets it apart;
— it’s a long shot but you want to research it further;
— you paid more for it;
— repairing or otherwise altering it would diminish its historical and financial (because let’s be real) value;
— there’s nothing else like it in your collection;
— it’s a double you might use to trade later for something else (I try not to keep much on hand for this purpose as it clouds my reasons for collecting to begin with).

Below is an example of a pad I’ve decided to make playable again. It’s just like the three other pads I have that are in better shape and have intact decals or badges; it’s condition was poor/unplayable but repair would make it useful to someone; and it wouldn’t end up in a landfill.

I’ve removed the original rubber disc, which will serve as a pattern for its bouncier replacement after I clean the old glue out of the recessed area.
I covered the underside with repurposed gaming pad, rubber side showing as a non-skid surface.
(I’ll save the old disc as another non-skid surface for a future repair.)
And when it’s done, I’ll have a nice no-name practice pad to keep or re-home.