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)