Hanging out with the QuietTone Practice Pad

For the last few weeks, I’ve been hanging out with various sizes and versions of the QuietTone pad. 

The QuietTone pad was originally designed and sold by Henry Adler in the 1970s. Later, it was manufactured and sold by the QuietTone company, which grew out of Adler’s design. Eventually, that business and its QuietTone pad designs were sold to the Sabian Corporation.

The OG versions (NY and NJ) of this pad are scarce and hard to find in playable condition. If you want to learn more about why this design is so good, watch Rick Dior’s discussion of practice pads on YouTube. It’s thirty minutes long and worth your time.

I have played the OG version a little and found it to have truly optimal feel and response for a concert or kit drummer. (These older versions are NOT for marching drummers!)

When Sabian took over the company, it had to use up the components on hand at the factory before deciding what to do with continuing manufacturing [overseas]. These “transitional” pads feature some aspects of Adler’s original design, and some aspects of what would eventually become the standard Sabian QuietTone design.

Changes to the pad included swapping in a heavier wood fiberboard core for the original paper fiber core, which added both durability and weight; and utilizing a pad-specific head that could not easily be replaced by a standard drum head in any size smaller than 14”. Today, Sabian produces the QuietTone pad in only the 10” and 14” sizes. 

I saw no need for the new 10” size as I already had a transitional pad in 12” but decided to get a new 14” so I could experiment with it.

The newest version here, now offered by Sabian, was made in Taiwan. As it sits it’s not awful, but it could be better.

So I took it apart.

I decided to leave off the plastic insert as kind of redundant.

The reason for the extra weight is definitely the wood fiber core.

The black rubber layer is slightly thinner than a SoundOff mute but made similarly; it’s inserted smooth side up. I turned it over to reveal the fine-patterned side, removed the plastic film insert, and swapped in a Aquarian coated batter head I had lying around.

The standard drum head has a slightly thicker collar, which prevents the inner core sliding around/off-center as you tension it. It did fit, snugly; as long as I took my time with reassembly and retensioning it was fine.

I also swapped in some deeper nuts to take up the excess threads in the tension rods.

The finished reassembly shows a vague “ripple” of the replacement batter head near the rim, the result of an earlier pad experiment with that head. I believe the ripples will flatten out with a few days of playing and perhaps readjusted tension.

It feels and sounds better by far. 

 

For me, this begs the question why, if Sabian made these design changes, they couldn’t have gone these extra fifteen yards and made the new version of the QuietTone this good to begin with.

At a MSRP of $65-70 it seems like they could’ve done at least what I did to improve it.

And while it isn’t the OG, it’s now a very nice, robust tunable pad for the dedicated concert or kit drummer.

 

And here is a video of my chopping on the reassembled, improved pad.

Aficionados of the OG QuietTone turn their noses up at this new version, but honestly it’s so much nicer to play now that I’ll keep and enjoy it. 

Happy Chopping.