Drum Pad History: Sabian/QuietTone

Henry Adler, one of the great drummers of the 1940s-70s, invented the original QuietTone practice pad, one of the earliest drum pads with a tensioned head. They were very popular among concert and jazz drummers because the feel was very close to that of an actual drum.

You can catch an original Adler QuietTone pad in action at Rick Dior's charming video about vintage practice pads, at 2:24 in.

Here's an original QuietTone pad, grabbed from online:

 

As you can see, the base material is fibrous, subject to wear, and may actually have asbestos in it. The original pads wore out fairly quickly with regular use.

Sabian purchased the Quiet Tone name and pad design in the early 2000s, and for a time continued to make the pads in North America at its Canadian headquarters. These transitional pads have fat, white rubber feet on bottom, and a small Sabian font sitting outside the QuietTone logo stamped on the head. During this time, QuietTone pads were made in 14", 12" and 10" sizes, and were made pretty much the same as the original QuietTone pads.

 

Eventually, Sabian would move pad manufacturing overseas. This is generally marked by the Sabian font being moved to inside the QuietTone logo, and the change to smaller, black rubber feet on the bottom. There was also a slight change in the material used for the internal base plate, and you can definitely feel a difference in the response and tone. The 12" size was discontinued with the relocation as well.

I'm a fan of these older transitional-era pads, which are getting difficult to find. One of my favorite non-marching pads.

Here is my transitional-era 10" pad, probably my favorite size in this model.

The base material is still fairly fibrous, but no longer uses asbestos and tends to last somewhat longer than the original base material. For extra measure, these QuietTone pads also use a thin rubber layer over the baseplate, and top that with a piece of Mylar that just fits over the rubber layer. The head goes on top of all this. In my opinion, it works pretty well on the smaller size, and not so well on the larger size. Some folks like to take the 14" pad apart and add a second layer of dense foam, which they say improves the feel and sound.

The nice thing is that the heads can be changed to suit your needs, though I don't really see a need for anything other than a coated Ambassador-weight head on it.

The transitional-era pads included a 12" size which is now nearly impossible to find used for sale.
The 14" is okay for concert and jazz work, but simply cannot be tuned tightly enough for marching or rudimental work.
The 10" travels well, and its size allows for a more crisp response.

The Taiwanese-made pads aren't terrible, but they will have a different feel than the older pads do.

It's a good pad, and worth adding to your collection if you do a lot of concert or drumkit work.
Happy drumming!