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!