Granted, the shell is probably done and would need to be replaced, or cut down and matched up with some shorter tubes to make it work again. Either step would make this a working drum again.
Someone got a little crazy with a torque wrench.
The drum retails new for around $500.
Selling it as is for $150 shipped is either a master stroke, or an indictment of the entire marching percussion industry.
Considering that the new Heavy Hitter pad (my favorite whipping boy for now) retails for a hundred bucks, it might be more economical to buy this drum, toss the shell, sell off the lower hardware and tubes and just keep the top as a super-loud practice pad. Those are selling for a couple hundred bucks anyway, and honestly, one of those will last you as long as a couple dozen of the Heavy Hitters.
And you can change the head whenever you need to.
Now, to be fair, while the Heavy Hitter isn’t getting a lot of breathless adulation from me, I have to say that the whole damned marching percussion scene is slightly ridiculous these days.
And I blame it on the modern drum corps scene, with its bloated excesses of glamour and piles of money at the top-12 level.
Today, a top-12 corps can buy a brand new drumline — drums, carriers, stands, covers and cases, for around $50,000, use it for a season, sell it off at 1/2 to 2/3 of what they paid for it, and start again the next season. Some big, well-funded high school band in Texas will happily spring for it, use it for several years and then sell it off to a smaller school for half of what they paid. Eventually, the drums wear out and have to be scavenged for parts, which will be sold in ragged condition for far more than they’re worth.
And yeah, the recycling is nice. But it’s not a solution when the starting price is more than the annual salary for a first-year high school band director at an average, non-powerhouse school.
The whole marching arts movement has become bloated, with overpriced gear and uniforms (LEOTARDS, people!). Top-12 drum corps have annual operating budgets of a million dollars a year. DCI itself is a juggernaut with an estimated 2024 budget of $28 million. And yet, the kids still have to pay in excess of $4,500 a season to march.
This is so far from the vision of the drum corps activity of forty or fifty years ago, when drum corps was an activity that gave kids something to do and keep them out of trouble.
A friend pointed out recently that childhood and adolescence are different now, and that high schools offer many kids the opportunity to march in a quality program (that is still too expensive for many families), and that with the advent of smartphones and the internet those old fashioned kinds of trouble aren’t as readily accessible by kids.
And yet, in order to get into a top-12 corps, you’re expected not only to play and march at the highest level, but you’re also expected, apparently, to be active on the socials and market your musical skills there, so that the corps you join can use your socials as another marketing mouthpiece. (I just learned this the other day by lurking on Reddit, where the kids generally hang instead of Facebook.)
I’m an old fart, I admit it.
And this kind of sickens me.
If this is what drum corps has come to then I’m glad I’m not involved.
But it does help to explain why marching percussion gear sells for so damned much money with folks no longer bat an eye.
And it reinforces my love for homemade pads.
The excess of the activity is really getting to me today.
Over on a drum corps discussion group, someone went to a lot of trouble to consider how Drum Corps International might be restructured as a response to the shrinking number of competitive drum corps, in order to keep the activity financially and socially viable.
It was a detailed plan.
And I think it would fail.
Here’s my response:
*****
Clearly a lot of thought and care went into this plan. But at the end of the day, there simply are not enough competitive corps left *in existence* to make it viable, for the management and funding of the activity or for the fans.
If someone saves up several hundred dollars (tickets/gas/lodging/potentially unpaid time off work) to travel to watch a drum corps show, they *might* fare better getting to a show that’s closer to home. If they do, how many will travel farther to see a second show somewhere else?
DCI has changed because the whole world has changed. While they have done an admirable job in bringing the marching arts to new levels of quality and artistry,it has ultimately come at the expense of high levels of participation. There are far fewer competitive drum corps today than forty or even thirty years ago, because there are now far fewer people who can afford to participate. (The root causes of the higher costs have been covered elsewhere.) DCI’s continued refusal to see this is evidence of the leadership’s own hubris.
As much as I love the marching arts, I can see a time when independent competitive drum corps in the style of DCI and national touring no longer exists, and it may well happen in my lifetime. Everything is just too damned expensive now, and wages and schedules and real life cannot keep up with the man-eating leviathan that DCI has become.
Want to save drum corps? Make it local and grass roots again, and make it smaller. Make it shoestring. Make it gritty and scrappy again. And reach out to the communities who are really good at doing gritty and scrappy. Examples that come to mind include orgs like Bay Ratz Marching Battery in southern Mississippi and Mad Beatz in Philadelphia. And don’t make it competitive, at least right out of the gate. Make it performative and community-minded, period.
The beats will be dirty to begin with. That’s okay. The average parent or city leader doesn’t care about dirty beats. They care about kids marching down the street in matching t-shirts, making beautiful noise and bringing smiles to peoples’ faces, and hope to their hearts.
DCI will eat itself. And that’s too bad. But that is what the weight of hubris can do.
Make drum corps truly relevant to the community again, and you just might save it.
Arthritis has made it difficult to play consistently or daily, but I've managed to work this up over the past couple of days. From Carlos Botello's book Path to Lifelong Drumming, which I recommend for anyone wanting to chop a little every day for the heck of it.
Here's the sheet, and a video below of me playing. It's still dirty but I'm working on it. It's fun to play the flow between four-sixteenth diddles and triplet diddles.
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.
(At left: my very last pair of marching sticks from HS, circa fall 1980. CB700, model 3S. These sticks are forty years old and still feel great.)
In 1997 I was knee-deep in the world of percussion education and performance. I taught marching percussion and movement at three Portland-area high schools, ran a small studio where I gave private lessons to kids and played three nights a week in a jazz combo. I also played pit percussion for two of the three major theater companies in town during the summer season. Then it all packed up and left town. On the way home one evening, I rode my bike past a parked truck when the drivers' side door swung open quickly and without warning, right into me. I caught the end of the door with my right hand, which bounced in and out of the latch, and then I slammed hard sideways into the pavement. Two bicyclists right behind me swerved wildly to avoid missing the spot where I'd fallen. One stayed and offered help. The driver of the truck was mortified; she made me lie still, kept me calm, and gave the ambulance driver and police her information while they dressed my wounds and decided I could get away with calling a cab to go to the hospital (I couldn't afford the ambulance ride).
Two surgeries and a year of physical therapy later, my right hand was put back together as well as possible. I could grip a wrench well enough to stay employed at my bike shop day job, and I could, with time play a passable snare drum roll. However, French grip timpani and four-in-hand keyboard mallets were gone forever, as I had lost access to the muscles in my right pinky and just below that in my right hand. That meant no more concert percussion and no more pit orchestra work, which was the primary source of my musical income. I was forced to close down my little drum studio and shad to sell my marimba to pay my bills. With the assistance of a lawyer, I eventually accepted a settlement from the driver's insurance company that covered the replacement of my totaled bicycle, all of my medical expenses and a fair chunk left over for "pain and suffering" and the loss of my concert percussion career.
I spent the next ten years getting involved in synagogue music and eventually rebuilt myself as a singer-songwriter. Between 1999 and 2019, I enjoyed a small but growing career as a songwriter, cantorial soloist and Jewish educator. I made wonderful friends in my new sphere and grew a great deal as a musician and a human being.
And I never stopped loving drums and percussion. After a long stretch of not touching any drums (and wincing whenever I passed a marimba in a music store), I found my way back to drumming with an old practice pad and some sticks I'd kept. After six months of careful, patient practice, I'd regained the ability to play most of the rudiments I'd learned as a kid, plus a few more I hadn't gotten around to learning when the timpani bug bit. I began acquiring practice pads, to test and try and figure out which ones worked best for me. I started researching the history of practice pad development in the twentieth century, and began collecting vintage pads and sticks.
I continued to pursue drumming as a hobby while I toured, occasionally buying vintage sticks while on tour and bringing a practice pad along so I could chill out between shows.
I was on the verge of a very big breakthrough in my little Jewish music scene when COVID came along and brought it all to a screeching, painful halt.
Since last March, my travels as a touring Jewish artist have stopped cold. I've had a couple of online engagements but nothing solid or long-term. With the shutdown of my songwriting gigs came a wave of deep depression and self-doubt that has lasted, frankly, for months on end.
But all the free time of unemployment gave me time and space to dive deep into drumming, and to find myself musically in other ways. Today, thanks in large part to the miracle of the internet, I've become part of a wonderful online community of drummers, our friendships based on mutual respect and a shared love of drums and
percussion. It has been, and continues to be, a wonderful journey.
My friends in the Jewish music world may be wondering why I can't seem top pick up my guitar right now, but many have been surprised at discovering this other music side of me (through videos I've shared online), and have remained encouraging. Be patient with yourself, they've said. You'll come back to it when the time is right. I hope they're right about that.
Meanwhile, I am deeply grateful for the friends I've made in Drumland, and I want to thank a few of them here for their encouragement, acceptance and welcome. In no particular order:
I'm sure I will fail to mention at least half a dozen other names here but they're all part of a wonderful drum rediscovery and I am grateful for every single one of them.
And I would be a complete dork and total loser if I did not thank the one who has been my biggest supporter through all of this weird and crazy time -- my Sweetie, Liz, with whom I will soon celebrate 20 years of US-ness and who may not have had any idea of what she was getting into when we started out. I wasn't really a drummer at that point and when it all came back to me, it all came in for the first time for her. Lesser beloveds might have run screaming from the room, but she simply asked me to play on rubber pads behind a closed door.
I don't know what my return to the singer-songwriter thing will look like when we all get through this COVID mess, or even how much of that I will do going forward. It's impossible for me to know right now. But I DO know that I will never stop being a musician, no matter what I use to explore sound with. And today, while everything remains terribly uncertain, that is one good thing I can be certain of, and deeply grateful for.
Happy Drumming.
Below: Evidence of participation. Gresham HS Band, Fall 1977. I am directly in front of the guy in the middle column with the saxophone neck strap on. You can only see half my face but that's me carrying a single tenor drum and loving every single note of the experience. (I also adored that uniform, right down to the overlay and spats.) Someday I'd love to find photos of my brief time marching in Spartans Drum Corps [Vancouver WA, spring and summer1978] -- if you've got anything showing ME carrying timpani or bells, please let me know. Super-extra bonus points if you can tell me where to score one of those funky, black short slant-top shakos. Thanks.
Last year, I purchased this drum from an online seller. I had kept my eye on it for almost a year, and watched as the price fell and no one bit. I made an offer below the most recent price and it was accepted.
The drum arrived with a fine layer of dust, and two batter heads that looked like they'd never been played.
I let it sit, dealt with other things, and sort of forgot about it for awhile.
Then the shutdown came along, and suddenly I had time to take the drum apart, clean it and rebuild it to make it playable.
I dismantled the drum, looking carefully at each part and seeing how much time and effort it would require to clean and improve and learning a little about drum construction in the 1970s.
(Left: Note how the wrap is integrated with the mahogany ply; taking that off would be above my paygrade.)
Then I looked at the hardware.
The rims, though showing rust spots, were not warped and would clean up nicely.
The snare strainer was incomplete and missing parts. Having encountered the same model on Ludwig I, it was easy to decide to replace rather than repair. It's a lot of metal for a pretty lackluster design, and since I only had the strainer and no buttplate, I felt no guilt at all. I replaced it with another, simpler strainer set of the same vintage that I knew would work fine.
Ive run into this issue before a couple of times when restoring/rebuilding old drums: when is it preferable to repair an original component, and when does it make more sense to replace it?
I asked friends on the FB marching percussion group for their thoughts. Most rushed to suggest I try to repair the original snare strainer, even though the strainer itself was incomplete and not so special to begin with. Then someone else pointed out that my drum had only eight lugs, not the twelve lugs which came with the drums outfitted with Super-Sensitive strainer. Those fancier drums were used by a few championship drum corps back in the 1960s and 70s (Including the Des Plaines Vanguard, whose drums were finished just like this one). But my drum came from a guy who took it home from his high school at the end of his senior year, because the school was buying all new drums for the following year. While I have no proof of any of this, I'm pretty sure a drum corps back in the day would've spent the money for a high-grade drum.
I would say that it's probably best to take it on a drum-by-drum basis. If you're planning to resell the drum one day, keeping everything as original as possible means a higher resale value. If you're going to keep it and play it, I'd say there's no harm in installing non-period parts to make it dependably playable. That's what I chose to do with this one, with no regrets.
I also had to decide which batter head to use. While I like the flat, wet sound of pinstripe heads, the Power Stroke head would require -- or invite! -- more tightening than I really felt comfortable doing on a drum this old and lightweight. So I chose the CS black dot, which provides a more focused sound and would have been perfect for the period anyway.
Cleaning the drum took about three hours total, including some problem-solving and adaptation.
I had to drill one small hole to accommodate the replacement strainer; the butt plate fit the old holes perfectly.
I used a rust-eraser from my bike tool kit to buff out the rust spots by hand, which took some time. Then I polished everything with a bit of Never-Dull, a polish that has been on the market since the 1950's and which is still sold in stores -- because it works and it's non-toxic.
My can dates from probably the 1960's. I scored it for fifty cents at a yard sale and it's mostly full.
And it works like nothing else, which is why I always had a can at my bench when I worked in the bike shop. Just look at how gleaming that chrome is.
I also had to decide whether to actually remove the lugs in order to clean them. To test for rattles, I pulled off everything but the lugs, and shook the shell hard. Nothing. I set it on a lawn chair, and tapped it all over. Nothing. No rattles and clicks. A good sign, so I decided to leave the lugs alone. I tightened the bolts inside very carefully, each gave me about an eighth of a turn, just enough to make sure everything wouls stay put without risk of stripping the threads.
Finally, it was time to reassemble the drum.
I am pleased with how it turned out.
It's bigger than the marching snares I've played before -- my high school band used 14's when I was there, and this is a 15" snare, with a big sound.
I plan to take this to the park tomorrow so I can try it out and chop a little on it, while fine tuning the sound.
Assuming everything works, I'll shoot a little video and toss it up here.
A couple of years ago, the rudimental show drummer SDJ Malik posted a video on how to make a shell-less drum from the top assembly of a free-floating marching snare drum.
To be clear, he wasn't calling this a practice pad -- likely because it's simply too loud for that -- he was calling it a personal snare drum. His video shows how to construct one of these without snares. For what it is, it's effective -- and quite loud, even without a shell.
I recently acquired the top assembly of a marching snare as part of a swap, and wanted to give it a try.
I liked the feel, but found the lack of snares meant a lack of dynamic possibilities.
I wondered how one might attach snares to such a thing. Adding snares
might diffuse some of the overtones and allow for playing at slightly
softer volumes.
And then I remembered Remo's Rhythm Lid kit -- a kit that lets you convert a five-gallon plastic bucket into a functional, fun-to-play drum.
The snare unit is sold separately, so I bought one. I removed the top rim and head from my setup, installed the snare unit by simply laying it over the edge of the bottom rim (which would have been the edge of the plastic bucket as in the video); reinstalled the head and top rim, tuned it up and voila! I had a strange but funky thing, not quite a practice pad and not quite a drum, but something in between.
Bending the metal snare holder slightly allowed me to adjust the sound of the snares to make them respond more crisply and with less buzz. (Remo encourages this in their instructions for use with the plastic bucket.)
Below: The installed snare unit from the underside.
After I installed and adjusted the snare unit, I set it on a stand and
played. It made a huge difference, both in the overall sound quality and
in my ability to play with more dynamic nuance. Adding snares meant I
no longer had to overplay to get optimal sound.
While this currently has a dedicated Kevlar head installed, swapping in a standard coated head might allow me to experiment with brushes, rutes and other sounds. I'm not ready to make that change yet -- I'm having too much fun with this as it is -- but at some point down the road I''ll consider it.
Meanwhile I'm having a lot of fun with what I've come to call my MonsterCorps Unit.
I may even experiment with a way to mount this on a carrier. Stay tuned.
During this week, my partner and I are both serving congregations as cantorial soloists.
But we're serving different communities and have to practice different music and/or settings.
In our very small house, that sometimes means we take turns practicing and the other goes somewhere else for an hour ot two to give each other some space and time alone in the house.
It was my turn the other day, so I took sticks and a pad over to the park and chopped out a little.
Since hanging out on the Marching Percussion Group on Facebook, I've learned quite a lot and have gotten exercises, advice and encouragement from some very experienced drummers, including a few rockstars who marched in drum corps in the 1960s and early 70s. Since my drumming in town is limited to to the community band I play with now and then, where the musical challenges are more ensemble based than rudimentally based, My rudimental chops are developing slowly after my eight-year hiatus in the late 90s-early 2000s; and I am slowly making up for some of the lost time.
My flams STILL suck, mostly because of my arthritic left hand; and I can play more easily only after soaking my hands in hot water in the mornings before I play. But my rolls and diddle exercises are smoother now, and I enjoy playing more than I did when I started back up again.
If time and logistics permitted, I would love to find a rudimentally-based drumline to chop out with, even if just for fun once a month.
I wish I had more photographic evidence of my time spent devoted to drumming.
But all I have are these photos. Hopefully, they tell most of the story.
1. 1973: Why I chose drumming.
(Above: Karen and David Carpenter, 1969. Check that traditional grip.)
I'd already been playing beats on anything I could find. When I was seven, my best friend owned two Hoppity Hops (remember those?) and when we'd watch The Partridge Family at her house, I'd turn them into my drum kit while she grabbed a giant Magic Marker and made it a microphone. The year I turned nine we moved to California. My Dad bought me a cheap set of bongos at the souvenir booth at Frontier Village, a third-tier theme park in San Jose. I played along with records and the radio until the heads broke. Then my Mom patched them up with duct tape and I played them some more.
In the summer of 1973, we moved from Walnut Creek to Concord, California. In fifth grade I was old enough to take a music class at the new school. My parents, both trained singers, hoped I'd sign up for choir. Being terrified of singing solo in front of people, I chose instrumental music.
The teacher, a fine cellist in the local community orchestra, invited me to consider taking up the cello. I loved the sound, but it wouldn't fit in my bicycle basket and we only had one car. So I asked for something more portable. I was given the option of violin (nope), clarinet (definitely not) and drums, which at the time required me to own only a practice pad and sticks.
I was warned I'd be the only girl in the drum section, but that didn't bother me since I was already the only girl interested in lots of "boy" things (like skateboarding and BMX).
I suddenly remembered that Karen Carpenter played drums and she was awesome.
That last reason pretty much decided it for me.
2. Gresham High School, Homecoming parade, fall 1977.
I moved with my family to Gresham, Oregon in 1975. After living in or very close to much larger cities, I thought Portland (and by extension, Gresham to the east) was a hick town with provincial, almost tribal loyalties that made little room for new kids like me. Still, once we landed in Oregon we weren't moving again, so I made the best of it.
In my freshman year of high school, I joined the marching band and played a traditional single tenor drum. (I'm marching in front of the guy with the light blue saxophone strap, my face partly obscured by the saxophonist marching in front of me.) If it rained, we marched. If it blew hard from the east, we marched. A parent would bring hot baked potatoes to the drumline at every home football game so we could stuff them inside our sleeves to keep our hands warm. After we played at halftime, we'd eat them, still warm, while the infamous East Wind would come screaming out of the Columbia Gorge and almost rip my face off.
I loved those old-school uniforms; the white wool overlay could be removed to reveal a tuxedo jacket underneath which was worn for concert band. (Women wore blue vests and skirts and white blouses, all of which had to be sewn from an approved pattern. I sold my vest and skirt back to the school when I graduated.) And those spats! So cool.
Sadly, these uniforms were replaced the following year by ugly, "modern" zip-up jackets, black pants and new shakos that were glittery and over the top.
Today, my alma mater's band program has NO real uniforms. Concert attire is black pants or skirt and a white dress shirt; and the marching band plays in sweatshirts and jeans.
..::sigh::..
(Vintage content: We played Ludwig drums that dated from the 1960s. Today my tenor drum would be a collector's item, selling on eBay for upwards of $100 in good condition. In my senior year, I could choose to play snare drum, or the brand-new marching Roto-Toms that we ordered to approximate "corps-style" drum lines. I chose the Roto-Toms and had a blast. I recently acquired NOS tenor mallets with wooden heads, exactly like the ones I used in that final year, still in the packaging. I may actually play with them at some point.)
Later that summer, I marched for three months with the Spartans Drum & Bugle Corps of Vancouver, WA. Two months of rehearsals in the spring, followed by First Tour, a three-week barnstorming tour through the Pacific Northwest. Drum Corps was really hard on me physically, for reasons which would only become clear in adulthood; but I still loved it and was looking forward to going on the national Second Tour, which would culminate in a performance at the DCI World Championships.
It all ended when my mother met the bus at the corps hall on the last day of first tour, bundled me into our car, and on the way home told me I wouldn't be marching with the corps anymore. My father had lost his job -- a nightclub he'd been playing piano bar in for almost a year suddenly closed on him without warning. The next night they re-opened with a DJ; it was the height of the disco era and lots of clubs found it cheaper to hire a DJ than to pay a live band. When he complained to his union local, they told him he was on his own. My dad tore up his union card at that meeting and was immediately blacklisted.
I had to find work -- mowing lawns, babysitting, delivering the paper, or whatever else a fifteen-year-old could do for money. I spent some of my free time scavenging garbage bins and back alleys for pop and beer bottles; thanks to Oregon's landmark Bottle Bill, I could take the empties back for change, and that was my allowance each week. With the money from my part-time "regular" jobs, I helped my parents pay the utility bills all summer. (My sister was old enough to work as a waitress, and she was outgoing and really pretty so she got a lot of tips.)
We ate a lot of tuna casserole and my Dad didn't find steady work again for several months. I never marched in corps again, a regret that lingers today.
(Below: rumor has it I'm somewhere in this photo, though I barely remember the parade. We marched a LOT of parades during First Tour. I'll assume this was late in that tour, after I was switched from timps to bells, which would put me in front of the timps and out of photo range.)
3. Western Oregon State College, 1983.
I'm playing with our college stage band at the Oregon Collegiate Jazz
Festival, somewhere in Salem if memory serves. We weren't half bad. Our
kit drummer was a great player (though like most twenty-year-old guys
he was a little full of himself).
Our brass section was to die for. I
played Latin percussion and occasionally vibes. That is my old HS
concert blouse, the only dressy white shirt I owned at the time, with
black slacks and a vest I scored at Goodwill.
(Vintage content: Those congas are vintage Gon-Bops from the 60s. They were a thing of beauty and a joy to play. I really hope they're still being played somewhere.)
In the late 1980s I played with a band called Pure Imagination, a vocal quartet backed by a combo. We did charts made famous by the Four Freshman, the Modernaires, Lambert, Hendricks and Ross, and the Swingle Singers -- all the vocal jazz groups whose music I'd been weaned on in school. At the time I was also making money playing in pit orchestras for musicals and operettas (please don't ask me how I feel about Gilbert & Sullivan. Thank you.), and had a beautiful Ludwig four-piece Ringo Starr model kit with white marine pearl finish. I was so stoked to buy this kit that I held a "christening" party for it in my tiny apartment, and invited the cast and crew of the show I was playing in to celebrate with me. To my great surprise, a lot of them did.
Sadly, there are no pictures of me with that kit. In 1997, my right hand was seriously injured in a bicycle-car collision. After two surgeries and a year of PT, I was told that my playing would likely never be the same. So I sold most of my percussion instruments, including that kit.
This was the beginning of a ten-year break from playing drums and percussion, and the beginning of my career as a singer-songwriter.
4. Northwest Folklife Festival, Seattle, 2010, with Jack Falk.
Along with rudimental drumming, I'd learned to accompany singers -- my parents first, and then school jazz choirs -- on brushes. I loved playing brushes for singers because it taught me how to phrase and breathe with them. I maintain that singing, and working with singers, made me a better drummer.
In the early 2000's, I got married, bought a house, and longed to play drums again. So I started with just a snare drum and brushes, and practiced rudiments on a little Remo practice pad like the one from my childhood. Eventually, friends got wind of my return to drumming and invited me to sit in with them now and then. Jack Falk, a good friend of ours, had retired from his European touring to return to school and finish a Masters degree, and invited me to play out with him now and then.
Here, I'm playing for the amazing klezmer artist Jack Falk at Northwest Folklife, one of the largest and oldest folk festivals in the USA. I went up to Seattle in a Prius packed with luggage and other instruments -- I was also playing a solo set on the songwriter's stage -- so I could only bring a snare and hi-hat. Jack assured me that would be enough, and it was. In fact, he was so thrilled with how it came out that he asked me to stay onstage and play for a set by UW's student klezmer band, the Disciples of Goldenshteyn. It was a gloriously fat, messy set filled with laughing trombones and crying clarinets, and I had a helluva good time.
4. Kit drumming, 2010-12.
When I began to play again I assembled a drum kit from spare parts, obtained mostly at thrift shops, online and yard sales. The kit included a sweet vintage Royce snare drum that, for having only six lugs, sounded amazing. I converted a floor tom into a really small kick drum and rebuilt it with wooden hoops and bass drum heads. The idea was to use it to accompany soloists and small ensembles, so I never bothered to get a rack tom for it. By this time, though, didn't really have anywhere to play it, and because I was still working full-time as a bike mechanic I didn't have time to pursue it. I eventually sold the kit to a friend for twice what it had cost me to cobble it together.
5. Shalshelet Jewish Music Festival, 2013, Miami.
In all the time I'd stopped drumming with sticks, I was still making sounds on anything I could get my hands on, including doumbek, tar (African frame drum), maracas, and tambourines.
In 2013, one of my compositions was accepted for inclusion at a Jewish music festival taking place in Miami. At the same time, I was also forging ahead with a full-time Jewish music career, having left the bike shop for good in 2012. I played a fundraiser show to cover my airfare, and went down to Miami, where it was immediately clear that I was a Jewish singer-songwriter who could also drum. I made myself available to other festival artists and wound up spending a fair amount of time onstage at the gala concert.
I continued to tour as a Jewish artist and educator-in-residence, and added percussion to my educational kit, accompanying multiple artists and even ending up on a couple of their recordings.
Today, I am as often found behind a drum as I am singing out front at Jewish festivals and music conferences.
6. Tziona Achishena, Portland concert 2018.
Jack Falk called me last August. "The Sephardic shul [synagogue] is hosting an Israeli artist, she's awesome and needs a drummer. However, because it's an orthodox shul, no men are allowed at the concert [The orthodox have a rule about men not hearing womens' voices in public spaces]. You're the only woman drummer I know who could learn her tunes quickly enough. The concert's in two days and she says she'll pay a hundred and fifty bucks. Want the gig?"
I brought my percussive love to an audience of mostly orthodox Jewish women from around the Portland area, accompanying a talented and gracious artist named Tziona Achishena. It was a whirlwind evening, I hung on for dear life to the charts, Tziona was a brilliant singer and composer, the whole roomful of women and girls got up and danced through the aisles, and everyone had a joyous time. (Video, below: I'm accompanying Tziona on a five-gallon water bottle with an amazing sound.)
7. Today. Still at it.
I'm playing drums every morning, chopping out on a practice pad as part of my meditative practice and a way to help manage the depression I was diagnosed with five years ago.
Along the way, I've re-discovered the joy of rudimental drumming for its own sake, joined a community band and am slowly working my way to true drum happiness.
I make and sell little travel cajons from recycled wooden cigar boxes and repurposed snare hardware.
I've joined a couple of online forums dedicated to rudimental drumming and vintage drums, and I feel like I've reconnected with a piece of my childhood that was especially happy and today is a source of comfort and joy.
So I've got myself a cool little pad (New, NOT vintage, sorry), made and sold by a drum corps called Jersey Surf. Unlike many drum corps in this all-too modern era, Surf remains a volunteer-driven organization, which means everything they raise goes directly into equipping, feeding and transporting the corps during their summer tour. (There are drum corps today whose senior staff members pull down huge salaries. Most volunteer-driven corps have much lower staff salaries and it's a labor of love. The latter are getting harder to find at the top levels of the activity.)
I ordered my pad as soon as they were made available this winter. After all, it would make a nice addition to my collection, and the price ($12) was right.
I've been enjoying my little pad since it arrived. It has two sides: one side is made from a mousepad the corps sold last year. They had extras and decided to repurpose them for these pads. (repurposing makes Surf a drum corps after my own crunchy-granola, PNW environmentalist heart.)
The mousepad side is a little harder and tighter, and makes you work a little more to get decent diddles and rolls. And it's SO clean-sounding that there's nowhere for your lazy technique to hide.
You'll hear every note whether you want to or not.
The other side is a hard, dense rubber that's only slightly thicker than the mousepad. It's also a fairly hard surface, but without as much "bite" as the mousepad side. Both surfaces are glued securely to a particle-board platform. The whole pad fits easily into my messenger bag and therefore is a pad I take with me anywhere. Below is an example of how this little pad sounds and plays.
This is not a super-high-performance drum pad. (For that, spend the bigger bucks and get a Xymox or Offworld pad.)
Instead, this is the pad to reach for when you find yourself with five minutes of downtime and you need to play a few rolls to calm your squirrel-brain. Or the pad to keep at the office when a vendor puts you on hold for too long. Or the pad to take to beach with you so that you can chop out while you stare at the waves and go all Zen-like. (One of my favorite pursuits, BTW)
I'm taking mine on tour next month when I go do some singer-songwriter gigs in Seattle. Because it's the perfect size to travel with and for what it is, it's not bad at all.
There are still some available at the corps web store: http://jerseysurf.org/product/jersey-surf-drum-pad/
Every purchase supports youth music.
Which I know you absolutely WANT to do.
Happy chopping, kids!
And all the best to you and yours in 2019.
