Brush pads: extremely, painfully specialized

While the specialty pads that get the most press are focused on the marching arts, there’s a subset of practice pads designed for practicing brushes on.

When I was in college, my Dad played piano bar at a downtown nightclub. Very occasionally, I’d bring my brushes with me, and Dad would pull out the Yellow Pages, open them on the bar and let me quietly keep time while he played. The opened phone book had a great surface for brushes.

And it was free.

Since then, several drum companies have produced brush practice pads, with varying degrees of success.

Here are just a few that I’ve tried:

1. Remo Brush-Up pad. Designed with input from Ed Thigpen, a renowned master of brush playing, this was essentially a stiff rubber frame with a Remo Fyberskyn surface laid over a foam rubber mute. The pad worked as advertised, and was very quiet, but sold poorly and was only in production for a few years. If you can find one for sale online today, expect to pay several hundred dollars for it.

2. Brush Up pad by One Beat Better. This was  panel of wood with rubber nonskid strips on bottom and a clear textured coating on top. There was also a partial rim so you could practice rim rolls. Designed with input by Sherrie Maricle, this was a really nice practice item, just small enough to fit on top of a snare drum. It appears to be no longer available at this writing. 

3. Ahead 14-inch Brush Pad. Basic and useful, with a rubber side for stick practice and a textured side for brush practice. It just fits on a snare drum, or on a stand or tabletop. And it’s still available.

4. Attacktile by Evans. A recent entry into the market, this is an Evans rubber practice pad, based on MDF and topped by a rigid, textured layer. The playing surface is nice for brushes, but for some reason Evans chose to make this pad in a ten-inch size — not really large enough to practice full brush strokes. Also, the rigid surface has shown evidence of coming away from the base after a month or less of use, showing that the adhesion may need some more work. With adhesion improvement and a 14-inch size, this might be a really nice brush pad, but in my opinion the design needs some work.

5. Percussion Practice Pad by Pete Siers. Siers, a drummer and drum teacher, designed and made up a batch of these pads from Formica tile and at this writing is selling them online. The pad fits on top of a snare drum, but is also rigid enough to sit in a stand or on a tabletop. While the shiny side is the one intended for brushwork, I’ve found that the underside also works for a slightly different feel and sound. I recently acquired one of these and like it a lot. 

If the price of a brush-specific pad seems prohibitive — and I can’t blame you — you can look around for an old phone book. Or, since those are getting a lot harder to find in the Electronic Age, a 14” square or round of corrugated cardboard also works very well.

History lesson: the first Remo practice pads

The very first plastic drumhead was introduced to the market by Marion "Chick" Evans in 1956. It revolutionized drum heads overnight, leading the drum industry away from calfskin heads into a new age. Belli followed up very shortly after that with heads from a space-age material called Mylar, which proved wildly successful. Remo's heads were branded “Weather King” because they were nearly impervious to changes in temperature and humidity.

Belli founded a company around the new technology and along with drum heads, he began producing practice pads to show off the potential of the new material. These two pads date from 1958 and 1961, respectively. (Remo’s web site has a neat little timeline where you can see changes in the company logo, dated by year. It’s helpful to collectors in dating historic Remo products.)

The earliest Mylar heads were a tiny bit thicker than the tunable ones that followed. Still very resonant, but not quite as floppy-flexible. Stapled into the wood frame and stuffed with some kind of muffling foam that literally disintegrated with age so that now, they are just annoyingly loud. It feels like Formica if Formica had more give to it.

By 1963, the pads would become tunable, with metal rims, tuning screws and replacement heads — perhaps an early foray into sustainability, though no one was using that word in 1965. The late 60s saw plastic rims replacing the metal rims. This version of the tunable pad was the very first drum pad I learned on as a kid. I played that pad from 5th grade through my second year of college and three replacement heads along the way. While numerous other pad designs have supplanted the Remo pad, that pad is still in production today and literally millions of kids are still getting their start in drumming on one of those. It holds a dear place in my memory, and in my pad collection.

#knowyourhistory 

#sharethetradition 

#practicepads

Do practice pads need special stands? Sometimes.

My Drumslinger pad is heavy, perhaps the heaviest pad in my collection. It easily weighs close to five pounds. That’s not a highly portable pad. Indeed, it’s better suited to studio use where you can park it semi-permanently and leave it set up.

A couple of other pads in my collection weigh a little less, and also work best in a stationary stand.

The drum industry has responded to the needs of drummers by offering ready-made, pad-specific designs. 

1. Remo’s practice pad stand has been around since the 1960s, and is designed exclusively for Remo pads with a threaded tip that the pad screws onto. For these lighter weight pads it works just fine, though anyone chopping really hard on a Remo pad would do well to find something heavier-duty and purpose-driven, from any number of companies: Evans, Rudimental Drummers, Rudimental Control and Drumslinger are  few examples of sturdier pads that I use. Cheap copies of this design abound. Make sure you get one whose thread size matches your pad.

2. Ahead offers a specific practice pad stand, with a miniature basket. These are designed for smaller pads in the 8” to 10” size. They hold a smaller pad more securely than the Remo version. 

3. Drumeo has come up with a pad-specific stand that accommodates larger pads up to 12” diameter. Its only pad-specific feature is that the grips at top are shorter in height to accommodate flatter, thinner pads without fuss. The concert height option is also nice. Otherwise, it’s just a stand with blue trim.

4. Tama offers an overbuilt version of the Ahead stand, much heavier duty but without the concert height option.

A number of off-brand copies of these models are available at lower prices. The quality may vary wildly and can be a little lower than the branded stands. Finding them used can be hard, as the concept of a pad-specific stand is less than a decade old and people tend to hang onto them when they find the right one.

6. Another option is to simply fashion your own pad stand, using a concert-height snare stand with a heavier-duty tripod and a snare basket. Be advised that a standard snare basket may not accommodate any pad smaller than 10” diameter, and some snare baskets may not work for anything smaller than 12”.

A variation on this idea offers slightly more stability. N stead of using a standard concert snare stand, simply find a heavy-duty cymbal stand, whose tripod usually expands farther out than a snare stand does, remove the threaded top section (s) and replace with a snare basket section from a shorter stand. This gives greater stability to hold the heaviest purpose-driven practice pads, and usually costs far less when you assemble it from used parts.

I did this many years ago and it’s still the best practice pad stand I’ve ever used.

Happy drumming!

Product Review: Tom’s Pad by Volkwein’s Music

I’d been wanting one of these since they first came out years ago. But it was expensive — $50 at the time — and I balked at the price. 

I should’ve bought one back then, when it cost less.

Today the same pad retails for around $80. Accounting for inflation and everything else, I suppose that’s just the way of the world. But when I had an opportunity to buy a slightly used pad for $50, I decided to pull the lever. It arrived today.

It’s a really nice pad.

Built out of hardwood laminates and a steel rim, Tom’s Pad is essentially a souped-up version of the Remo tunable pad. It even. Uses a Remo pad head, which can be easily replaced. But we’re talking seriously souped-up.

The pad takes an 8” head and it is so stoutly built that it should see me out. Using flathead screws for tuning means your stick won’t hit one accidentally (they use a 4mm Allen key, available at any hardware store). The recycled particle foam rubber underneath the head is firmer than the old open-cell foam rubber used by Remo, and the feel is satisfying. It’s also louder than the Remo pad, so be mindful of where you play it. Finally, this pad can be played on a tabletop, but without rubber on the bottom, it will work best on a cymbal stand with an 8mm thread.

It’s a keeper. 

And it’s available at https://www.volkweinsmusic.com/products/toms-pad-by-volkweins-percussion

Vintage Corner: Remo's precursor to the tuneable pad (Part III, sort of)

Here's the followup to my previous posts about the Remo tuneable practice pad.

First, Remo has a really cool little timeline at their web site that allows you to see major developments from the company's beginnings up till around 2007 (the timeline could use an update). From there, I was able to learn a few things that helped me to place the Remo pads in my collection on the historic timelime.

My plastic pad dates from the 1970s.
My two metal-rimmed tuneable pads date from the early to mid 1960s -- basically, until Remo began making tuneable pads with hard plastic rims.
But I have two pads that pre-date these pads, and I always wondered exactly where they came from.

These pads are not tuneable. They are constructed entirely of wood and use very early versions of Remo's synthetic drumhead material, for which patent paperwork was first filed in 1957 (the patent was granted in 1962; prior to this, most drummers had to live with calfskin heads and the vagaries of temperature and humidity that affected them. The synthetic drum head was a revelation as well as a revolution).
Beneath the head there appears to be what's left of some kind of foam (padding? muffling?); it has disintegrated over the decades, leaving a pad with an unsatisfying, hard "thud" sound.

Construction: each pad is made of wood, a built-in tilt and a sound chamber made of a thin piece of wood that looks like it was heated and bent into a curve. The framework holding the head is mounted on top of the curve, making for a resonant pad.

One of the things that can stymie research is a lack of serial numbers or other markers. These can be found on drums, but generally never appear on practice pads.

However, Remo's timeline gives us some help in determining exactly how old these pads are.

Remo's timeline goes as far as charting the course of its "Crown" logo design over the years, which in this case helped me more closely date these pads, the first produced under the Remo brand.

The larger pad's logo is worn, but still visible enough to determine a manufacture date.

Based on Remo's timeline info, that would date this pad to right around 1958-60, making it the first generation of practice pad offered by Remo.
Below, the logo from the smaller pad.

This means that the smaller pad is almost surely from 1961, since the new plastic-rimmed pad was rolled out in early 1962.
Not all companies provide such useful historic information to collectors, but Remo's timeline is especially helpful here. If you look closely at some points along the timeline, you can even click on links to patent information.

Like I said, playing these pads is NOT an exciting experience. The feel and sound are klunky.
It would be great to find a pad in as-new condition, with the foam in original shape, so I could get a better sense of how it sounded in the late 50s.

I hope you've found this exploration as interesting as I have. Happy drumming!

new drum day, updated: 2000's Pearl ST "shorty" marching snare

I got this a few weeks ago, for a song. It needed work, cleaning and new heads.

Last night I installed the new heads -- Mylar top and bottom, and tuned it up.
The gut snares still need to be tuned individually but they're in good shape.
The carrier bracket that came installed on the drum is damaged (possibly in shipping? Don't know, don't care). It will make a nice paper weight once I find a workable replacement and carrier.

I may need to wait on the carrier until I get pad for another gig in late November. But I've got my eye on one that I think would work. meanwhile, it will be fine to sit on a stand and play at home.

Floating drum hardware basically allows the shell to "float" freely while the hardware holds the structure of the entire drum in place. When I installed the snare side head, I took the shell out to show my partner how the whole thing works; then, of course, I couldn't get the shell back in without disaligning the badge. I may try to straighten it if I can do so without totally removing the snare side head and rim again.

Pearl ST Shorty, 13" x 9"
Batter: Remo Powerstroke 4
Snare: Remo Ambassador snare

I'm looking forward to some quiet time at home so I can really play this thing.

Let us now praise famous Drum pads: Remo

I joined my school band in 1973, when I was ten years old. We had moved to Concord, California about three months after I started fifth grade, and I wanted to join the band and learn an instrument.
My first choices -- trumpet and french horn -- were not available. My parents told me they couldn't afford to rent something from a store, so I had to make do with whatever I could borrow from the school. After considering multiple options, I chose the drums, and rode home with a brand new pair of 5-A sticks and a Remo tuneable practice pad in my backpack.

The Remo pad was the first practice pad for a whole generation of drummers, most of whom began playing in the late 1960s through early 1980s. It's portability and tuneability were the main selling factors, as was the reasonable price. Because the school bought pads and sticks in quantity, I could obtain my pad and sticks for a total of $10 in 1973 ($45-50 today, adjusting for inflation).

The Remo pad was also popular because it could be played on a tabletop (or on a tilted music stand, which was standard practice when I was a kid) or mounted on a threaded cymbal stand; the raised rim allowed you to experiment with something cool called a "rim shot" (played on a real drum, this would eventually break the stick; played on the Remo pad, this would eventually crack the plastic rim. I admit I broke at least four Remo pad rims on my way to High School, when I switched to a rubber practice pad). Another nice feature was the replaceable head -- though I never played mine hard enough to have to replace one. The largest size, 10" in diameter, was almost big enough to practice brushes on.

The pad, first patented in 1962 (only a year before I was born!), revolutionized drum practice for tens of thousands of school and professional drummers for decades, and nearly every drummer my age remembers starting out on one of these pads.

(Below: A 1966 patent for Remo's practice drum kit, comprised of multiple tuneable pads on an adjustable metal frame. Today, you can find these for amazingly little money at yard sales and on craigslist.)

Remo tuneable pads are now considered a good choice for a student on a tight budget, the idea being that when money was available the goal would be to "upgrade" to something "better" -- or, in 2019, something that came closer to the feel of a high-tension marching snare with a Kevlar head. Remo pad heads are tuneable, but not past a certain point; and that point doesn't come close to the feel of a higher-tension head.

For those who can't afford a high-tension, "modern" practice pad (the best ones start at close to $100 each), there are numerous Youtube videos showing how to get an approximation of the modern "fake-snare" sound by modifying the Remo pad -- by filling it to the brim with unpopped popcorn or even ball bearings, and even swapping in longer bolts to allow for tighter tuning. But remember, that plastic rim can only handle so much tension -- so if you decide to experiment this way, expect that the rim will show its limits before you reach the desired higher tension.

For those of us who continue to play on Mylar heads, the original, unmodified Remo pad is still a fine choice, which is why I keep one in my stable today. Happy playing!