Vintage Corner: 1960s Ludwig pad (my latest rescue project)

My Latest rescue pad. 

Clearly not a museum piece, the repaired split down the middle of the base needed some further shoring up and the rubber had to be re-glued. But it’s not bad now. I made a mute for it from scraps. (Also, while not visible in the photos, I eventually removed the white rubber "feet" and the tiny nails holding them in place. The rubber had hardened and shrunk, causing some of the feet to actually rattle against the wood when the pad was struck. I replaced these feet with some thick neoprene rubber squares, in case I ever want to remove the pad from its mounting bracket. The rattle went away with the old feet.)

My partner certainly likes how quiet it is. It feels great. I LOVE these old Ludwig pads, especially the earlier models made of oak. (Later versions used a lighter weight wood — pine? Fir? Unknown — that had a different feel and resonance. Try to find one made from oak if you can.)

Bonus: the tilt is pretty mellow when compared to other pads of the era, making it a nice pad for the younger player who is still getting accustomed to traditional grip.

These pads often show up at rummage sales and various online outlets (FB marketplace, eBay, etc) for as little as $15-20 plus postage. I got this one for $30 with the stand included. The black rubber they used tends to last a very long time and is still bouncy and responsive fifty years on. Anyone just getting into vintage practice pads will enjoy finding and using one of these without spending a fortune.

Vintage Corner: George Way’s “Henry Adler Tone Control” practice pad, 1950s

Readers will remember that last year, I acquired an early generation Henry Adler adjustable practice pad and was over the moon.

Well, I now have what is really the mate to that pad, existing at the other end of the historical arc. 

George Way’s version of this pad was licensed from Henry Adler and made by George Way Drums in the mid to late 1950s. This version of the design was manufactured for less than a decade, and when George Way was forced out of his own company by Camco Drums the pad was discontinued. It’s a rare pad and hard to find in any condition. A few years ago, one of Way’s pads was sold on eBay in poor condition, without the internal mechanism or the moving side doors; bidding was fierce and it sold for over $200 — too rich for my blood at the time.

But this was the version of the pad I’d been looking for all along. And I had an opportunity to buy one last month. It arrived this week.

 It works, though the slider tends to move when open and struck on top. The internal arms that hold the side doors are attached by means of a small leather piece that seems to provide for greater ease of motion; however, one of the leather pieces is gone, replaced by a small piece of steel band attached with a large thumbtack. The leather piece on the other side is intact, and got hit with some paint. I may look for a way to stabilize it further and keep it from rotting. The result of this mismatched repair is that one of the doors opens farther than the other, and doesn’t close fully with the lever is moved to the closed position.

The other issue is that Way chose to redesign the pad — he was always tinkering with designs — so that the door hinges are at the top, rather than the bottom as on Adler’s original design. He also replaced the simpler wood knob with a metal assembly that uses a sliding lever to open and close the doors. I actually think Adler had the better idea, as the weight of the open door would help to keep it in place to wherever it was adjusted; and the wood knob means fewer parts inside to potentially fail. Having the doors swing out from the bottom means that weight could cause the doors to fall slightly closed again, and that’s the case with this Way pad.

A previous owner applied white paint (Killz? Flat base? No idea) on the top panel of the pad. 

I was able to remove a lot of the white paint from the sides of ths panel by gently scrubbing it with a sponge and some warm water. The white paint on the top appears to have been applied directly onto bare wood where the yellow paint had completely worn away. I'm going to take it to my local paint supply and see if they can help me match the color, and if they can I’ll sand the to lightly and cover the white with a new coating of yellow.

I doubt I plan to do much more than that. The original red rubber on top still has rebound — though the rubber used on George Way pads always tended to be firmer than gum rubber anyway — and I won’t bother trying to remove the circles that someone drew on, probably with a ballpoint pen. The pad works, and I very happy to have these two historic “bookends” in my collection.

UPDATE: There was a strange little noise when I played on the pad that suggested cracks in the wood. I found the cracks.

They were mostly running through a couple of the side panels, which I sealed by inserting a tiny screwdriver, wedging the crack a little farther apart and dribbling glue into it. Then I removed the screwdriver, wiped away the excess and weighted it down overnight. After it was dried, the buzzing sound I first got when playing had gone away. It’s too bad that one of the worst cracks ran through the middle of the decal. After the glue dried, I applied a thin clear coat over the decal to preserve it.

The next day, I called four different places to find one that would sell me the smallest jar of matched paint, then went and got some. They tried to match as best they could, and warned me that it’s nearly impossible to match dirty, aged paint. They got close enough.

I decided to sand lightly and apply over the white, plus touching up a few other spots. 

Looks better than the white on top did.

I can live with it.

This is never going to be a museum piece , probably why I got it for a good price. But I’m happy with how it turned out.

The pad, after two light coats of paint. I tried to blend some of the paint over the original yellow so the different yellows wouldn’t look quite so stark. I think it worked out.

A little video, comparing the two pads, before I painted.

Interview with David Loendorf of Quiet Tone

David Loendorf grew up in Bayonne, New Jersey and began playing drums in the early 1960s, while still in grade school. He attended Rutgers University for a time and by the late 1970s he was taking formal lessons with Henry Adler in New York City.

Henry Adler had started developing what would become the Quiet Tone Mute in the late 1960s, but because of his work teaching students, running a drum shop and performing, production was sporadic and limited and “advertising” was strictly word-of-mouth.

David was part of the team (with Adler and Glen Sorge, another of Adler’s students) that turned Quiet Tone into a going concern beginning in 1987. After a short time, Sorge stepped away from the business, and eventually David took over the Quiet Tone operation himself. During this time, David was making the mutes in the basement of his New Jersey home, with some help from his wife. 

While building mutes and managing the Quiet Tone business, David worked as a teacher and percussionist, performing with multiple ensembles in the NYC/NJ area including the Monmouth Symphony.

In 2000, Quiet Tone was sold to the Sabian corporation and the operation moved to Canada, with David staying on to consult in production and to work on other projects for the company. He stepped away from Quiet Tone completely by 2004. Today, David is retired and living in Maine. 

While researching the history of Quiet Tone, I was given his name by Robert Boyd, who’d run into him at trade shows. Before I’d had a chance to look David up on the socials, his name popped up as a suggested Facebook friend. It was eery, but also helpful. I reached out to him asking if he was indeed the David Loendorf who’d been involved with Quiet Tone pads and if so would it be okay for me to talk with him? He responded in the affirmative on both counts a couple of days later, and we talked by telephone for a little over two hours. 

Here’s our chat, edited for clarity and brevity:

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BH: So you started drumming in school?

DL: Yes, in sixth grade, in 1963. My music teacher noticed that I could play a little and put me on drums. I played all through high school, learning as I went along by practicing and watching other drummers. 

BH: You grew up in Bayonne, so you must have known about the Bridgemen [drum and bugle corps]?

DL: Oh yeah. I played with them for around three months. Practice consisted of being lined up on either side of a long wood table and being given rhythms to tap out on it, over and over. Then, we got on a bus and headed to the New Jersey Armory, where we were taught to march. Dancing and playing at the same time? It was not for me. So I quit and went back to my high school band and was quite happy there. I played everything from snare drum, bass drum to cymbals and timpani and enjoyed it. 

BH: What other kinds of drumming did you do between public school and your studies with Henry Adler?

DL: Through the 1970s, until I got into the orchestra in 1981, I was playing lots of country, pop, and swing. We had some interesting times -- because we were working in Union City (NJ), Les Paul came and started watching us play. He really loved my guitar player, Paul Jones. We started hanging out at his house and his studio, which was filled with guitars — I had fiddled around with guitars before really getting into drums — and I saw some amazing, beautiful stuff. I saw some of his prototypes and got to try some of them. We also got to visit Media Sound in NYC, across from Carnegie Hall, where we worked with John Phillips and got to do some interesting things. I got married in 1979 and went into orchestral percussion not long after that. But that time was fun! We made $35 a night and spent $45 (laughs).  I also worked on the sales floor at Freehold Music before I started working with Henry Adler. 

I was capable but my hands were kind of weak in terms of technique. So after I dropped out of college (I studied English at Rutgers, with a professor who was from Oxford — I couldn’t do anything right by that guy!), I started taking lessons with Henry Adler.  I studied with Henry in Freehold while I was working on my house there. Eventually I went in for more regular, formal lessons with Henry at his New York studio, which was on 46th street across from Manny’s Music. I studied with him for around 6 years, formal lessons every couple of weeks. We’d go through the Buddy Rich book with traditional grip, then he’d have me start over using matched grip, and then he’d make me start again with varying degrees of bounces. Lots of repetition, over and over, so I could apply different kinds of technique and get better at each one. If I’d studied with him longer than I had, he probably would have made me go through that book nineteen different ways!

BH: How did you get involved with the Quiet Tone mutes?

DL: Henry [Adler] had started making Quiet Tone mutes in the late 1960s at his studio on 46th Street, and drummers he knew liked them so he’d make more by request. By the mid-1980s, when I started studying with Henry, I was helping Henry make them with another of his students, and we began making them in greater quantities. Drummers would hear about them, come in and try them. They sought out the mutes and we started selling a lot of them. Quiet Tone was formally incorporated in 1993, and we were making mutes in larger and larger batches. That included some contracts with the military. 

BH: I have here an early flier for QT that shows mutes for 14-inch snare, 13 and 14-inch toms and a bass drum mute. You also made larger mutes, for awhile, yes?

DL: Yes. We also made a 15-inch mute but we quickly discontinued it in favor of a 16-inch size. When tom sizes got bigger they got softer — the 16 tom was, well, a bit mushier, you know? So I thought, let’s put them out the way they feel and sound. So the 16-inch mute sounds and feels like a 16-inch tom. In early 1994 I patented a Quiet Tone bass drum mute. People were telling us we really had to have one, so I designed one and we brought it out, but it was something of a disaster. It just wasn’t that good, and we didn’t make them for very long.

Around that time, I took over the entire Quiet Tone operation from Henry Adler. I continued making the pads at home for awhile, while at the same time playing in ensembles in the area and teaching drum students. Drummers sought us out to talk about QT mutes and about drumming in general, and I traveled to trade shows and festivals to market the mutes for a number of years. I’m grateful to have befriended and hung out with some of the best drummers in the world because of my work with QT. I didn’t try to seek endorsers, it was mostly just drummers coming to me to ask about the mutes, then spreading it by word of mouth to other drummers.  David Weckl, Vinnie Colaiuta, lots of other drummers, they all tried the mutes and loved them. They did a lot of advertising for them just by raving about them.

(Below: original QT mute, from Editor's collection.)

An interesting story: One of the larger batch orders was for the US Army’s Old Guard [fife and drum corps]. My wife was helping make the mutes in our basement by then, she was a nurse and she’d come down to the basement after her shifts at the hospital and assemble mutes with me. Some of those early mutes wound up with the Old Guard. Just a few years ago, I saw a video for the Army that showed the Old Guard rehearsal barracks, and while the camera swept along the room, at the back were some of the earliest Quiet Tone mutes on drum stands — my wife had made some of those pads years before, and guys drumming now at the Tomb of the Unknowns were still practicing on them!

BH: When did Sabian get involved?

DL: In 2000 I retired from performing, and the mutes had grown more popular than in-house production could keep up with. Around that time I sold the Quiet Tone brand and design to Sabian. They moved everything to their facility in Canada, which allowed them to ramp up production considerably to keep up with demand. They used some parts sourced from our suppliers in New Jersey for a while. Eventually -- after I left Sabian -- they scaled up even more by transferring all of the Quiet Tone manufacturing to Taiwan. 

I worked with Sabian for three years as part of the management team for percussion and accessories. My wife and I sold our house in Freehold and bought a property in Maine, which put me closer to Sabian’s facility in New Brunswick. Sabian had a building in Houlton, Maine, a big empty building that we turned into a soundstage, and I spent a lot of time inventing there, but my actual office was up in New Brunswick.

I was able to continue playing here in Maine, and artists visiting the area would stop in to say hello and perform on the soundstage there. I continued to work with a small number of students here, including Dustin Fitzpatrick of Drum Science. He studied for four years with me, mostly on hand development. He got so good, over the top, that he scared me.

BH: Tell me about how the Quiet Tone was constructed. Where did you source parts?

DL: Well, before Sabian, the rims and hardware came from China, the heads came from Remo and the fiber board base — you know there’s no asbestos in it, right? — the very first base we used was basically acoustic sound tile material. Later, we switched to something called Homasote [a versatile, eco-friendly structural fiberboard made from 100% recycled paper and wood cellulose compressed under high heat and pressure without harmful formaldehyde adhesives - Wikipedia].  We used closed-cell Homasote, made in those days in Trenton, as the base. Then a layer of open-cell sponge [similar to what’s used in neoprene drum mutes now - BH], then a layer of flat Mylar and then the drumhead. It’s a good combination of components for a good feel and response.

BH: Were you still with Sabian when they brought out the mesh head version?

DL: No, that was after I left. I haven’t tried it. 

BH: Since you stepped away from Sabian, have you been drumming much?

DL:  Well, I recently bought myself a new drum kit and I’ve been spending a lot of time tuning it, outfitting it with extra things and just having fun with it. I find myself playing along with recordings of my favorite bands; right now it’s a lot of Yes, especially their "Live at the Apollo" recording from 2018, it's just really great stuff.

(Below: David Loendorf, 1967)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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After a delightful conversation, we agreed to swap email addresses and eventually photos of our favorite drums and pads. I’m truly grateful to David for his time and for sharing his story.

Vintage Corner: Quiet Tone practice pads, from the early days

According to verbal history, Henry Adler designed the Quiet Tone practice in the 1960s as a way to practice drumming quietly.
It could rest on a tabletop or on top of a drum, and worked as advertised. 
The earliest version featured a plain Mylar plastic head and rim laid over a muting base (made of some kind of fiberboard that, contrary to rumor did not contain any asbestos). The earliest version of the QT pad had very primitive tension that was difficult to work with and did not offer much of a tuning range. 

The patent for the design was actually awarded to Merton Glick and Joseph Mancari in 1969. I am still researching the Henry Adler connection to see if he was involved in any way, but so far I can find nothing.

Below: drawings from the patent application:

The earliest versions of the QT pad, before the patent was awarded, are extremely scarce and very hard to find today. So imagine my surprise when I found listings for two of them, at a surprisingly low price for each. Of course, I snapped them both up.

14" pad, meant to fit on top of a snare drum:

 

And the 13" size, meant to fit on top of a tom or a piccolo snare drum:

As you can see from the blow-ups below, the tensioning mechanism was far more primitive on this earliest version, which used a simple nut and bolt design. This would be replaced later by a drum tension rod, which provided more adjustability.

While this earliest tuning mechanism was too primitive for real world applications, having examples in my collection makes it easier for me to see and show the full development of an important piece of drum pad history, and I'm glad to have them.

Happy drumming.

Vintage update: Sam Ulano’s King Size Pad, refurbished

Remember when I got this gigantic practice pad?

I was thrilled to add this vintage pad to my stable. But I was also really nervous, because the large slab of gum rubber was showing its age. I worried that I’d ended up with a museum piece rather than a playable vintage pad. My goal with nearly all of my vintage pads is that while they’re historic, they should also be in decent enough shape to at least offer a short demonstration if asked.

I sat on this pad for a couple of months and asked around about ways to restore the rubber. After not getting a reassuring answer from anyone at local hardware stores or the handful of woodworkers I know, I weighed whether or not replacing the gum rubber would make sense. Gum rubber from fifty or more years ago is unlike what industrial suppliers call gum rubber today, and I worried I’d lose the feel by replacing it.

Finally, today promised to be a sunny, dry day and I decided it was time to act. I’d gently pry up the original rubber. If it was too degraded, I’d replace it with a new piece cut to the same size.

I took a deep breath, applied a thin flathead screwdriver to one edge of the rubber slab, and gently began to pry up the rubber. I took my time and pried a tiny little bit at a time before taking the whole slab in my hands and slowly tugging on it. To my relief, it came up in one piece. I was surprised to see that it was almost 1/2” thick, rather than a more standard 1/4”. 

(The top of the gum rubber, a

Ready hardened and crumbling, cracked even more as I pulled it up.)

To my even greater relief, the rubber was only degraded (by air, light, and time) less than 1/8” down; the other side of the slab was like almost new. Whatever glue had been used to adhere the rubber into the wooden frame had stayed with the wood. 

All of this meant that I could simply flip the rubber over and glue the old side down into wood frame, and the fresh side could be the new playing surface.

I lightly sanded the wood frame, applied a thin layer of wood hardener, and set it in the sun to dry. Out in the sun, it took about five hours to dry thoroughly. (I was careful not to get any hardener on the hard rubber surface on the reverse side.)

When the hardener was dry, I lightly scuffed up both the wood surface inside the frame and what used to be the top of the rubber slab, wiped off the excess crumbs from the rubber and the wood, and applied the glue.

Then I carefully pressed the rubber back into the frame. It was a snug fit and I took my time to make sure it would be fully seated all the way around. Then I weighted down the rubber and let it sit for two hours. This evening, I checked my work, and was happy with how it had turned out.

I tried it out and noticed that without the thin hardening on the top of the rubber, the feel and response is a touch softer now. I think this will be best with concert or drum kit sticks. With 1/2” of rubber, marching sticks will feel a bit sluggish, and I suspect that’s not what Sam designed these pads for anyway.

In case there’s still an odd smell — I was born without an olfactory sense so I can’t tell — I’m letting it air out overnight in the shed, right next to the open screen window. It should be ready to bring into the house tomorrow.

Vintage Corner: 1950s pad, maker unknown

When the world gets scary, I get geeky.

I did a mad bunch of flipping to come up with the scratch to obtain this beautiful old practice pad. Ludwig stand dates from the early to mid 1970s. The practice pad is older, probably from the 1950s. Pad is possibly homemade (it’s a little too narrow for the big mass producers of the era), and the rubber feels surprisingly bouncy and nice for its age.

It’s a keeper.

Vintage Corner: Leedy practice pad, 1930s-40s

I have a fondness for the older, larger tilt pads that were popular between 1930 and 1970.

I’m especially excited about pads dating from the first half of this age spread. They tend to have a slightly steeper tilt angle and a larger rubber playing surface. The reddish rubber surface tends to keep its rebound for a reasonably long time if it’s stored indoors and taken care of. If it’s left outside, the rubber degrades quickly, becoming unplayable.

Dating some of these pads can be challenging due to any or all of the following reasons:

— Pad designs from this era tended to be similar across multiple companies, and were not changed often;

— Available materials were similar, due to availability of both materials and types of rubber processing;

— Major drum companies changed hands multiple times between the mid 1930s and the mid 1950s, meaning that branding had to change along with ownership. Good examples of this include Ludwig, Leedy, WFL, George Way and Camco. There are others.

Thanks to the efforts of the fellow who created and maintains the DrumArchive web library, hundreds of pdfs of historic drum catalogs and fliers can be examined and the pictorial evidence found can help confirm what started as a hunch as to the year a pad was made and sold. A recent deep dive into the archive helped me determine the maker and age range of this pad, which now makes it one of my oldest vintage pads.

I obtained this pad last spring, and couldn't figure out who had made it or when.

The reddish rubber on top is likely original, though that's impossible to prove. Also, there's no decal on the wood anywhere. So all I have to go on is the design, including the size and shape of the wood panels and any distinguishing features.

The bottom panel has a circular cutout that appears to serve as a sound enhancer.

The rear-facing support panel has carved-out sides that add some flair to the pad's appearance. 

If you turn the pad over, the bottom is made of a very thin fiberboard, which covers the sound hole. Presumably, this fiber bottom has no function.

Or does it?

Going into the Drum Archive, I looked through multiple listing of Ludwig catalogs, and found nothing resembling that shape or style.

But when I turned to catalogs from Leedy Drums, I discovered that they had made this very pad, including the shape of the support panel, the sound hole and the fiber bottom -- which was actually designed to be a second practice surface. Leedy sold this model as their "Two-Way" Practice Pad.

Drum Archive has Leedy catalogs starting in 1933, and my pad appears in every Leedy catalog from 1933 through 1949. The next catalog on file dates from 1953, by which time the company was called Leedy & Ludwig. Conn owned both companies and merged them by 1950. (In 1955, Leedy was sold to Slingerland Drums, and Bill Ludwig, Sr. bought back the Ludwig Drum Company and merged it with what was left of his own WFL Drum Company. By 1965, Leedy was on the wane, and was completely subsumed into Slingerland the following year.)

Earlier versions of the Two-Way pad appear to have been made with a lighter color of rubber, but since everything was printed in black and white there's no way to confirm what color the rubber was unless I find a much earlier version of the pad. I'd guess that either the white rubber was replaced, or more likely the reddish rubber came into use during World War II because high grades of rubber were being rationed.

This pad still sounds and feels good, though the rebound of the rubber is slightly lessened with age. The fiber bottom is intact and I have tried playing lightly on it with skinny sticks, but I won't make a habit of this. It's similar to the fiber that was also being used for drum cases for decades, though perhaps a little bit thinner and now a bit warped in the center. I'm glad it's still there. Now that I've been able to date this I can determine that it's among the oldest pads in my collection. I can't really estimate its age much beyond a range from between 1933 and roughly 1949, but that still makes this pad between 76 and 92 years old. That it's still in quite playable condition is remarkable, since practice pads of this era were generally among the cheapest items in a catalog and among the most abused by school drummers. When one survives in such good shape, that makes it a real find.

Vintage Corner: 1950s pad from Kitchen & Company, Leeds, UK.

This was a lucky find on eBay. I knew nothing about the design or the original company, but it was so unusual that I knew I wanted to add it to my collection. I contacted the seller and asked if she’d be willing to ship to the US, and she was delighted to calculate the cost.

It arrived today.

Based on how hard the rubber playing surface is, even accounting for its age, I think the pad might have been meant for pipe drummers. I have another pad of similar vintage (made in the US) using similar rubber and it’s only slightly softer than this. The pad itself measures 12 inches across. The arms extend out beyond the diameter of the wood base, but the placement of the softer gum rubber feet attached underneath suggest the pad could be used sitting atop a standard 14” snare drum. Despite its age, the gum rubber feet are still quite soft. I haven’t yet tried this on top of a snare drum, but that’s coming.

The age of the pad is unclear, but some clues suggest at least a rough decade of the 1950s:

— the wood is beautifully finished and stained like good furniture.

— the feet are the pure gum rubber found only on pads from the early 1950s or earlier.

— the badge is made of a thin white plastic, in a shape and size and with black embossed lettering, that is very similar to the badges used on Carradice bicycle saddlebags of the same era. (Carradice switched to cloth badges in the 1960s. I know this because when I worked in the bicycle industry, my shop sold Carradice bags and I’m familiar with that company’s history. I still use a Carradice bag on my bike today.)

I’ve reached out to a Leeds-based newspaper to see if they can help me research the history of R. S. Kitchen & Company. I will keep researching and report back with whatever I can find.

This is really unusual find both for geographical and historical reasons, and I’m thrilled to have found it.

I don’t own a set of pipe sticks (nor do I a know how to play in that style), but here’s a demo anyway.