Have we finally reached Peak Pad? Maybe, at least for now.

I've been watching used pad prices rise and fall -- mostly rise -- on the internet for well over a decade now. While I don't claim sole credit for the meteoric rise of used pad prices since 2021, I do believe that the Drum History Podcast interview I gave in July of that year certainly helped to accelerate some interest, especially in vintage pads. Since then, prices for select used practice pads have shot through the roof, most notably the tan Real Feel practice pads of the late 1990s and the first-generation Xymox pads from their pre-laminate days.

While prices on the tan Real Feel pads remain high, especially for those in mint or near-mint condition, I've begun to see some prices for other pads fall.

A pre-laminate Xymox pad that sold two years ago for over $100 is now stalling out at asking prices of $60 to 80.

And with the availability of information on the Internet, general antique dealers have gotten in on the action. An unlabeled pad that's probably an old Slingerland model, which would have sold in 2023 for perhaps $40-50, is currently going for almost $200 on Etsy. The dealer didn't know what she had, and when I reached out to tell her what I thought, she raised her price and listed it elsewhere for even more. It's a nice old pad, but without a label its provenance is impossible to verify. 

Old vintage pads have little or no appeal to most drummers under thirty. They all want the cool marching-specific pads that came on the scene in the late 90s and 2000s. In addition, many newer makes and models of marching-forward pads have since come on the market -- and the market is positively glutted with those pads now, as older drummers graduate from school, age out of drum corps or otherwise leave the activity altogether. With school arts budgets being slashed, music programs being eliminated and the birthrate beginning to fall, fewer kids are getting into drumming today. 

The end result is that there are now more pads available than people who want or need them.

I've watched prices fall on these used makes and models over the last year and a half:

-- Real Feel gray pad, from $30 to $10;
-- Ram Pad, from $70 to less than $40;
-- Xymox laminated "reserve" pads, from $100 to as little as $25;
-- Offworld Invader pads, from $60 to as little as $20

And so it goes.

I've been slowly offloading a number of pads from my collection over the last year and a half, either by selling them, using them as trade-in on stuff I need at local drum shops, or giving them away to students. Technically, I'm sure I've lost a fair amount of money in the process, but as someone who used to own a retail business, I understand that a new thing loses half its value when it leaves the store and will almost never get it back. I've enjoyed the research and testing of these pads. But I'm retired and am approaching the time when I will really have to downsize. So off they go, in dribs and drabs.

As of this writing, some significant practice pad deals are to be found online, especially on eBay. If you've been putting off your search for a cool practice pad, this may be a good time to take a more serious look. (No guarantee how long these items will be available, of course; but they give a good example of the state of the used pad market right now.)

https://www.ebay.com/itm/158325682366 -- Offworld Shuttle pad

https://www.ebay.com/itm/237030291700 -- Pair of Remo pads

https://www.ebay.com/itm/820132643625 -- Vintage Ludwig 1960s aluminum pad

https://www.ebay.com/itm/178494949572 --  vintage WFL 1950s aluminum pad

Tan Real Feel pads are still being offered at over $200 in good condition, but I've sensed that the hype around those pads is lessening over time. So if you have your heart set on one of those, be patient. I think that Peak Pad will eventually come around to these models as well.

I'm not being all doom and gloom here. Drum equipment follows the same retail rise and fall patterns as almost everything else being bought and sold on the market. There may come a time when smarter heads will prevail, schools will once again devote more funding to arts education, and maybe the demand for music equipment will increase again. Meanwhile, more people are DIY-ing their own pads, drums and other gear to save money and/or to express their ingenuity and creativity. It's an interesting time. Pay attention, and as always, happy chopping.

 

Made in China. But at what cost to US makers?

The annual convention of the Percussive Arts Society is happening this weekend in Indianapolis.

PASIC features lots of workshops, performances and a gigantic marketplace where drum companies display their latest releases of new product.

I've never been and likely won't ever make it to a PAS Convention. But I'm confident in saying that at least half of what's new on the market this fall will have been manufactured in China.

(You can read my previous posts here about which companies are making their own products in-house, and which are having them made and branded by juggernaut factories in China. The last time I went into specifics, guys from the two biggest US drum companies went all pitbull on me in the socials and it wore me out.)

That drum companies feel compelled to mass-produce cheap pads overseas, mark up the retail by several hundred percentage points and then massage the socials to hype their pads so that kids will want to buy them, is just a sad reality of today's practice pad market. It has been a sad reality of retail for a long time, and there is little you or I can do about it except to point out when things go sideways.

Case in point:

A well-known marching drum instructor and clinician had a signature pad that was produced for several years by a US company. That company made the pads in small quantities in-house in the US and they were immensely popular among marching drummers. The pad was very well made and retailed for a little over $100, a price deemed a little high by the dictates of the modern practice pad market, but understandable because the pad was made in small batches by the guy who was selling it and there wouldn't be a ton of profit in that. (Apparently, you're not supposed to turn a huge profit if you make what you sell. Who knew?)
It became one of the most popular pads in that maker's catalog.

This fall, that instructor told his small US maker to drop his signature pad. He was signing on with a larger company as one of their official artists, and the new company would be offering his pad going forward. 

The catch? The company this instructor has jumped to doesn't actually make any of its own products. They are all made by other manufacturers and embossed with the company's name and logo. In the case of practice pads, the pads for the new company are all made by Hanflag in China. Hanflag makes pads and rebrands them for a bunch of American-based companies including RCP, Salyers and others. 

When you have one factory making products for three or five different companies, those companies have to come up with ways to differentiate from each other in order to sell more units. If they can't find a way to differentiate, then negotiations must be made for one company to drop a pad design and allow another company to market that design under their name. 

(This has just happened with Salyers and RCP, both of which produced an adjustable snare pad that was made by Hanflag -- which also sells the pad under the brand name HUN in Asian markets. Salyers realized that it could not differentiate enough from RCP, and since RCP brought out the pad in the US market first, they are keeping it in their lineup while Salyers has discontinued it. I wasn't a fly on the wall, but I have friends who work in the industry and they have confirmed that this is basically what happened. Good luck finding a Salyers "Stealth" pad now. They're gone. But you can get the exact same design from RCP, which sells it as their "Active Snare" pad.)

What's so maddening about this is that the production is not at all sustainable; the pads use materials that are redundant and harmful for the environment and the factory has to ship them halfway around the globe to get them into the hands of kids in the US market. None of this is good. What makes it worse is when a design is copied -- or altered just enough to avoid copyright infringement -- so that an artist can shift his allegiance from a small-batch craft maker to a larger mass-producer which doesn't even make their own product.

This conversation has already made its way to the socials, and the new design of the pad mentioned above has just been released at PASIC, so I'm not revealing anything new here.

Exhibit A: the original design, made in the US from sustainable, environmentally sensitive materials. The practice rim went all the way around and the top surface had a laminate laid over recycled rubber. A second surface affixed to the bottom provided a different feel and made the pad versatile.

Exhibit B: The new version of this design, altered enough to avoid legal concerns and mass-produced in China from materials that are very likely not as environmentally friendly. The practice rim goes only halfway around the surface, and there doesn't seem to be a laminate (though I won't be surprised if one is sold separately at a premium price).

This new version of the design retails for around $100. Consider how little it costs to make this mass-produced version and you realize that a great deal more of the money will be pure profit for someone who didn't make the pad. (By the rules of this game, the man who owns the company is the one who deserves all the profit he can get. Because he was smart enough to get someone else to make the product for him at pennies on the dollar.)

I'm sure the new version of this pad design is playable, and will sell well enough to justify the switch. The kids who participate in the modern marching arts are all familiar with this instructor and will certainly want to buy this new pad.

The instructor/clinician is a brilliant drummer, has chops for days and also publishes instruction books that are becoming very popular among marching drummers. (The new company will distribute his books, which is an added bonus for someone who had been self-distributing before.) I have no ill will for the drummer at all and wish him well.

What bothers me is that the marketplace as it is currently designed and managed forces people to make decisions based on economics first, and other considerations fall much farther down the ladder. This isn't one drummer's fault. It is the fault of a kind of capitalism that insists on endless growth for a company's survival.

The kids who will buy this pad won't care. They're kids who just want to chop on an awesome pad designed by an awesome drummer. Never mind how the pad came to be what it is today, or where and how it was made. If you try to educate the kids about this whole scene, they will resent you for harshing their vibe. That's just the way it is.

But the state of the drum marketplace today is just so predatory and wasteful, and that is why I've largely turned my attention to collecting and restoring vintage pads. Every old pad I bring back to life is a pad that won't go to the landfill, and instead can be handed to a young drummer to be enjoyed for many more years. I can live with that, and I can live with never stepping foot into another trade show exhibit hall for the rest of my life.

Chop on.

(NOTE: If you wanted the earlier version of this pad, don't worry! The original US maker of this pad has turned to making custom pads on demand, and if you can live without the signature you can probably get something very close to the original design of the pad above.)

Inflation has led to deflation: Used practice pads

I've researched and collected historic drum practice pads for a long time.
When I began my deep dive, almost no one else I knew was focused on historic drum pads, so that made it easy for me to find old pads at bargain prices. 
But by 2018 or 2019, things had begun to change, as more drum enthusiasts found vintage drums increasingly unaffordable and/or unattainable. Many of them turned their attention to other drum-related collectibles, including practice pads.

Before the Covid pandemic closed down the world, a brisk trade in vintage practice pads was on the rise. Alongside that, some of the big drum manufacturers were investing heavily in marching- specific designs and throwing a lot of marketing at younger drummers who were just coming into their own in the marching arts. 

During the pandemic, the practice pad market grew exponentially, and quickly. Those with an eye towards profit were punching above their weight with new models of marching-focused pads almost every season, while older drummers who had marched in the 1990s were now selling off their own vintage pads to turn a quick buck. 

If you've followed this story, you know that tan RealFeel pads made before D'Addario acquired HQ began fetching prices in the triple digits, Xymox was running the table for a little while and half a dozen other companies were trying to catch up. It was exciting for maybe a decade at most, and then the wheels gradually began to fall off. Xymox had horrible supply issues and atrocious customer service; Drumslinger learned that a one-man shop could never keep up with the likes of Vic Firth and Evans; and Prologix basically sold its soul. Whenever I pointed out the excesses of the practice pad industry, I would get shouted down by guys who worked for those comp[anies or who had helped design some of their most-hyped models.  

The shop bosses don't like canaries in their coal mines. They serve a useful function for the minders, but they also eat away at profits by slowing down production.

Now, in late 2025, the bottom has begun to fall out of the used practice pad market as so many enthusiasts who bought up piles of cool pads woke up and realized that (a) they weren't marching anymore, (b) they had bills to pay and (c) the pads they'd paid an arm and a leg for were now worth less than a quarter of their original value. 

Suddenly, the market was glutted with more pads than drummers and prices fell like 1920s wheat prices. (Millennials, look it up.)

Today, you can find an old tan RealFeel pad for under $100 and sometimes for less than $50 on Facebook Marketplace. HUN's M-12 pad (which was rebranded for RCP as their Active Snare pad) is now selling used for less than $25 used. Evans gray pads, which were never my favorite but which are ubiquitous, are selling for as little as $5.

The only pads which seem to have retained some value are those whose supply was controlled their makers: Evans red Barney Beats pads still fetch a high price due to artificial scarcity caused by Evans decision to make it a limited run. Beetle pads are made in small batches, one at a time, using sustainable practices that would never work for a large-scale manufacturer and those pads still demand competitive prices even in used condition.

While the practice pad market was beginning to capsize, I had turned my attention to making my own pads from scrap and repurposed materials. I was also recovering from two years of Long Covid, and didn't have the money or the energy to keep collecting in the same manner as before. My priorities began to shift. I focused on a handful of older, vintage pads that continued to have lower demand among the younger pad crowd, and for which there was a lot of documentation I could research. But my pad acquisitions really began to fall in 2024.

More recently, I decided to downsize my holdings in general after being approved for Disability. Knowing that I would not get a great return on my investment, especially for the marching-focused pads I still owned, I began to sell these, mostly at a discount. (In some cases I donated them to students so the pads could still see use. I am very happy that somewhere, there are schoolkids practicing on one of my pads.)

My collection at its peak numbered close to 200 pads of all kinds. That was in early 2023. Since making the conscious choice to pare down, I'm now at around fifty pads. I have plans to sell a few more of these and get down to the pads I enjoy chopping on the most, plus a couple of really rare, old pads that I find beautiful and historically interesting.

I had a lot of fun researching and find historic pads. But as I've begun to come out of serious illness and am adjusting to life in retirement, my priorities have shifted. By making more space in my material life I'm being open to whatever comes next. 

So if you're looking for a good drum practice pad, this is a very good time to shop online and at yard sales. I'll post some of my pads soon at the Drum Pad History Group on Facebook, and donate whatever I can't sell to a school. 

I haven't give up on drumming! I still chop a little every day and get a great deal of pleasure from doing so. I'm just getting more focused about what I chop on and why.

Happy drumming.

(Photo: George Stone practice pad, 1920. Back when a practice pad was just a horizontal surface that kept the neighbors off your back, and nothing more.)