At the end of the day, a practice pad is a tool that allows the drummer to practice on a quieter surface, so as not to disturb the neighbors.
If this is the primary consideration, everything else fades in importance.
The pad’s construction, age, size and scarcity (real or perceived) matter far less in this context.
The value of a practice pad, then, is not in its design or construction, but in its use.
The pad that is pristine is a pad that hasn’t been properly valued. It hasn’t been used.
So today, I’m celebrating pads that have been valued through use.
A well-used pad is a pad whose owner has dedicated their time and effort to improving their drumming art.
A well-used pad holds drumming history on an individual, even intimate level. It contains the residue of every stroke played on it, and past a certain point, those strokes begin to have an effect on the appearance and feel of the pad.
I rejoice when I see a well-worn practice pad. It tells me its owner is devoted to excelling at drumming, and not distracted by externals, by ephemera. There’s sticks, and a practice surface, and the head, heart and hands. Period.
That feels like a beautiful thing to meditate on as I drum today.
May your drum meditations be as rewarding and precious.
Here in Portland, there’s a drum corps that has been entertaining folks since the 1990s.
The Last Regiment of Syncopated Drummers (LRSD) consists of men and women who play a combination of snare drums, traditional [single] tenor drums, bass drums and cymbals.
Their web site explains that they were founded by a fellow who grew up in Long Beach, California, and after he moved to Portland he decided he wanted to recreate the drum line of his school days.
The style of drumming is called “Syncopated,” and was developed by a school band director in Long Beach in the 1960s. During its heyday, Syncopated Drumming was popular in Long Beach, with several schools assembling drum corps to compete against each other in local parades.
Its popularity did not extend very far outside of Long Beach, back then or today.
During the 1990s and 2000s, a handful of alumni groups were in existence and mostly based in or near Long Beach. At the same time, LRSD was beginning to get noticed in the Portland area and a little beyond, thanks to the hard marketing and instructional work of its founder.
Ultimately, the Portland group would make its way to Long Beach, sort of like going back to the mothership, where it would perform alongside the remaining alumni groups to enthusiastic applause.
Today, this style of “Syncopated” drumming is performed almost exclusively by the LRSD. The Long Beach-based groups had mostly folded just before or during the pandemic. There may be a new alumni group in Long Beach, but it’s small. And women do not play any of the instruments there except cymbals. There is a prevailing attitude by the old guard that the overt physical demands of this kind of drumming are too much for women to handle. (Also remember that in the 1960s, when most of these guys were in middle school, it was incredibly rare to see a woman marching anywhere in a drum line. Old attitudes die hard. And so do old drummers.)
More recently, the founder of LRSD has made successful inroads into the public schools, promoting and teaching this style at any school where he will be welcomed as a volunteer coach. Considering how little arts funding there is in Portland Public Schools these days, some schools are grateful for his work and today there’s a tiny Syncopated Drumline at at least one Portland high school.
I want to be totally stoked about this.
At its best, it gets people excited and happy, and make kids think about learning a musical instrument in school.
Unfortunately, the “style” involved here has no basis in actual Rudimental drumming. None.
If you have studied Rudimental drumming, you know that no small amount of technical study and practice is involved in order to learn and master the twenty-six original rudiments (as codified by the National Association of Rudimental Drummers in 1933. The Percussive Arts Society later expanded this list to forty official rudiments).
Syncopated drumming, if you go by these videos, does not utilize the rudiments. Nor does it emphasize the technical or visual uniformity that is a hallmark of Rudimental drumming. It approximates the traditional grip, but the volume required in this style destroys hands.
Check out this photo. The drummer has taped hands, in order to either facilitate a stronger grip or possibly to provide relief from the strain that may well come from drumming this way for a lengthy period of time.
The bass drummer, above, is putting on heavy cowhide work gloves, in order to better grip the bass drum mallets. That’s because when he plays loud, he’s pulling the mallet two feet away from the drum head in order to achieve the desired volume. A modern, Rudimental drum line doesn’t need to hit the head from that far away.
Note how low the drums are hanging, with the leg rests positioned just above the knee.
Also note that most of the snare drummers are holding their sticks with the tips facing away from the head, presumably to get a bigger, fatter sound from the drums, which are usually older, 15” snares and tenors.
(I learned how to March using a drum on a sling and leg rest. My drum never hung this low. My leg rest was positioned in the middle of the thigh, and marching with it was pretty straightforward. I cannot imagine trying to march with my drum hanging this low.)
Here’s an example of the Long Beach style of “Syncopated” drumming, as demonstrated in this retrospective video that includes a couple shots of LRSD from Portland. As you can see and hear, while there’s certainly some syncopation here, there’s not a single legitimate rudiment being played other than single strokes played at varying volumes.
See, this is where I start to struggle a little with “Syncopated” style.
If this guy, in the name of encouraging kids to play drums, is successfully making inroads into schools and getting kids to engage with drumming this way, he’s potentially doing the students, and proper Rudimental drumming, a disservice. Sure, some of these kids may never want to play any other way, and/or may never play drums after high school; but if this is how they learn to play and they want to lay anywhere else — in a college or community band, in an orchestra or a jazz trio — they will have a lot of bad habits to unlearn before they can learn how to play rudiments from someone else, somewhere else. I’m still believe — and a ton of drum teachers will agree — that the rudiments can be applied in all kinds of musical settings and should continue to be a big part of the foundation of drum instruction. Introducing kids to this kind of drumming is cutting them off at the knees.
On the other hand, there are growing noises about just how boring the rudiments are, and how fewer kids want to get that technically geeky, and short attention spans and blah blah blah. And maybe there’s some truth to that. But there are still thousands of students every school year who take the time to learn and master the rudiments on their way to learning how to play snare drum, drumkit and classical percussion.
If I had not been a music educator for thirty five years, I might not care as much. But I was, and I do.
And I am personally glad that this “style” of drumming hasn’t caught on in many places.
Because if I had to choose between my kid learning this:
And this:
I’d pick the one that’s cleaner and more musical.
Especially if I have a kid who wants to play drums in any capacity beyond high school.
If you grew up playing Long Beach style and you want to call me a snob, that’s fine. I can handle it.
I went to a high school with a merely decent concert band and a horrible marching band, and I still managed to learn proper drum technique. I played a different marching instrument every year — single tenor, cymbals, snare and tritoms (class of 1981) — and I took all of that knowledge and technique with me when I played after high school.
I would want no less for my own child, and I don’t apologize for that.
Why am I writing about this now? Honestly, because I would really like to find some rudimentally trained drummers to play with recreationally, say once a month with a performance or three during the summer. And there just isn’t anything locally to satisfy my desires. There’s a small drum and bugle corp outfit in Milwaukie, OR that’s too far from where I live for me to get there regularly, and there are a few Honk! bands I’ve sat in with, one of whom I played with for the better part of three years. I sat in with the former, where none of the other drummers had any training at all (and most didn’t care if they got to play on two and four). I was the only snare drummer in the latter, and when they wanted to March in more protests and longer parades I couldn’t keep up with them. I also got tired of being the only drummer, with no one else on the horizon. (I like second-line, but it’s not something I’m burning to play.)
Every now and then, while I sit at home and chop on a pad (or, rarely, a drum) and wonder what it wou”d be like to find some other drummers who would want to play together strictly for pleasure. It’s not terribly likely to happen here in Portland, especially when LRSD a is such a draw for the folks who never got exposed to more technical marching percussion. So I admit I’m sometimes a little sad that this kind of drumming is attracting more interest than traditional, technically based Rudimental drumming.
I’m on a particular place on the Timeline, and the likelihood of finding what I want is pretty darned low. So I’ll keep drumming on my own until I can’t anymore, and be grateful for what I have.
I haven't gigged behind a drum kit regularly, or owned a decent drum kit I could play at home, since 1993. That's almost 30 years ago. My goal for assembling this vintage oddball kit, refurbished by Westcraft Drums, was primarily so I'd have a kit at home I could play regularly, even if I had to do so with mufflers to keep the peace there. If things opened up in such a way as to help me find musicians to play with, great. But first I needed to play at home and get my sea legs back.
(You lose a lot in thirty years' time.)
Today, Sweetie gave me the rare gift of time alone in the house.
"Take the mufflers off," she said, "and have fun."
So for two hours, I did just that. Recent upgrades, including a 70's Zildjian Ping Ride and a 90's Zildjian light crash cymbal, made a great-sounding kit sound wonderful.
Of course, I shot video of everything I did, in ten-minute increments. Then, towards the end of my allotted time, I shot one final video, satisfied that all my previous efforts were sufficient to work out the worst of the ugly, forgetful kinks. I hoped I wouldn't suck.
After Sweetie got home, I watched all the videos to learn from them, and saved the best one to share (below).
For not having had this much time behind a kit in so long, I think I did okay. And I have quite a ways to go to get back to a point that will make me happy. That's okay. I like to practice.
When I was having health issues over this past winter, my counselor suggested I look at a meditative practice to help ease some of my symptoms and create a consistent way to begin my day.
I tried sitting still for five minutes, every morning.
That seemed doable. So I upped it to ten.
It got harder, but I hung in there.
I thought about upping it to fifteen, but my last day at ten minutes crashed and burned at around Minute Six. I was fidgeting and squirming and I couldn't sit still anymore.
So I gave up.
One morning after my failure, I was in the studio, fiddling with my sticks and a rubber practice pad (definitely a happy place). I pulled up my dog-eared copy of Stick Control and opened it to the first page.
I set up my metronome at something stupid slow like 70 beats per minute, and forced myself to play the entire first page as instructed: each exercise twenty times without break before moving onto the next one.
So the whole point of Stick Control is that it's meant to be sequential, methodical and very gradual. You don't jump from Page One to Page Ten. (You could, but you won't really benefit as much from just burning through and sight-reading. This is not a sight-reading book.)
By the time I'd gotten through the entire first page at that speed, I noticed two things:
a. My hands felt jerky and klunky at the beginning, and pretty smooth and comfortable by the end of the page.
b. Repeating every figure twenty times before moving on at 70 bpm took me something like 10 whole minutes.
I knew I was onto something.
Every morning after that, after eating breakfast and taking my meds, I went into the studio and played the first page of Stick Control, at gradually increasing tempi with the help of a metronome.
When I was done with that, I decided I wanted to play something else. So I pulled up book number two: 128 Rudimental Street Beats, a collection of drum cadence figures from the 1960s, by John S. Pratt (a master drummer of the time and the head drum instructor at West Point).
These beats are deceptively simple.
I figured that, if I could nail down the snare drum part, I could then get the bass drum and cymbals in my little community band to play steady time, with beats on the quarter-notes. (None of them are experienced drummers and a couple don't read music at all, so I have to introduce new material by ear and repetition.)
What I discovered along the way of selecting two or three street beats I could string together is that these things are actually a lot of fun to play. I memorized a couple and have incorporated them into my morning drumitation.
Finally, if there was time left in my half-hour time limit, I'd pull out
my favorite solo book of all: America's NARD Drum Solos, published in the
1940s and reprinted with fresh plates about 20 years ago.
The NARD Book was compiled by the first members of a new drumming organization formed in 1936, called the National Association of Rudimental Drummers. Their goal was to standardize the 26 basic rudiments (the "drummer's scales") known at the time and to encourage new drummers to adopt these standard rudiments as part of their training.
The original organization lasted until it disbanded in the late 1970s. A new version of NARD was established in 2008 and remains active today. This book, now in its third edition, remains a gold standard for rudimental drummers around the world, and it's the book I learned from in high school. (I still have my old copy!)
I don't always work out of this book every morning -- sometimes I get lost in Stick Control and allow myself to just zone out, because the point of drumitation is to chill out and calm down, not to work up new material all the time. But when I reach for it there's always something more for me to learn.
I learned a couple of these solos for contest in school. Because I couldn't afford private lessons I figured them out myself, and was scolded for taking this approach at contest. "You're a good drummer," the judge told me. "If you're serious about your drumming you'll make finding a private teacher a priority." (This was back in the good old days when it was unseemly to admit that your Dad was looking for work and you were eating tuna casserole for the fourth night that week. So I kept my mouth shut and nodded. Then I went home I continued to play and work out stuff myself. I did not have a private drum teacher on a regular basis until I got to college.)
In my return to rudimental drumming I find that I'm sometimes paying for my lack of private instruction early on. But since my primary goal is to enjoy myself and to use rudimental drumming as part of a meditative practice, I don't worry about that. I'm not currently looking for a private teacher (and I can't afford one, anyway). And sometimes I don't get to the drum pad when I'd planned to so I end up doing it a little later in the day. But drumming on a rubber pad has definitely helped me musically and emotionally, and for that reason I'm grateful I can still play.
I came of drumming age, as it were, in the days when marching drums came with Mylar heads, same as concert drums.
Around the time I had graduated high school, some drum lines were experimenting with a head made of woven Kevlar (the same stuff found in bulletproof vests). Kevlar was the new miracle material; drums heads made from it could be tuned higher and tighter than any Mylar head. As a result, kids in the 1980s began putting Kevlar heads on their regular drums, cranking down the lug bolts, and playing hard enough to break lugs and drum shells.
Of course, this led to the development of high-tension drums, with a free-floating shell and a tubular lug that could withstand the forces of cranked-down Kevlar heads. Eventually it even led to drum tuning wrenches that could handle the torque required to tune a high-tension drum. (I have one of these and I only use it on the aforementioned drums. It's complete overkill for anything else.)
The result changed marching percussion forever. Modern drum corps and marching bands now use Kevlar or Kevlar-Carbon hybrid heads almost exclusively. Today's kids are learning to play on these heads from middle school onward, with the result that it's ruining their concert technique (because we still use Mylar heads in orchestral playing and they require a very different touch) and it's ruining their hands and wrists in the long run (because the tension is so high there's no real "give" and all the shock goes into the hands and wrists, causing fatigue and a high potential for tendon and joint injury in younger players).
I had just missed the Kevlar boat when my marching days ended; The one season I marched in college band the school was broke and still had older drums with Mylar heads. When I began coaching high school drum lines, nearly every one was equipped with high-tension drums and Kevlar heads. I had to adjust my playing approach, and my hands became fatigued early on. Eventually, I learned to play examples on a pad and let the snare players figure out on their drums. (I didn't yet know that high-tension drums could cause long-term issues; I just figured it was because I wasn't used to it.)
When I joined the UBB last year, I scored a used Dynasty Wedge snare and carrier to march with. The drum's sound was tight and crisp -- and completely out of p[lace for the second-line style of playing I was being asked to do. But it weighed far less than a regular high-tension drum, so I hung with it until I came across this Ludwig marching snare drum from the 1970s, around the time I played in high school band. After some fussing and cleaning and little help from the fellas at Revival Drum Shop, The drum has become a serious player. And I love it so much I've put my Wedge drum up for sale.
You'll notice that, with Mylar heads, you really have to draw the sound out of the drum more; you can't just let the sticks bounce happily away, because Mylar heads will require you to do a little of the work, controlling the strokes with your hands and wrists. (This i why, back when I marched, we practiced at night on our pillows before going to sleep in the gym on tour. The pillow made us do ALL the work, and we built up our chops as a result. Today, I'm sure wouldn't be able to pull of half of what I'm doing with my arthritic hands, if I had not worked out this way as a kid.)
You'll also notice a fuller, deeper sound with a lot more space in it. That's because of both the shape of the drum and the lower tension required for Mylar heads, both of which lend more depth and color to the snare drum's sound. (My drum is a 14" x 10" model -- try this in a 15" or 16" snare drum from the 50's and you'll be amazed at the depth and darkness of the tone.)
Because you know what the other benefit of going back is? With a sling and leg rest, this drum weighs far less than my high-tension setup, and my whole body is happier.
Sometimes going retro is the right thing to do. I'll never play Kevlar heads again. Because I don't need to.
