The pandemic sent everyone indoors and into themselves for several years, including me.
During my time shut up in the house, I dove harder into the things that brought me pleasure, especially drumming and my fascination with practice pads. I’d been into pads for over twenty years, and when I couldn’t work and had too much time on my hands, I spent a lot of it researching the history and development of drum practice pads. I went down all sorts of rabbit holes to find out the history of pads, which led me to the history of pad-making companies, and along the way I spent a bit of the money from the Covid relief checks on some very special and rare pads.
I enjoyed my adventures in research and all that I learned along the way.
I also enjoyed learning from each pad too, playing them gently and educating myself about which materials lent to the more realistic drum feel, and why.
I was also invited to share what I learned with others, by way of an interview on a drum podcast and by joining a Facebook group devoted to drum pad history and development.
But things change, and evolve, over time. During the lockdown, I got Covid and later on, Long Covid. I also developed worsening arthritis and exacerbation of other autoimmune issues. In the end, after three frustrating years of waiting for treatment and results, I had to concede that I wouldn’t recover enough to return to work.
So now, I’m moving into a new phase of life, as a person, a retiree and a musician.
The truth is that I can’t make my living from music anymore, and haven’t been able to for some time. So now I drum for pleasure. I do some easy warmups, then sight-read a little something and then, if my hands don’t hurt too much I might play through some familiar things.
I’ve also found less and less satisfaction following the Facebook Pad group. I was an admin for a time, but found it harder to enforce the goal of history and information-sharing when more and more young, marching-focused drummers joined the group and wanted only to blather on about the new crop of marching-specific pads being sold by ten different companies while being made unsustainably by only one of three different Chinese factories. And the truth is that, aside from a handful of older adults, almost no one else in the group really cares about any of that. They just want the coolest pads that the top DCI drummers are using — and of course, whatever they’re given to chop on by former DCI drummers who’ve made it “big” in the marching arts as instructors and arrangers.
The whole thing just feels like a fake universe, and I suppose I can see that because I’m on the outside looking in. A life on the margins can, after all, give one an interesting vantage point from which to watch what’s going on in the cushy center.
So today, I find myself wondering what it’s all for these days, and whether or not I need to be involved anymore.
I still enjoy drumming, and all that I’ve learned from my research and testing of practice pads. I suppose I’ll still enjoy it for awhile to come. But I’ve definitely shifted my focus. I’m mostly just interested in small-batch, sustainably made pads these days, and not so interested in the gajillions of pads made on the cheap from formaldehyde-laden crap being churned out overseas. Whether or not I’ll ramp up my calling out of that crap remains to be seen. But I’ll definitely continue to hurl interest and love at the craftmade pads being made here in North America, and shine a light on the best ones I find.
My blog posts won’t make a difference in the big picture. A few guys in the mass produced pad universe already resent me, and have made their displeasure known on and off Facebook. I may continue to call out the naked emperors where I find them, until I tire of the game. We’ll see.
Meanwhile, I’ll continue to share here whatever I continue to find interesting and worthwhile.
I just got this from Byron Hall. He was a drum student of mine a million years ago. Now he’s the percussion director at Sherwood MS and HS, and also coaches the University of Oregon drumline.
..::pops a button or two while kvelling::..
The guy on the right is Dan Foster, international Band Director of Mystery who can’t seem to fully retire. He hired me to run his Cleveland HS drumline when Byron was a snare drummer there.
They’re both down in Pasadena right now.
What a lovely surprise to see this morning. Thanks Byron!
The latest from Xymox, the Voldemort of drum practice pad makers, appeared in my feed today.
That’s right. Oblivious to the patent and trademark infringements going on here, Xymox has decided to screw everyone by selling a knockoff of the old tan RealFeel pads from the 1990s.
Same look, same shape, and a nice knockoff of the old HQ logo that reads “OG”.
They must know they’re in violation of something here.
And my guess is that they don’t care.
As soon as this showed up on the drum pad groups, people howled, either in derision (“I cannot believe that Xymox would stoop this low”) or in excitement (“I have to get one!”)
A guy who works at D’Addario, which owns Evans and all the designs and branding from HQ (which originated the design thirty years ago) is popping a vein. He promises that D’Addario will take legal action, if necessary, to stop this thing in its tracks.
I predict that they’ll be too late, and that almost no one in the general pad market today will actually care all that much. They’ll be too late because the pads are already in production and are being sold at the Xymox web site, and any legal action taken will not stop the pads already shipped out. (Nor will said legal action protect the exclusive on the octagonal shape, because you cannot really patent a geometric shape anymore.)
And other than a few hundred people who got ripped off by Xymox, almost no one else will care, especially the Gen Z kids who see this as their chance to get something close enough to the original tan RealFeel pad their dad practiced on thirty years ago.
It gets better. RCP just came out with this delightful little Chinese-made knockoff, which I believe is supposed to hearken back to Offworld’s Shuttle Pad. It’s another crass attempt to play on fake nostalgia, and it’s kind of depressing.
Crying foul now, when nearly every mass-produced pad on the market is made in part or in whole in China, is like bolting the barn door after the horse has fled.
And with that, I know that I have stayed involved for long enough.
There is less and less interest in vintage pads and their history now. The online drum chat groups are populated mostly by folks who are young enough to be my grandchildren, and they want whatever the top 12 DCI drum lines are using. Even if it’s poorly made, even if it’s unsustainable, even if it will wear out in a year or two. They do not care. Fine. Let the modern mass-producers of practice pads chase each other’s tails, and chase the dollars of every high school and college drummer out there. I’ll chop on what I have and be content.
Happy drumming.
(Photo: yours truly, using a fire hydrant as a practice pad.)
You won’t find much info there, or even any contact information.
You can watch this shiny new demo video, offered by a talented snare drummer who marched Bluecoats this summer.
Be advised, though, that said drummer is sponsored by the company, which just means that he got his pad for free. How nice.
If you want one, it will set you back a cool $140 PLUS shipping.
Before you jump at the chance to own one yourself, be advised that the pad is being pre-sold in small batches, and you have to get on the list before you can see a meaningfully detailed photo of the pad.
Also note that we don’t know the manufacturing process at all, only that it’s “made in America.” We don’t know by whom, or where.
In the absence of any more info at the web site, I looked up their business info, and found a listing for Live Edge Drum Company’s incorporation in Florida dated October 11 of this year. That means the company became an LLC just seven weeks ago. It’s possible the pads are being made in Florida, but we have no way to confirm that.
We also don’t know what kind of wood is being used or what the playing surface is made of, because that’s not mentioned either. The grainy-resolution photo at the web site doesn’t help matters.
A clue comes in the video when the drummer tells us that the pad is very lightweight. So we know it’s probably not a dense hardwood because those are mostly fairly heavy. A softer wood could be coated with an epoxy and still weigh less than a fine-grained hardwood. And whatever the playing surface is, it can’t be terribly heavy, either. It may be a very thin layer of clear silicone, which wouldn’t add a lot of weight but still provide some bounce.
So in the end, I reached out to a friend with decades of professional woodworking experience, and I asked him what his impressions were.
He was underwhelmed: “I’m sure it’s a cheap trivet from somewhere we can all access. It’s really covered in plastic or epoxy or something when I zoom in. Bark should not stay on wood naturally like that. Reminds me of the stuff at like Michael’s or other craft stores. If it’s light it’s fast growth birch or balsa.”
I trust this guy and his response makes a lot of sense to me.
UPDATE: just got these, which explains things even better.
As with all things, Your Mileage May Vary.
But I’m not going to get excited about a cheaply-made pad that sells for $140.
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.
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.
