Starting to Play

After Pop and Mom had listened to me bang on whatever I could get my hands on around the house and watched me play “air drums” for a couple of years, one day when I was around ten years old Pop brought me home a pair of drumsticks and a Ludwig model #354 gum-rubber practice pad (see catalog photo, above). The sticks were not even a matched pair — one was a Ludwig 2B model, the other was a Slingerland 5B model; they were quite different in weight, diameter, balance, and in shape near the tip — and they both had been well used by the time I took possession of them. As an adult I’ve often wondered where Pop got his hands on such a motley pair of sticks. (Maybe he won them in a poker game.) But when I was ten it didn’t matter — at last I had real drumsticks instead of wooden spoons and cutlery! And I worked out for hours on end with those sticks on that rubber pad, which I placed on an old wooden chair that had a stoutly-padded yellow vinyl seat cushion. With the practice pad as my snare drum that yellow cushion became my tom-toms, while the wooden back of the chair was a set of Zildjian cymbals (well, in my mind’s ear it was).

A little later on I replaced the rubber practice pad with a Remo tunable practice pad, which had the twin advantages of 1) incorporating a real drumhead with a foam disk underneath, so it felt much more like I was playing on a real drum (and so better helped me develop my touch on the instrument), and 2) producing a loud “pop” sound with each stroke, which made the thing way more satisfying to play than the rubber pad, which with each stroke produced a muted “tuh” sound that was barely audible. I swapped out the rubber pad for the Remo pad on my chair/drumset and kept right on playing. That rig had to suffice for the next year or so until I had proven to my folks that my obsession with drums wasn’t simply a passing fancy.

Remo tunable practice pad

When I was 12 Pop took me to a music store (Baxter-Northup, in Sherman Oaks) to look at snare drums. I pointed out the chrome-plated brass-shelled Slingerland “Festival” model snare drum they had — remembering that Pop had always told me that Slingerland were the best drums (probably because he knew that Gene Krupa played Slingerland drums for his entire career). Pop picked up that drum and looked it over, saying "Nah, you don't want that heavy thing" as he put it back down. What he was really telling me was that we just couldn't afford its $95.00 price tag. Even at 12 years old I understood and accepted this.

The Slingerland Festival snare drum — 
a victim of my eyes being bigger than Pop's wallet

Costing only $35.00 — including a stand — the red-sparkle Pearl MIJ* that I did get was a perfectly adequate beginner’s instrument. After eventually replacing the crappy factory drumheads with top-line Remo drumheads it sounded and played decent enough. Not pro-level by any means (its sound was unrefined and had too much ring), but it was good enough for me to get my hands working, and to begin mastering the art of extracting different sounds out of a single drum. I had begun taking drum lessons at a local music store (Adler Music) and loved finally being able to put all this theory into practice on an actual instrument that made actual music instead of practice pads and chair cushions that only made music in my head.

Pearl MIJ snare drum in red-sparkle wrap finish (not my exact drum but similar).

Around this time I discovered that the 6” circular brass lid of my father’s ceramic Amphora tobacco humidor had an indentation inside its handle that was a perfect fit for the angled top of my music stand (if I removed the stand’s music holder). So naturally I conscripted it and used it as a cymbal along with my new snare drum. (Although I’m sure Pop wasn’t too happy about this transgression, I don’t remember him ever reading me the riot act over it. Underneath all the Sturm und Drang, Pop was a real softie.) I also discovered that if I removed the foam disk from my tunable practice pad it sounded like a tom-tom, so I also added that to my rig.

So with my beginner-level red-sparkle snare drum, humidor-lid cymbal, and practice-pad tom-tom I had at last taken the first concrete steps on my way to becoming A Drummer. 

*MIJ = “Made-In-Japan”, a drum collector’s umbrella term covering myriad low-budget drum brands made in Asia during the 1960s rock music boom, differentiating them from the better Japanese brands like Tama, Yamaha and Pearl (different company than MIJ Pearl) that revolutionized the drum industry when they began producing state-of-the-art professional-quality drums and hardware in the early 1970s.

-Hyam R. Sosnow