A couple of things have happened recently which seemed totally out of place and could be the start of a worrying trend.

The first was a week or so a go. I got in late and turned on to catch some of the Glastonbury festival footage. Supergrass were on and they seemed to be rocking the crowd quite nicely. The camera on Danny Goffey panned round to reveal… a lovely (?) old hexagonal Simmons drum pad to the left of his hi hat.

The following week I went into one of the nicer rehearsal studios in London to see a Simmons kit folded down, but clean and polished. After enquiring as to what it was doing there, I was told it was available for hire and, yes; there had been demand for it.

Amazing! Does this mean that another area of drumming is going retro? Was Danny Goffey using the Simmons pad his tribute to older (dare I say ‘Vintage’?) electronics. Admittedly there was a lot of vintage acoustic gear being used this year, so as a ‘modern’ kit endorser, Danny couldn’t really use a nice vintage Slingerland, so maybe he was just trying to get on the bandwagon. Or (and lets hope it was this), he was being ironic. Hmm… we shall see.

So what next? ‘80’s tribute bands using Mattel Synsonics? For those who don’t know the Synsonics, it was a small plastic box with four rubber pads on the top, made by one of the better known toy manufacturers (yes, that Mattel – Action Man anyone?). The sounds were simple and are available for free on line – I last found them on the Akai MPC website on a link from a Japanese site. To give you some idea about how good they were, Argos sold them. Say no more.

If this is the start of something, all of you with Yamaha ‘Darth Vader’ pads and Roland ‘chopped off triangles’, should get them out, clean them up and proudly use them (or get them on eBay). Dig out your old SDS7s and 9s and stuff the reliability (liability?). Then again, do the sensible thing and sample them, load them into your brain or sampler, use them discreetly and wait for someone to comment on your great drum sound.

There could be something in this though, as by all accounts, our acoustic drums are returning to ‘70’s and ‘80’s specs as our crashes get smaller (see Dave Batemans article on cymbal sizes) and our snares get bigger (I have just bought a 14x8” and it sounds great, and I spoke to someone yesterday who had just bought one too).

So, I am confident that over the next few months I shall stop referring to DTXs and TDs and we shall talk about how to get EPROMS for your SDS7, replacement rubber for your SDS9, and new screens for the MTM…

Maybe not.

John Williams
July 2005