And I want to introduce and welcome everybody to this session that's going to be presented by Jillian Adji today. She's joining us from the Royal College of Midwives and her campaign and her research is really interesting, looking at listening really to the voices of midwives. So I'm going to go ahead and hand the presentation over to you, Jillian. We're going to take questions as we go, but we'll answer them at the end. So feel free to type them in. Hello everybody and happy International Day of the Midwives. I'm absolutely delighted to be doing this presentation for everybody. I've worked for the RCM since 2006. I am a midwife. I was a clinical midwife for nearly 25 years in Sheffield. That's where I practice. And I supported midwives when I joined the Royal College of Midwives as a regional officer. And I now manage a team of regional officers across the north of England. I led on this campaign caring for you for the Royal College of Midwives from 2016 to the end of last year. And it was a really important campaign for us. We knew that our members were complaining of feeling stressed in the workplace, not being able to get a break, etc. Or even have a drink while they were at work because of the increasing workload. So we did feel that we needed to raise the importance of the health and well-being of our members. And I suppose it really started to hit home when we were campaigning for better pay in 2014 when midwives were telling us how bad they were feeling. So the campaign caring for you, as it says there, was to improve off the members health safety and well-being at work so that they were able to provide high quality maternity care for the women and their families. And I think we know that supportive and open workplaces benefit both staff and service users. There's lots of research around if you feel happy and motivated, you feel well supported at work, then you perform much better, you're confident, you're in good health and obviously good health, safety and well-being. Underpins all of that. And clearly an investment in staff is an investment in the care for women and families. We know that the NHS budget is primarily spent on staff, so it's really important that staff are well cared for, but it's also very important that those staff are well and are at work because they are a valuable resource. And I think also when we look back at research into health and well-being over the years, Boorman in 2010, I think it was, he started to look at health, safety and well-being of NHS staff. And actually that work hadn't really gone very far. Simon Stevens, the CEO for NHS England in 2016 said that he really wanted to improve staff health, so actually they are in running this campaign. The RCM were actually pushing on a door that was wide open really as far as the NHS was concerned. The campaign was launched in June 2016, but prior to that for the first six months of 2016, the campaign steering group set about planning the campaign, making sure that we had all of our ducts lined up for the campaign launch. The really important part of the campaign was obviously doing a benchmark about how our members were feeling, and we conducted a survey of RCM members in March 2016, and we asked them a number of questions about their health, safety and well-being at work, how they were feeling, stressed, undermining behaviours, whether they had access to occupational health in their own organisations, and whether they were aware of the organisational policies in their organisations that could help support their health, safety and well-being. We had four themes that we wanted to concentrate on for the campaign, and we wanted to make sure that we tried to cover these themes over the course of the 18 months of the campaign. Although the campaign did come to an end in December 2017, we actually have tried to now embed caring for you into everything that we do at the RCM, and hopefully everything that our members and our activists are doing in workplaces across the UK around looking after each other, looking after the colleagues that we work alongside, and clearly making sure that we look after the women that we're caring for. So the themes were around maternity working conditions, because we knew that staffing levels weren't good. Displants, we knew that our members weren't necessarily being offered a variety of shift patterns to work along, and obviously a big thing was around taking breaks. We've known for a number of years that there's an issue with undermining behaviours in the NHS, and certainly maternity services, we've always been unfortunately in maternity services and obstetrics at the top of the list for undermining behaviours in NHS staff surveys. The RCM had previously done and continues to work with the RCOG on undermining behaviours, and we had previously done work and produced a toolkit for undermining behaviours for both obstetricians and midwives to work together to improve the culture in their workplace. We also knew that we were looking at different ways of working for our members and continuity of carer, which is clearly now post-beta birth, is definitely something that organisations are trying to look at models of continuity of carer now, so that we wanted positive working styles to be a win-win scenario so that we could get some flexibility for our members and that actually those positive working relationships would start to underpin everything that we do. We also, because we represent a lot of our members following serious incidents, so we knew that resilience and coping and post-traumatic stress was definitely a problem for some of our members, and we did have a lot of discussions around how we wanted to make our members more resilient, and we didn't want to make them more resilient just so that they could work harder and they could endure more stress, but actually we've got a very stressful job and it's very difficult at times to handle difficult situations, so we do feel that our members need to be supported when they're going through some very difficult times, and that was the resilience that we were looking at, and I'll come on to a little bit more about that later on. As I said, we know that supportive and open workplaces benefit both staff and users and investment in staff is an investment for the women that we care for, so we launched our campaign and we had the survey results ready, that's a document that you can download from the RTM website, and certainly some of the things that I'm talking about this afternoon is in the survey results for you, and there's also a number of quotes from our members from 2016 about how they were feeling at work, which is really interesting to read and really quite sad as well some cases because of how our members were feeling, so we really really wanted to make some inroads in improving how they were feeling over the course of this campaign. So the second publication, which went along with the launch in 2016, was how are we going to do it then, so as part of the plan we needed to think about, we've done this survey, so actually how now are we going to go about supporting our members in the workplace, and the idea was that we want obviously health, safety and wellbeing should be key to everything that we're doing and that clearly our members should all want to be involved in it, so as a trade union as well as a professional organisation, we organise in our workplaces, so we organise to engage with our members to see what they want and see what we can do for them, we organise them so that we can recruit more members and we organise so we can recruit more activists in organisations because the RCM is the strength of its members and that's what's really important, so it's a two-way communication between our members and the RCM, so this publication supported the campaign and how our health and safety reps and our stewards could work with the heads of midwifery in partnership on the charter commitments, so what we were asking organisations to do was to sign up to this campaign charter and we wanted to make the charter as broad as we possibly could, so things were going to be achievable and we asked our stewards and our heads of midwifery, as I said, to work in partnership to sign up to this charter and the first thing that they needed to do was they needed to develop and implement an action plan, so throughout the course of the campaign our reps and our heads of midwifery were sending us their action plans to look at so that they were telling us the sort of things that they were looking at, whether it was something as simple as ensuring that our members got a break, which seemed to be the smallest thing that made a massive difference to our members as I was going around the country during the campaign. We wanted to make sure that midwives and maternity support workers had access to a variety of shift patterns so that they had the ability to work flexibly and we obviously wanted to promote positive working cultures and a working environment and that had included in taking breaks. Just working on what we'd already done with the RCOG, we had a statement of commitment calling for zero tolerance for undermining behaviours so we wanted to make sure that this was part of the campaign charter, so as organisations signed up for caring for you, they were also signing up for the zero tolerance to bullying behaviours and we as I said that many of our members couldn't access occupational health or they weren't aware of organisational policies for their mental health and physical health safety and wellbeing, so as part of the campaign we hoped that action plans would look at how those policies and working with occupational health that members would have greater access to support in the workplace and clearly nurturing a compassionate and supportive workplace that cares for the midwives and MSWs and students and obstetricians and anybody else that's working alongside midwives is really important so that they can obviously best care for the women and families that they are looking after. So this is what our members were telling us, they were tired, they felt unwell, they were dehydrated because they were doing 12-hour shifts and they weren't having a drink, they felt like they wanted to cry because of the pressures of work and some of them were telling us that they didn't even have a chance to go to the toilet. So some of the results and these are just a few of them so if you wanted to look at more results from the survey that is in the publication that is on our website. So 50% of our members were worried about making a mistake at work because they felt so tired and that was clearly really worrying for us and we had some really strong comments from members about how tired they felt and 71% of our members were telling us that they had come to work in the last three months despite feeling not well enough to perform their duties and some of the quotes that we got back from members around this was that clearly they didn't want to let their colleagues down and they didn't want to let the women down that they were caring for but they were also worried about punitive sickness absence policies and they also felt unfortunately for some of their colleagues that they would be criticised for being off work ill and again this just showed us or highlighted that the lack of empathy towards our colleagues that we were working with and I think some of that was just because maternity services were so intense we knew that we were three and a half thousand midwives short just in England alone of midwives to be able to deliver a safe service so actually the pressure that midwives and maternity support workers were under and still are under is absolutely immense and I think members tend to just come to work look after the patients that they need to look after and they tune out to everything else that maybe is going on around them with their colleagues because actually that's the only way that they could cope and get through a shift and when they went home they had caring responsibilities they they just zoned out when they were at work but actually what we did know is that that they weren't doing a bad job so that women still felt that they were being cared for by the midwives it's just all the pressure was being taken by the by the midwives themselves and clearly it says 84 percent of our midwives said that they had an increased workload in the last six months so this is 15 to 16 remember this these survey results are from March 2016 we know as I said there's a shortage of midwives and there still is which is an issue that we are trying to address and 22 percent of our members the only only 22 percent of our members felt that they had time to build a rapport with service users now this obviously is something that's really quite worrying time to do their job trying to build up those relationships with women that is really really important but we also know from women because we've done a previous survey with women around how they felt about the time that they spent with midwives and actually women were telling us that they could sense that midwives were short of time and they could sense that they probably didn't have enough time to discuss all their issues with them so if they were going to an antenatal clinic to see their midwife and they may have had I don't know half a dozen or 10 questions that they wanted to ask them because they knew the midwife was under pressure and they only had a 10 or 15 minute appointment they had to think they told us that they had to think of the top three questions that they really wanted their midwife to ask so obviously our members and women were saying the same thing is that we haven't got enough time to to build up that rapport and actually women were saying we don't feel we're getting enough time with our our midwives either okay so 48 percent of our members were saying that they felt stressed every day at work almost days and the most common reasons for this which I've already talked about was the workload staff shortages and that feeling of not enough time to do their job and then looking at the the dilemma around breaks 62 percent of our members said that they felt dehydrated at work and actually there is evidence now to show that cognitive function actually decreases when we're dehydrated so if you know I know midwives that seem to wear is a badge of honor that I'm doing a 12 hour shift and I've had I've had one drink and as before I've managed a 12 hour shift and not gone to the toilet it was it was a bit like I remember thinking when I was a nurse and working on a care of the elderly wall thinking gosh my back really ached today I'd worked hard when completely that was the wrong thing to be thinking so what our members were telling us out there in the field when we were out and about they weren't getting their breaks they weren't even having a drink actually this survey absolutely told us I suppose what we already knew and it's not I'm sure it's not just in the UK this problem and I can see some questions the tisha is saying that this is a universal problem for us all and yeah you are legally entitled to a break and I think it's about you need to make sure you're getting a break and I think when we when I went around the country and we were talking about breaks and as I said before the smallest thing having a drink has made the biggest impact so actually if this campaign has done anything and it's about asking your colleagues if they have had a break looking out for each other asking your colleagues can I get you a drink can I bring your cup of tea and can I bring your coffee in that's really really important because we need to look after each other as well as managers looking after us we also need to look after each other I think the other thing is that I went to a service in the Midlands a few weeks ago and it was really really funny because they hadn't signed the caring for you charter but they were going to sign it that day and we'd be looking at an action plan and the midwives in the room before the head of midwifery arrived said we can't have a break and we're not allowed to take drinks into the room well the head of midwifery came along and said she'd never said that and that actually we solved the problem of having a drink really really quickly because the head of midwifery in front of lots of midwives says you can have a drink obviously you need to risk assess that if you're taking a hot drink into a room where there might be little children but yeah absolutely you must have a drink so I think it's really important that we look after each other and it's not just the manager's responsibility to do that yes they have got a responsibility to do it but actually we need to be asking for it and saying we need a drink so I suppose if you dehydrated you're also delaying using the toilet and some criticism I had about this statistic was really quite interesting from a head of midwifery who said if they can't if midwives can't get themselves to the toilet how on earth can they advocate for a woman if they can't get themselves to the toilet well actually being a clinical midwife and being a a label coordinator for a number of years you would set off to go to the toilet but you just need to stop and talk to somebody that needed you quite quickly or you'd need to go into a room you know it's sometimes it's easier said than done and I can absolutely see where you delayed going to the loo because work didn't allow it and the other figure on this slide it's around the number of hours that our members would tell us that they worked unpaid in 2014 when we were doing the pay campaign we asked the same question and our members were saying that they worked three hours unpaid so a year and a bit later they were telling us it was five hours unpaid a week so if you add that up that's a lot of time the NHS is getting out of midwives and maternity support workers I think we also believe that this is an underestimated figure of five hours so actually I'm just going to have a look at the next slide and see what we've got or let me just go back a bit so what did we do when we got these survey results is that we launched the campaign we wanted organisations to sign up for caring for you we publicised when those organisations signed up so we used social media we asked people to take photographs of them signing the charter of any events that they did when they when they signed the charter quite a lot of them had tea parties or pampering sessions for their midwives and support workers and students so our success over the over that 18 month of the campaign is that about 134 organisations signed up during that 18 month period and that's out of a total of 164 that was about 81 percent of organisations across the UK four more organisations have signed up since we actually officially closed the campaign but we're still we're still allowing organisations to sign the charter obviously because it's really we know how important it is so health and safety reps have worked in partnership with HOMS to develop action plans and they're working through those action plans as we speak today what I would say is clearly for the organisations that signed the charter first which was central Manchester I think they may be on the next slide central Manchester signed our charter first and this is then our health and safety rest excuse me I'm the head of midwifery on the 6th of June 2017 now central Manchester already we're doing some work around their staff's health safety and well-being so actually they're really they're two years on with their action plans having signed their charter some organisations have only just signed so they're not as far on with their action plans so that I think when we resurveyed our members at the end of last year obviously there was a mixture of responses and some were further on than others and some organisations hadn't actually signed the campaign charter so this is the work that central Manchester were doing and they were they were working not only with midwives but they were also working across gynecology and neonatology as well and actually central Manchester have resurveyed their staff last year and also resurvey and also surveyed the women that our staff are caring for and that actually that survey showed that women felt well cared for that they felt that the atmosphere and the environment that they were being cared for was a happy happy place to come into they felt that it felt like a supported environment the the number of complaints received from women had gone down fitness absence for our members had improved in central Manchester so I think the work that they're doing has absolutely supported our members there and I view central Manchester because they were the first but there are a number of organisations and best practice that we've got in the in the in the RCM where organisations are really working hard to improve staff health safety and well-being this was in Northampton there was a trust in the East Midlands that again they've signed our charter but actually as an organisation they were already committed to health safety and well-being so as I said at the beginning of the presentation we were pushing on the on an open door as far as this campaign was concerned to a to a certain extent because organisations were buying into it really really easily during the campaign we obviously needed to think of things that would keep the momentum going for the for the campaign so to keep the interest up so we thought of a number of initiatives one of them was a predominant predominant per dot can't even say it predominant a challenge which we actually did in April last year which was the fortnight before idm last year so the if the challenge ended just in idm week so when the challenge ended we also encouraged our members at that point to have a celebration for idm so I had a really brilliant idm celebration last year on the back of the activities that we were doing for caring for you and you can see from this slide our members walked ever so many steps and the winning team was from Urdale and they walked nearly 1.5 million steps and I know that talking to the teams that were walking it was absolutely huge the nearly one in the numbers of teams that took part and what they were getting out of it and they were taking their kids for walks afterwards it wasn't just about how many steps we walk at work and would clearly midwives and support workers walk many many steps at work this was about looking after yourself and being well and doing something outside of work yes we were counting the steps while we were at work but it was really important to actually as a team count those steps outside of work and be more active and also the campaign gave the RCM the ability to organize workplaces as I said before we're a professional association and the trade union and trade unions organize their members and that obviously this campaign encouraged workplaces to get organized it encouraged our members to work together it encouraged us to engage with our members and hear what they were saying we could recruit new members and we could recruit new activists we could it helps retain our members because they think that we're doing something positive to support them and clearly health safety and well-being is something that everybody can sign up to because it's very close to our hearts as I said that the the pedometer challenge led very nicely into IDM 2017 and with that came our caring for UT party so we produced caring for you bunting for IDM we encouraged our workplaces to look after each other and have tea parties to celebrate IDM and caring for you we also used IDM last year to encourage some activity in workplaces around IDM but also use that activity as a springboard to sign the caring for you charter so IDM and caring for you last year went very much hand in hand and actually this year over the past two weeks RCM staff have been out and about across the UK celebrating IDM with our members again this year and many of them have continued the same sort of theme around caring for you and looking after each other sitting down having a cup of tea and talking about middle free and middle free issues and International Day of the Midwives so I think it's been a really really positive IDM for us in the UK this year and I know we couldn't cram in all the IDM events we wanted in the last fortnight so I know that we've got some spilling into next week and the week after as well so that's really really great news for IDM so the other thing that we did is that we encouraged organisations to send us their best practice submissions and we had some we didn't have as many as we wanted so some of these things on this screen was some of the things that they did so for example one organisation in the south west of England decided we needed some emergency toiletries for when staff have had a busy shift and they want to freshen up at work we needed some emergency supplies some healthy snacks for our staff if they've not been able to get a break on really busy shifts because I think we can all understand that although yes we should be getting our breaks that sometimes those shifts that are just the shifts that are that maybe nobody will go get a break so actually the RCM branch made sure that there was healthy snacks fruit and drinks for members to have when they couldn't get to the canteen and we also lots of organisations came up with celebrating midwifery and and their colleagues so they would have employer of the month or and that would be for everybody some people had really silly challenges to sort of improve morale the midwife that talks the most that happens to be me today at the moment and just to get people involved and talking and to just got that sense of we're all in it together and we're working together and actually what couple of the best practices I can share with you I think I've got time is Cardiff wanted a some robust really robust methods to engage with staff and to get feedback from their 300 midwives that they've got working in Cardiff so the RCM reps and human resources would do walk around the unit so their forces they were seen working in partnership and that they would be dealing with concerns of the midwives as they were walking around the unit and be able to talk to them together to deal with their concerns and certainly at the same time promoting staff well-being Cardiff found that morale had increased over the course of the campaign and they held days on resilience they held days around they had appreciation boxes so people could put in I suppose it's like a suggestion box idea so that somebody if they appreciated some somebody something somebody did that they could actually put in a little box that they they were thanking that person lots of people had shout-out boards where they could say Geolagi was really fantastic today she really helped me when I was having a difficult time those sort of things so that they could have shout-out for for staff which which was really really very positive and Cardiff started small they had a staff Facebook page and although they thought they were starting quite small they actually 250 people signed up really really quickly they have coffee and cake and catch-up sessions so again working on this theme that midwives have got to have cake which of course we have but actually using those opportunities to chat and discuss their problems and issues and sometimes that wouldn't necessarily just be work issues that would be personal issues because I think I found with 12 hour shifts that actually you come in you do your job you go home you don't actually know what's happening in anybody's lives so really our members really appreciated this they also in Cardiff supported newly qualified midwives and maternity support workers and just recently they've had a 10 week yoga for beginners for all their maternity staff which has been supported by the trust which has really really increased staff morale and there's quite a few examples of best practice where midwives who maybe did hypnotherapy or massage for women were then given time protected time by their heads of midwifery so paid time within their working week to run sessions for their colleagues so that that's proved really really good I think that was Bristol actually that that did that. County Durham and Darlington set off with a running club and they started off doing a 5k challenge and then they thought crikey we can do this and now they're running half marathons but again it's about teamwork and working together and actually doing something that's not work but actually something that you can do as a team together which increases your morale and how you work more positively when you are at work and one of the other examples we had was from let me think George Elliot and they they did have an issue around staff getting their breaks and they also had no access to hot food so they surveyed the members and they they went to senior managers and they made sure that staff were relieved for their breaks and they set up a budding system for breaks they also made sure that the little hospital cast that was there for patients as well but they they they were able to extend that and put in more tables and chairs so staff could also get a break there as well and this hospital as well they had a seating area outside which is a bit of a not a particularly nice garden area but they managed to get some funding to clear the garden put tables and chairs outside so on nice days so I'll keep my fingers crossed today in George Elliot Trust that there are midwives having their break as we speak in the sunshine in the East Midlands. Okay so we also did a little bit of research during the campaign this wasn't a piece of RCM research but it was some research that Louise Silverton from the RCM advised the Poppy Programme and Professor Helen Spidey from Nottingham University and who's a midwife and Professor Pauline Slade who is a psychologist in Liverpool University had been studying post-traumatic stress in midwives for a number of years and they had got with some interventions to support midwives Liverpool Women's Hospital and signed up to working with Helen and Pauline and we're still waiting for Helen Pauline's report to be published actually I've got on here it's the end of 17 but it's not being published yet but what we do know from Liverpool is that what they try to do is they try to look at interventions would support midwives if they were they've gone through a traumatic experience so a poor outcome that they weren't expecting so there were three steps to this one self-help which is just information leaflets peer support system and then psychological intervention if that was necessary the take from midwives at Liverpool was high trauma focused clinical psychology was actually well received but certainly they felt that more work was needed with the peer support to increase the workshop numbers of the midwives that were going through the workshop so that they could act so that and more midwives could access that midwives did report increased job satisfaction during the period and I know from speaking to Helen Spidey that sickness absence rates were reduced and I believe quite significantly and midwives who had previously reported they wanted to leave the profession were there were few by the end of the work that they do in Liverpool there were fewer midwives reporting that they wanted to leave the profession now I know Helen and Pauline really want to look at this in a much wider scale because sort of working with one unit although they've had really good results they would like to work across a a bigger area which would involve a number of maternity services so at the moment I know that they're looking for funding and submitting funding bids for that so I really do hope that they get some funding because I think it's a really interesting piece of research and again the RCM representing members I know of a number of members that we're representing at the moment through internal mechanisms through internal investigations and NMC investigations how traumatic they are for our members so any support that we can give our members to be able to go through these sort of investigations would be really really good and I suppose this really was the bit that sort of linked into the resilience and coping mechanisms part of the scene for the campaign so the other bit of research that we actually commissioned in 2017 was the work and health and emotional well-being of midwives the well-study and this was commissioned by us and I'm sure maybe some of you may be aware of it it's work that's also been undertaken in Australia New Zealand Sweden and Finland I believe it's maybe or has been also undertaken in Canada and there's also proposals for it to be undertaken in Germany and Ireland this obviously allows for international comparisons to be made despite the variations in national health systems and models of midwifery development the study was carried out by Billy Hunter at the University of Cardiff in collaboration with the Griffin University I know that's due for publication anytime soon nearly 2000 of our members responded to the survey in May June last year this was well above population norms and those other well and those other well countries the RCM now needs to discuss how we're going to use the information that this study has given us to improve staffing with a focus on retention I think increasing support for interventions and giving time off to staff time off to attend the support that we can give them I think I might be running out of time okay so very quickly these are the highlights of the campaign I've already talked about the numbers of organizations that signed signed up we also held a number of events during that 18 months and and clearly those numbers were high this sort of links into being an organizing trade union we had hoped that we'd get more health and safety reps but I think with any trade union I think the numbers of representatives whether they're stewards or whether they're health and safety reps there is a certain amount of churn and so unfortunately we only had a net increase of 10 health and safety reps which was disappointing but it's work in progress and obviously we hope that that will improve and so the follow-up survey that we've just published there were some improvements I would say but maybe not as much as we would have liked again think back to what I said earlier around organizations being at different parts of their caring for you journey as far as their action plans are concerned so what obviously we surveyed all members we have to we know we surveyed all members but there were some improvements you've also got to look at it and the backdrop of the NHS as it is at the moment it's not got any better our members still felt underpaid undervalued so morale was still low and clearly we were three and a half midwife sure these are some of the things that our members were telling us so again some good things and some not so good things not massive dramatic changes but I said you need to consider this in the backdrop of what the NHS is like at the moment this is some of the good things around certainly there's some good things here about taking a break but then some not a very positive comment from a midwife in England below but I think what it has done is it does raise awareness about how we look after each other and how we should be should be looking at each other okay so again not so brilliant results around the sickness absence and improvements so still working progress for us there again this is a little bit around what our members told us in November 17 and this is what we're going to be carrying on doing in 2018 so we're still finding up those organizations it can't be the only step you've got to work on your action plan we will continue to showcase good practice and we work with other trade unions and royal colleges because I know there's a lot of trade unions and royal colleges that are absolutely talking about the same things at the moment so again that door is wide open for us to work with so oh might I just skip okay so what we're doing so we've we've clearly the Secretary of State for Health has announced recently that there's going to be 3000 more midwives student midwives coming into training that is not without its challenges clearly for our HEI colleagues capacity in the workplace etc we're looking at how we support our maternity support workers we will continue to raise concerns around health safety and well-being we want to strengthen literary leadership and we will be making announcements at our annual conference in October around what we're going to do about leadership we really want to support multi-professional working we know that people who train together work better together there's better communications and we're definitely promoting safe maternity care for women and babies and I just want to say this is midwives in Liverpool which is my hometown if anybody hadn't clocked the accent that I've got is together we can make a difference but we have got to work together to do that thank you very much I'm not sure whether we've got any time for any questions thank you so much Jill that was a very inspiring presentation it's amazing the work that RCM has done just in the last year and unfortunately we don't have time for questions


Hi, I'm Anna. Nice to meet you. I'm Gett. How are you? Good to see you. Turn around. Turn around. I'm only getting between you guys. All right, here we go. Ready? Okay. Are we going in? We've got the convo from the taker of fiction. Okay. I can't see you. I'm all right. I'm Gett. How are you? I'm Gett. I'm Gett. How are you? I'm Gett. I'm Gett. How are you? I'm Gett. How are you? I'm Gett. How are you? These are all the folks that work at the White House. I've already delivered the message to Manne. They know that we're not to do anything. Say that again. Say that again We will make sure that we respond to I do Yes Say again No I Think they are Yes Very I don't think there's any civilian casualties. That's another reason why it's a success So look, we're going to get a chance to talk apparently After the fire station so rather than by the way anybody want a coffee Six bucks, but I'll do it anyone Seriously, if anybody here And by the way, do we have all the stuff for the Firefighters yes, we do Streets and coffee all wrapped up radio We actually start selling food to the customers this morning so that we could send We paid you right But I'll be doing it to talk to you all after the fire By the way, we're almost in heaven almost in Scranton


Welcome to the drum history podcast. I am your host Bart van der Zee and today I am joined by Beth Hammond to talk about practice pads Beth. Welcome to the show Hi Bart. Thanks so much for having me here. Absolutely. So you are like on Social media on Facebook on the practice pad page You are just so knowledgeable and passionate about practice pads. I just had to have you on the show to cover this Seemingly on the surface. It's sort of like one of those topics that people might go. Well, you know, whatever but I know there's much much much more to it and It's got a rich a rich history, but before we start what got you so into practice pads? Well, two things first of all, I grew up in a series of apartments Until I moved into our first house at age 12 And so living in apartments you develop a style of walking that my sister and I call apartment feet You have to be conscious of the neighbors below. Yes If you live below people you have to be careful that the sounds you make don't travel up So you have to be apartment sensitive and I didn't get my first real drum until I was 15 So in order for me to learn how to play the drums I had to play everything exclusively on a practice pad and so they're kind of near and dear to my heart when I rekindled my interest in drums and drumming about 10 years ago after after establishing a career as a cantorial soloist in synagogues I Decided, you know, I was getting all these emails from friends. Oh, are you into vintage drums? No, I'm not into vintage drums who could afford that. I can't afford that. Yeah, where would I put them all? You see these things on Facebook these guys on the vintage drum networks that have like entire Wings of their houses devoted to storing vintage drums, and I went that's not my life But I did notice two things. Nobody was really into collecting practice pads What was talking about it and nobody was really into researching the history? And so I decided that it just spoke to me and I said Practice pads. I love my practice pads Sure, and by then I had already been collecting for like 20 years And so I had a number of practice pads and I decided to make that a hobby focus About four or five years ago. I started really getting into it. I also enjoy research I like to look things up and go down rabbit holes and read Strange tangential wings of topics that Seemingly don't connect but if you keep going down the columns and you keep reading you discover. Oh my gosh There's a connection here. Yeah, and so that all of that led to me going practice pads I love practice pads. I'm currently surrounded in my studio by about 150 practice pads. Oh my gosh Wow, but they all but they all fit on shelves and in one room and My vintage drum collecting buddies can't do that. They can't match that. No, it's there's parallels to that to some of the guys I've had on who've talked about Collecting vintage pedals where oh my gosh much more attainable much smaller and they They they basically said that it's it's a similar thing where it's cheaper, you know, you get it for 50 bucks Well, it is I mean and most people don't dig practice pads the way I do so sometimes I luck out and I find something really Interesting and different and you know, there aren't a lot of them around either because it's a really old homemade pad from the 20s Or it's a one-off that some teacher designed and his student made That you're not gonna see those masks produced, but boy, they're interesting And so I go I want to try and acquire that so I can look at it up close and study it and really Understand it. Yeah, just just as an aside. I was also a professional bicycle mechanic and bike shop co-owner for 20 years So I've always had an interest in how things are made and how things work So you're a very mechanically inclined person to begin with and I am obviously very intelligent But also you just have that part of your brain where you want to learn more and you want to push more and I'm Fascinated by how stuff can be made into other stuff Yeah, and that's a lifelong obsession of mine. I started by taking apart a wind-up desk clock when I was Six and by the time I was 12, I had carefully taken my mom's stitch ripper to dismantle a shirt So I could see how it was made. Nobody had told me yet about patterns I've always been curious that way. Yeah, and it's it's clearly paid off And it's good to be curious and practice pads are Like I said, they're seemingly You know, what's the big difference, but as I think we're about to find out from you throughout time there are a lot of differences and I will I posted a question on drumforum.org. I mean, I think I posted it there September 16th 2020 which almost a year ago and and it takes a while to find the right people and then you I kind of like I was sort of watching your page and stuff and I was like, okay, you were definitely the right person here So I have some cool little like pictures from there that I'm going to share on social media later And you yeah shared some pictures with me that I'll post on social media But right one of the pictures you shared at drumforum Yeah, was of a practice pad that I wound up becoming the owner of oh really and that was the white practice pad with the rubber spot a top a clear plexiglass Angle mm-hmm. Yes. Yeah. Yeah, I call it the deco pad I actually wound up buying that pad from the previous owner and I went down some crazy rabbit holes doing research about Why did this pad get made and who made it and what was their background and and what happened to the business of Selling in these pads after he started baking them and it's it's on my drum blog I have a blog called drumlove on blog spot One word drumlove. There's topics there under the deco pad Awesome, so you can find all the history that I dug up on this one pad, but I love doing that kind of research. It's fascinating Yeah, it's very rewarding And and I'll go through all of them later, but I believe that his username or her name was stop sign 70 I think who posted that original one, but I'll go through just because everyone posted a lot of cool pictures and just give But Anyway to jump in to the topic here Let's start at the beginning and learn about the history of practice pads Where does it all begin as far as we can tell, you know? the only evidence that we have as far as anything prior to commercially made mass produced pads is Anecdotal it's somebody writing in a journal or it's somebody telling somebody about what they used and The earliest references in that sort of vein that I was able to find date back to the 1880s Somebody was interviewing a theater drummer of the day and he was warming up By playing his sticks on the leather padded center Cushioned part of a wooden dining room chair. Yep, and that was his practice pad They you know People used stacked pieces of cardboard boxes People stretched leather around a piece of wood and tacked it in place or if they had it They would take an old calf skin head that didn't serve anymore cut it into a smaller size Add a little stuffing like you know wool from a sheep or something and they'd stuff that under there And then they'd stretch it as far as they could and tack that into place with tax and a hammer and all of those things became practice pads My first practice pad on the road wasn't even my remote tunable pad which dates me I started playing drums. I started playing drums with six in 1973 when I was 10 and My pad the standard issue in those days was the little gray remote practice pad that was tunable You could replace the head sure but on the road when I toured one season with a drum core I didn't have room in my bag to bring my practice pad and and everybody said that's okay They make us practice on pillows bring a pillow and we also and at night we'd lay out our sleeping bags in the gym and We'd practice our show on pillows with no rebound Which meant your hands and wrists got really strong because they really got a workout From that from from base, I mean We talked earlier about me having a mechanical bent if you think about what American life was like between 1890 and say 1920 Most people knew how to fix their stuff. They owned and a lot of people, you know America was still a semi rural country That was rapidly industrializing. You had a lot of people out there that knew That knew rudimental rudimentary machinery. They knew some some carpentry They knew how to make stuff. They knew how to fix the things they owned. It was a very different time from the way we live now and so Practice pad and I put this in quotes practice pad Innovations were one-offs. They were one at a time as the individual found something that they needed or figured out that they could use And so you don't really see any standardization of this Until we get into the 20s The very first u.s. Patent awarded for a practice pad device was awarded to a man named I believe Henry Bauer. I could it could be Harry Bauer. I wasn't able to find it But but mr. Bauer submitted a sketch and a description for a patent on a drum practice device in 1919 I believe the patent was awarded in 1920 by 1921 his His pad Had been licensed. He had licensed the manufacturer the quote mass production Of his pad to a fellow in Los Angeles who ran a music store and he licensed this fellow to Mass produce his pads. Now when I say mass produce, I'm saying it with my tongue in my cheek really because mass producing at that For the population of that time mass producing meant you probably made a couple hundred of these Yeah, by most. Yeah, and you sent them out to people. Yeah, so what we have And I sent you pictures of it.  Let me let me put a different Piece of leather or piece of calfskin or whatever on there, right? Right cool that it's interchangeable. I like that It is interchangeable though. I don't I don't see any evidence in the limited documentation That indicates bower was thinking that far ahead Gotcha. Yeah, you know, I think it's a great idea. I'm certainly curious now It's like oh, I got to make another one of these I made a functional replica based on bowers sketch that was submitted for patent. Yeah, um and Because I'm the kind of person that likes to make stuff out of stuff Mine is pretty crude. I don't have a lot of fancy woodworking tools where I live but I was able to get an approximation of a very functional pad and it works. It's sure it looks great. Yeah There you go.  Well, you remember everybody played traditional grip in those days Yes, which I think we'll get to soon with the the practice pads that are more Lifted which obviously we'll get there, but it's pretty cool. And but I I Think it needs to be said that Talking about practice pads and drums in general and like you said where you're just playing, you know, you're your instructor or whatever said play on a pillow yeah 1880s as the first kind of formal practice pad. It makes me think though that guys and girls had to be just literally playing on their knee or their bed or their pillow or their, you know In their cave I'm looking for a flat surface that I can strike with a stick. Yeah, okay. The ground works Yeah, the ground is flat. Look, let's use that um, I I'm not going to dispute it. I I would say that you know before we had a sense of industrialization of drumming and drums People may do with whatever they could cobble together sure in a pre industrialized America in a pre industrialized Europe even I mean I now now understand that most of my research is about practice pads in America because that's the easiest information for me to find through research Yeah, I'm glad you said that there's a wonderful website that you can look up called Google patents and you can use That to locate patents on innovations in almost any field Including drum practice pads. Sure. Yeah, good I'm glad we kind of clarified that because of course we're talking about You know more Quote-unquote modernized practice pads not in like, you know The year 1200 or something. No, no, no, no, no this this Bowers Bowers design was patented in 1920. Absolutely. So that's the first recorded patent awarded specifically for a drum practice pad and Everything just kind of walks forward from there. Yeah, and it's gonna be based partly the part partly the history of commercially made practice pads will over time is going to be based on Scientific innovations that were happening independent of drums and percussion So you have some kind of a calf skin Stretched over an opening or stretched over stuffing and we see that from probably the 1890s Maybe earlier, but I can't find documentation well into the 1920s and early 30s and Sometime in the early 30s. We start to see rubber being used in various grades and blends in compounds gum rubber that is pure gum rubber is very soft and the earliest gum rubber surfaces for pads are Soft almost to the point of becoming very tacky when they're new Once they figured out what they could mix with the gum rubber to create a compound that was more durable But still provided a rebound you started to see Different kinds of rubber in various grades and compounds in the mid to late 30s You really started to see more of that By the time we are getting ready to enter the second world war rubber production had ramped up Yeah, to meet the needs of the military and to meet the needs of industries that were all helping the war effort And so we start to see a real influx of rubber covered practice pads in the early 1940s and Again the rebound and how well the rubber ages over decades is really is really a set of variables I have a rubber pad. That's probably from around 1940 It's labeled the globe and I'm assuming that was the company that made the pad. This pad is really worn. It's been loved It's been used the rubber is still fantastic And I still like to take this pad out and play it once in a while because the rubber is in such great shape Which tells me it's not pure gum rubber It's been something is a little something has been added to it because Would have deteriorated or gum rubber would have either been Soft tacky melted in extreme heat or it would have hardened over time I have a couple of gum a couple of rubber pads Rubber topped pads where the rubber has degraded to the point where it's a little hard And it's almost like playing The purposefully hard service of a modern marching specific pad Hmm not a lot of fun to play but I have it because it serves it feels a historical hole in my collection Yeah, yeah, absolutely. So all through the 40s and into the 50s You see a lot of rubber topped practice pads This is also when you really begin to see the tilt the the tilt to accommodate traditional grip a lot of those pads are happening in the 40s and forward And and really from from I would say roughly late 30s early 40s all the way into the 80s You are seeing practice pads with a built-in tilt either They've been on a built-up wooden platform or their rubber mounted on a solid wooden wedge The way that Premier made their pads in the 60s and 70s And that was because back in the back in the 40s and 50s Hardly anybody was playing matched grip even at a drum kit most drummers of that period We're still playing traditional grip because the first thing you learned were your rudiments Why did you learn rudiments so you could march in your local band or drum core? How did you do that you wore your drum on a sling so there was a natural tilt to the head? Yeah, and I there's some great pictures here on the post in drum forum where I again, I'll share these pictures, but Stop sign 70 username shared where you can tilt or Untilt it's kind of on a rise as opposed to yes a wedged block So as we're going here, I it's obvious that like after 1920 I'm assuming pretty quickly that the big drum companies started to adopt these and put them in their own catalogs because it seems like It became just part of the drumming Culture to have a practice pad to work on it. Why not capitalize on it and put a brand name on it? Well, and really practice pads that didn't really innovate were still included in catalogs Especially starting in the mid to late 20s as a way of just further getting the brand name out there. Sure There's a But if I have a I have a copy of a 19. What is it? I have a copy of a 1911 Ludwig catalog. It's like eight pages. It's little it's bitty and There's a practice pad in there that is basically it looks like somebody took a giant embroidery hoop Stretched a skin over it and stuffed it with batting. Yeah, and said here's a practice pad Wow, okay, and you're selling this mass produced Well, they're selling it mass produced for 35 cents, which probably went a lot further in 1911 than it does today But what you really see is that once we get into the wooden tilted platform era of pads in the 40s and 50s The differences between pads in terms of their feel Aren't that great? I mean, yeah, there are some there are some really beautiful pads from this era One of my one of my favorite pads in my collection dates from about 1948 to 1950 it is a Slingerland Radio King practice pad and it has a radio King cloud badge Specifically made for the pad. Wow. There's no hole in the middle. Huh? It doesn't go around a sound hole So they made a specific cloud badge just for that pad and they only produced that pad from like 1947 until about 1952 it was a very short run and I was lucky enough to score one of these. I gotta tell you the rubber is not so exciting It's just basic black rubber that's been tacked to a wooden platform The cool thing about this is it's a slightly larger pad than you normally see and it's on a stand Okay, it's neat to see that that sort of development because a lot of these I guess would have like a Whatever the threading would be. I don't know the exact size quarter thread or whatever like to fit on do a either a symbol stand or I guess that probably came in later though. Once the threading became more universal in this period There were stands that looked like symbol stands But they were really designed to take hardware Specifically that was nailed or bolted to the underside of a wooden pad and it didn't depend on threading. Hmm Interesting you had yeah, so if you look in catalogs from like 1945 up through the 60s, you'll see this hardware And and you can have the option of having this, you know practice pad X can either have rubber feet on the bottom Yeah, first for use on a tabletop or on a music stand, which is how I was taught to first use them Sure, or they come with hardware that will let you mount them to a specific stand for that pad and You can find these stands Sometimes online on auction sites and for sale sites But without the hardware that attaches it to the pad. It's not terribly useful. So So so some really some really interesting stuff started to happen, you know you had this you had kind of Mild variances of size and look and how well the wood was finished and whether the labels were metal or Decals they were mostly decals because they were cheaper to make. Yeah, and we don't really see any more extreme innovation Until the late 50s and we owe that to Remo Belly In 1957 The first of two revolutionary moments happened that directly affected practice pads later on the first was that in 1957 Remo Belly filed a patent for the first synthetic drumhead, which was made of a new space-age material called mylar and that patent went through revisions and hearings and it was subsequently approved and awarded in 1960 in 1962 the Remo drum company Put out on the market the first tunable practice pad you could tune it I believe the earliest versions could be tuned with a screwdriver They were originally made of a fiber a fibrous wood Compressed wood fiber platform over which was mounted a metal Framework that allowed you to have a tunable mylar head It felt just like playing a regular drum It could be tuned just like playing a regular drum and for that time It was the it was a massively bold innovation and suddenly everybody went. Oh my gosh I have to have one of these pads. They're insane. I gotta have one I gotta have I've gotta have a drum kit made of these pads And so you see you see a practice pad drum kit made up of all these first early tunable Remo pads and it's phenomenal people go drummers go nuts Schools go crazy for this thing because suddenly they don't have to budget having a whole drum set in the band room And it's nice and quiet and you're not getting you know, you don't need to just annoy everyone down the hall That's right. It's quieter than a drum kit. You don't have to go sit in a soundproof room. It's amazing Yeah, I have a few examples in my collection of these earliest Tunable Remo pads. I also have in my collection the pads that predate them which are made of a very lightweight wood and have a pre-stretched pre-tuned Mylar plastic head. I think they attempted to fill the space between the head and the platform With some kind of foam rubber that really disintegrated over time because now I have one of these things and it's foam rubber crumbs crawling floating around inside, but I have Here's another Here's another resource that you could go and check out. That's a really fun rabbit hole for drummers of all ages Remo drums Remo percussion has a timeline a historic timeline from the beginning of their first developments to their Establishment as a company all I take I think it takes you all the way up into the early 2000s Very cool. And and you can see if you look closely enough You can see the changes in the logo that help you identify what year your pad was made I have three Remo practice pads from the pre-tunable era. So like 1958 59 60 and Each of them is from a different year based on the shape and design of the logo on the head This episode is brought to you by dream symbols dream Just sent me over five symbols to try out including the dark matter bliss paper thin crash in 17 18 and 19 inches and Two dark matter bliss crash rides in 20 and 22 and these symbols are awesome. They're dark They're gritty. They're explosive and they're just super unique beyond how they sound though They look like they were buried for a year dug up lit on fire buried lit on fire again And then sold to you they just look so cool And I highly recommend them learn more at dream symbols calm and find them on social media at dream symbols I know it that the the ability to tension and you know having the either the tuning keys or the screws around Mm-hmm was obviously for tuning purposes But I would assume you could also change out that head if yes, you completely because looking back at some of the pictures on the You know drum forum here. Some of those old pre-mylar heads I'm assuming I mean some of them looked like like you said the Internal stuffing whatever it was just as you said turn to dust So I'm sure you'd probably want to stuff that a little more or or pick a different material Early foam rubber was a disaster and it disintegrated quickly when exposed to the UV rays of sunlight Yeah, so that's why you know the leap from wool batting to early foam rubber was not a successful leap Yeah improvements in in rubber and foam rubber had to be developed along the way for that Stuffing to make sense by the time I have my Ludwig pad in 1973 and I still have my pad from 1973 by the way very nice this the foam rubber inside is still intact and still perfectly functional Wow, but they'd improved things by then the The whole point at you know and and practice pad kits tunable practice pads took off and Again because you're dealing with copyright law and patent law Whenever you're dealing with protecting intellectual property rights The law is going to lag behind reality by at least 10 to 20 years Um, absolutely and so that allowed For well, what percentage of this product do I need to change? So I don't violate the previous patent holders design and that's why you see Ludwig tunable pads in the 60s that could only be tuned with a drum key and those things are monsters I have a couple of them in my collection and they are beasts You know, but yes, they were designed to be able to so you could change the head if you wore it out It was a brilliant idea. It is brilliant and this kind of leads me to so Well, you know when I started getting into obviously more of the drum history stuff particularly into this practice pad Stopped about a year ago or whatever do it with that post on drum form. I didn't realize That the kits were so old so I had when I was younger a practice pad kit That I believe I ended up trading when I was younger for like a DW 5000 pedal or something and You know, every I feel like that was more of the modern one that everyone was aware of that little DW one that had the you know Pads kind of just branched off of a stand in the middle. Sure. I did not really later model That's a later model of practice pad kit. Exactly and I didn't realize though looking at the great photos posted by mr. Stop sign 70 There's some just amazing almost art deco Like practice pad kits that look like the fifths kit FIPS the fifths kid Man, that thing is a piece of art. I could put that in the Portland Art Museum and put a plaque next to it And people would pay to just come look at it. It's so beautiful. It's so it's so streamlined. It's so modern for its time I have never seen one in person. I have never tried playing one Yeah, I would love to but but some of these things some of these innovations became design They became works of design art Here's another example of you know, we've had practice pad kits for a long time since the 50s at least Another one was Colotto, which also became regal and regal tip sticks Yeah, sure. So Colotto took the tunable practice pad and he Tweaked it a little bit and then he turned it over and he added a rubber playing surface on the bottom So that you could flip it and have a choice Which we see a lot today. There's like a Vic pad. There's all kinds of pads where you flip them and you get two different Yes feels and and on the kit side of things. There's also another great picture that was shared It's basically a suitcase that opens up and has yes different You know, there's a little pad on the back of the suitcase I I don't know how I feel like people played softer back then without a doubt. Simple stands were thinner Things were just you know, the Tom arms were thinner. I think I feel like people Yeah, before before the Grateful Dead came along You didn't need two drummers because you didn't have guys pumping their amps with their electric guitars to get waves of feedback That that changed everything. Okay, the Grateful Dead had two drum kits because at some point in their musical adventures They needed them. Yeah But you know what's moving a little forward now What you have between the 60s and the 1980s are to what I think and of course This is my uneducated opinion. I did not grow up in the drum industry so all of this is based on research curiosity and a little bit of Deduction on my part between the 60s and the 80s you had two different things going on drum companies were innovating Drum companies were being bought sold merged with each other you know, um and so what you had was a kind of a multi-decade confusion of Oh my god, here's all this stock That's labeled You know, it's labeled George Way. What do we do with it now? Well, we relabel at camp go and we just we we put these things together and sell them Got the heck out of here so we can make room for new stuff that's labeled with our company So you have a lot of that going on Um, you see in the catalogs that there are models of practice pad that were developed in the 50s And they're being held over until 1979 or 1980 Because they're sitting on back stock in a warehouse somewhere that they have to clear out Having owned or small retail business I I understand that, you know back stock in a warehouse is dead stock until you find a way to sell it and make some money So you see a bit of a confusion over those those 25 or 30 years of Hardware from older models being put onto new drum shells just to move it the heck out of here Yeah, you always hear about that too with Ludwig stuff where it was, you know They or slingerly they just reach in and just grab stuff. That's what makes dating things Very difficult, but it just makes sense Well, and dating practice pads is almost impossible during this time because You have the whole wfl Ludwig leady con mess Which you know took a full decade to sort out and in the meantime people have to work people have to eat So they're pulling whatever they can find out of the warehouse slapping it together. Okay. Well that works here Just send that out to a dealer somewhere There's a lot of that going on, but the thing with practice pads is No serial numbers Practice pads today still don't come with serial numbers as a rule So dating them Is very very difficult. You have to use You have to use your resources You have to go to drum forum and find knowledgeable people with pads in their collection that they're willing to Share photographs of you have to go to The the the drum catalog drum archive. Yeah Archive the drum archive Yeah, and that's an amazing resource for anyone who's into drum history Because you can just go through catalog and catalog and catalog and take a look at the progression of A product to try and approximate a good guess on its age I've actually done that with a couple of older drums of mine But with pads, it's a little harder. But what happens is that For my money, I don't see any You know other than a few outliers like kifa pads in the early 2000s You know, I don't see any real innovations in practice pad technology until we get into the mid to late 1990s and early 2000s with the rise In popularity of the marching arts the pageantry arts Because what happens then is that now we're seeing Purpose specific practice pads. You have your regular practice pads for people who play behind a drum kit you have Practice pads that have brush applications that you know, I mean the 10 inch Remo tunable pad which has still which is still being made today Is a perfectly acceptable surface for a kid to practice their first brush strokes If they have nothing else when I was a kid I practiced on an open copy of the yellow pages and I played directly on a page inside the yellow pages Yeah to get that feel to get a little texture Just to get a little texture and I'd set that up on the piano bar at the club where my dad played And when I would come in to play brushes for him because my parents were nightclub musicians I would he would just grab the yellow pages and slap it open here play this and I'd pull out my brushes the song The raven sings he'd hold the microphone for me play one Play one handed chords and I'd sit there and sing along and play for myself It was it was it was a nice parlor trick, but it was also what I had available Well, that's the beauty of drums as you can do that and there's a there's one of steve gad's old tapes where he's Someone is sitting there.  No, but in the meantime, it's steve gad. So he's making art Exactly and you don't want him to stop Right, okay. It's a beautiful thing So we're now we're in we're gonna fast forward a little bit because out of interest of time Now we're in the early 2000s and now a lot of new innovations are happening First you have new approaches to making rubber compounds which Can be fine-tuned so that now you can make very specific recipes to get Different hardnesses different levels of response on a rubber practice pad That's a big innovation right there because when you can fine-tune something That's going to open the door to a purpose-driven pad. Yeah to You have the rise in popularity Of the marching arts because in the late 90s early 2000s Drumcore finds its marketing gold and suddenly all these kids go. Oh, that's cool. I want to do that Right. And so suddenly you have a market that you've been growing that is now clamoring for these kinds of pads in What is it uh 2004? 2005 You have the guy who would go to go on to found ximox But in the beginning before he founded ximox percussion He had patented a design So that you had a rubber pad on top and underneath Curved into the wood you had a recess where you could put Metal ball bearings cover it with a metal panel Adjust the tightness of the screws just so so that the balls would rattle a little bit And suddenly you had a practice pad with fake snare drum sound And the fake snare drum sound was just tight enough to approximate the sound of a highly tensioned Early kevlar headed marching snare. Yeah, and the kids went nuts And as he was beginning to grow this you know ximox percussion. He was also Licensing this patent to other drum companies and they would brand it pro mark ahead Oh my gosh, who else yamaha They were all taking this same design and the pat the licensing the patent sticker is on the metal band on the bottom of the of the pad And it would say oh, you know Patented patent number blah blah blah blah blah and you turn it over and it would just be whatever brand had hired His company to make the pads and brand them for them We're gonna see more and more of this as these purpose specific pads take off But that was a real innovation that was of its time Yeah, and now it's happening all the time where you think of a pad that like that that has that little bit of a sound And it's kind of like a oh duh. Why not just throw it on there and you know, it seems like uh It seems like a no-brainer, but nothing is a no-brainer until someone does it and that's right. That's right Now we all do it And so there was a quote on the drum forum site that I went and found Which really uh, it really speaks to me and and it was deaf moon On the drum forum site. Okay. Yeah Here's the quote drum practice pads began on a padded chair Went through cardboard boxes and then to a piece of plumber's rubber nailed to a board How we got to someone charging a hundred and fifty nine dollars for a rimmed space age material Screwed onto a plastic body is beyond my understanding And yeah, okay. He's talking like a professional curmudgeon, but he has a point He has a point. Um, what's really interesting about my interest in pads is that I'm also a longtime advocate and practitioner of sustainable living Um, because my industry was the bicycle industry I I've I lived for 35 years without owning a car I wrote a bike everywhere. I didn't need a car in portland. We had bikes We have great public transit and I got really tuned into the idea of Making a life more sustainable My interest in practice pads runs counter to that philosophy because Because now there's a practice pad. Oh wait, I need to be able to play these rudiments on a pad But on thursday So now I need a pad for thursdays with these rudiments and you know, somebody is going to go there Okay, somebody is going to go there and it's going to go from the ridiculous to the sublime I recently acquired for my collection Um, I'm going to reach back just a little bit. Sure. HQ real feel pads Those late 90s pads with the tan gum rubber and marching drummers of a certain age that grew up on these pads They're all oh, I'm so sorry. I sold that I want to get that pad again And and suddenly it's like the hot used pad item on ebay You know people are paying like 70 80 90 bucks for a used HQ tan gum rubber pad. It's like really I recently found one that I'm sure had to have been a trade show gimme it's It's three inches across It's adorable. It can be played the tiny pads. That's that's a little bit and you know what? Yeah Sounds good. It sounds great. It feels great. You put it on a rubber surface. It's not going to creep a whole lot. Um But it's you know now We're blowing up the sustainability idea right and left in practice pad manufacture because How many different rubber pads does a person need? Now you have people on drum discussion groups going Is there a meaningful difference between the yellow vader pad and the red vader pad in feel? And and maybe I should have both and and and people People have gotten as fussy about modern practice pads As they have been about drums and heads for decades. Yeah But you get it as a enthusiast. I mean you obviously do and but that's a good point because rubber Does not I mean rubber is coming from places where it's usually not.  I mean, it's it's it's rubber is not an easily renewable resource. No exactly and You're it's great.  So I want to Take a step back here and I ask you about a couple particular pads that I'm seeing well first I want to mention that so I've talked about it on the show before but my grandpa was a drummer and um In the fit I posted a picture on that forum on on the I saw that photo.  He's smoking a pipe And he's practicing but I guarantee and I think he told me when I was younger I guarantee he just took a saw and just cut out a piece of wood and then like some, you know Leather or rubber or whatever on it or glued it down and and uh, he would also talk about Cutting up newspaper and putting that in his bass drum and just all those old school Techniques, but I just want to give me pads. Yeah homemade pads because then it's like It it was different. It's post-war. I mean obviously which was kind of I guess a boom in the 50s But I think that was around 56 or 57 So shout out to my grandpa tom con up who's no longer with us But was a big influence but a couple things here. So looking back at the um drum forum thread The gladstone the billy gladstone kind of vacuum drum pad that sits on the middle of your snare Yeah and converts your snare Will you talk about that a little bit? I mean that that everyone has used one of those at some point in their life Oh, yes. Oh, yes Um, I think if that's what you grew up with then you thought it was great because that's what you had access to Yeah, I think that it I mean if you play on the thin part of that pad You get a snare sound that's a little muted makes your mom happier. Um I think that's not an optimal pad for developing great drum technique I think it's an optimal pad for making your drum quieter Exactly and sometimes you have to make choices as we say with my people for the sake of peace Billy Gladstone was a nice Jewish boy who understood that sometimes you have to make choices for the sake of peace And he probably developed that pad To make mothers happy. That's funny. That's a good way to look at it. I get Billy Gladstone I completely get him and love him and love his contributions to drumming. Absolutely. Yeah, and I get it. Okay, but homemade pads are still a thing um You can still make your own practice pad out of scrap wood and whether or not you want to put a tilt on it is up to you I have I sent you a photo of two Homemade pads that I love. Yes one of them is covered with stickers and it I made it from scrap wood And a cast-off piece of gum rubber from some industrial application It's my very first homemade pad. I've had it for a number of years and I still take it with me What I didn't show you is that the bottom is covered with mouse pad Or stack cup stacking game material with the rubber side out and the fabric side glued to the wood And so now you have a pad with a non-skid surface and cool And it feels wonderful. It sounds wonderful and it at a at nine inches square Or 10 inches square It's it's carry on if it's in my carry on bag and it's it's a pad I take with me places when I have to be quiet the other pad is one that I actually just made last week um Rema tip top are the manufacturers in germany of the most familiar Tire patch tube patches in bicycling Everybody has a reama patch a remit patch kit in their cycling bag They make they make patches for inner tubes of all sizes including tractor tubes and I have A new old stock box of 10 of these things that are each of the patches is like four and a half inches in diameter And you know they're four and a half inches across it's a big round giant reama patch And I glued a couple of these one on top of the other on another piece of scrap wood and you know what? Oh, yeah And it feels great. Um, absolutely and And again, I took some mouse pad material and put a non-skid surface on the bottom That non-skid surface also insulates if you're trying to protect the tabletop so far I have not added a tilt to either of these Um, but I could yeah, I think I think that if you want to add an element of experience To the drumming that you are learning to do It's a great thing to make your own pad. I was just going to say that you're you're You're invested in it. It feels it's like like I am currently totally unrelated to drums, but I am currently staining some pine closet doors For my two-year-olds room and I'm putting three coats on each one. I'm doing poly I had to use pre-stain I feel a connection to these closet doors that I'll always Have You know why it's a beautiful thing Bart? Because it's a throwback to the time when Americans knew how to fix the things they owned exactly And anything that you and I can do today to bring us back into that space Is good for us and it's good for our community and it saves money, which You don't need to go out and you know, you can you can buy a hundred 50 dollar pad a hundred dollar 60 pad, but you can also just make it um, and on the um rima tip top, um Patches I just want to say on that, you know, give a shout out lane Bune and then lee van keef, which is a good lee van cleaf the actor reference. Um Both had a back and forth talking about that on the thread and it's just so cool to see that where he said I have this pad. It's homemade and then lee van keef got on and said this is what it is. It's this old Yes patch. So that inspired me to make my own. Oh, that's so cool. I love that inspired me and I went Oh, he's right. This is a great material to play on This is great. It's the community. Um, it is. Let me ask you, uh, I think one last Bit here that I want to mention is there's some pictures that were shared uh on our with our drum forum friends here that well two more so uh Going back to stop sign 70 who shared a couple pictures of something that I've seen more modern More modern lee, but uh, it's the pad that looks like it can strap onto your leg Which oh sure. I'm I'm seeing very old versions of those with with what appear to be cap skin heads And then it gets newer I didn't know that one back that far One of the earliest versions of that that I saw came from france and it's from the 19 teens Cool and it was it was a homemade pad nice Yeah, because if I can if i'm gonna play on my leg, why should it hurt? I'll put a pad there. Yeah It's like ingenuity. It's just like the okay like exactly like well my legs are really getting red Well, I wonder if I put something there. Boom idea Why why not? I have to say that one of the things I love about being a drummer in terms of being part of the drive the tribe of drum is that I can tell you that this kind of homegrown innovation Probably doesn't happen to the same extent in the tribe of bassoon for example You know what i'm saying? Oh, totally drumming is so hands-on.  Oh mom. That's so cool. I want to do that How many kids are doing that with a double reed instrument? I do not know but but because it's the the the connection between player and instrument is so primal and so direct I think it opens the door to a lot of grassroots innovation and that is a big part of what I love about being a drummer. Yeah Yeah, absolutely. And the last one That I just think is a neat one that i'm just trying to hit on the ones that everyone that i'm seeing pictures of that I think everyone has seen in their life is the The dude posted one saying um in 1966 he used It's basically like the the kind of keystone looking badge where it's just a it's just a big hunker rubber Oh, yeah, David says porto practice pad um, and there's just That big chunk of rubber cut into that kind of keystone shape Those were just That they must have caught on with schools Um, well they did they were they're ubiquitous. First of all, you can still find them everywhere. I think they're like bunnies and they breed Yeah, they came about in the 50s after rubber compounds started getting messed around with and improved for durability Uh, the they're really great for kids because you could just stick it in your pocket It's literally a pocket pad. Yeah, and it's you know, it's and and if if if they've lived in a climate where The climate didn't destroy the the rubber compound. They're still great. I have one. I take it places. It still works Yeah, they're terrific Some of the coolest pads are the ones that were mass produced to the point of being ubiquitous Yeah, for sure. They're popular for a reason. I mean they're They caught on and I just have to read it and you know, it's funny. I'm sure he he wrote it So it's worth, you know, it's out in the world, but he wrote uh, I could shove this pad Uh in the pocket door to my bedroom and my parents couldn't open it While I smoked from my bong and ex exhaled it through a short garden hose. I hung out the window. Oh, yeah I remember reading that and laughing out loud. That is too funny. Thank you See we're drummers. We are natural innovators We will come up with solutions to things people haven't thought about yet. Exactly. That's genius. So, um Well beth I want to um, just like First off, just thank you and we'll talk about we're gonna do a little bonus episode which we'll talk about in a minute But I want to go ahead and just thank everyone on the forum real quick vintage drummer, sweden the dude Uh stop sign 70 Don't forget deaf moon deaf moon. Yes deaf moon and then bethness. That's you. I'm just seeing you. Yeah Lane yoon noble cooly nut uh, no Libos Dave zedle. Thank you, Dave zedle. Um deaf moon jda Frank gdiva L rod 1707 matched gripper gk rk pedal pusher drummer friend, uh, who's a fan of the show csr had some great pictures uh, malt jd And lee van keef and I believe that is it. So thank you to those People for submitting those and it took about a year to get this together But uh, we found the right person with beth um Anything you want to plug now at the end for people to check out that you're working on. Oh my gosh. Well I have two musical hats that I wear one is as a drummer percussionist historian the other is as a An acoustic folk pop singer songwriter And if you'd like I will send you the links to both of those places Please don't you're done so you can include them at when you post this interview. Um Uh, I I I do singer songwriter stuff under my name beth ham and music And I do drum stuff under the blog Uh, the blog spot blog drum love one word cool Awesome. Well, um for everyone listening, uh beth is gonna hang out here for a little bit and we're gonna do a quick episode and Beth doesn't know what I'm gonna ask her but I'm gonna say now So beth what I want to talk about with you is maybe A couple stories about how you've gone about uh, acquiring And cracking down. I knew that was coming. Yes, we're gonna we're gonna pull back the curtain and and destroy the magic Let's do it. Cool. So we'll wrap up here and then we'll jump over to that But for everyone who wants to check out those, um bonus episodes Go to drumhistorypodcast.com click the patreon link Two bucks a month and up if you want early episodes and all that it's a little more But um, then you get the bonus episodes so On that note. Um, oh and we should tell people to join your awesome facebook group So yes, there is a facebook group for people who are super into drumcads. It's called the drum pad history group It is co-moderated by myself and mark beecher And if you want to join you do have to answer the two screening questions One is to tell us a little about yourself as a drummer The other is to agree to our very simple and very basic rules You must answer both of those questions to be admitted to the group Thanks so much mark for having me on your show. This has been A surprising and wonderful delight Yes, you you are great. You're the perfect guest for this a very Nice and sweet person and and shout out to mark beecher who's been on the show and who made me an honorary member of Nard. I'm just super proud of that still. Um, I don't think I could I have the I got to work on my chops more to actually You know follow up with it, but um, thank you to mark For being a member of that group and running it with you. So beth on that note Thanks for being here. This has been a blast. Thank you for having me part. Take good care If you like this podcast find me on social media at drum history And please share rate and leave a review and let me know topics that you would like to learn about in the future Until next time keep on learning


Hello and welcome to Chanakya IS Academy's daily current news analysis. I am Priya Kumari. Today's topic is digital payment system. So before that let's see the points of discussion that why this topic is in news, what is digital payment, what is RBI's digital payment index, key features of digital payment index and its significance. So why this topic is in news? The Reserve Bank of India released a digital payments index to measure the growth in cashless transactions in India. The Reserve Bank of India digital payment index has been constructed with March 2018 as the base period. The DPI for March 2019 and March 2020 work out to 153.47 and 207.84 respectively indicating appreciable growth. What is digital payment? Digital payment is a way of payment which is made through digital modes. In this, payer and paying both use digital modes to send and receive money. This is also called electronic payment. The digital payments in ecosystem is currently dominated by large technology players including Paytm, PhonePay, GooglePay or Gpay and recently launched WhatsApp payments. India's digital payments had shot up to 82% in the current fiscal years, quarterly two along with a 99% jump in value from the year ago period. This fact is according to the Worldline India digital payments report. Now what is RBI's digital payment index? So this index was recommended by a committee headed by Nandan Nilekani on deepening digital payment. The digital payment index will assess and capture the extent of digitalization of payments effectively. RBI's digital payment index will be published on the central bank's website on a semi-annual basis from March 2021 onwards with a lag of four months that is every four months this will be published on banks website. The objective of digital payment index is to reflect accurately the penetration and deepening of various digital payment mode. Now the key features of digital payment index will be based on multiple parameters and they are payment enablers which weigh around 25% payment infrastructure that is on demand side factors which weighs around 10% payment infrastructure supply side factors 15% payment performance 45% and consumer centricity 5%. Now each of these parameters has sub-parameters which in turn consists of various measurable indicators. So what is the significance of this recently launched digital payment index? So this will help in bridging the gap of digital divide. The digital payment index could also lead to reduction in poverty and economic inequality. RBI will also set up a new self-regulatory organization that is SRO which will work to enhance the communication between payment sector stakeholders. This is a composite scoring system and it will allow both consumers and stakeholders to better study the local area developments in infrastructure access demography and acceptance related growth. So that's all for today's topic. Thank you and we will meet you in the next topic. Take care and goodbye. Don't forget to like share and subscribe to our channel and press the bell icon to never miss an update.


We tried our best possible to get by self-banning, but I guess technology decided to do what autocrats sometimes do. You can get past the barrier they have set for you so we couldn't reach it. We used this opportunity now to do what we usually do to close this programme. Today is Tobak. The 1957 Wilings Commission. The 1957 Wilings Commission, also known as the Minority Rights Commission, was established in pain-dependent Nigeria. Its purpose was to investigate and make recommendations regarding the concerns and grievances of minority ethnic groups in the three pre-independence federating regions of the country, as the west, the east and the north. The commission was named after its chairman, Sir Henry Wilings, a British lawyer and administrator. It was formed in response to the growing tensions and conflicts between the different ethnic groups in Nigeria, particularly the majority ethnic groups and the minority ethnic groups who felt marginalized and discriminated against. The Wilings Commission conducted thorough research and consulted with various stakeholders, including minority ethnic groups, government officials and experts on minorities rights, both within and outside the colony. Nigeria was still a colony then. It was actually in 1957. It produced a report in 1958 known as the Wilings Commission report, which contained its findings and recommendations. The report recognized the deep-rooted issues faced by minority ethnic groups and highlighted the need to address their grievances and ensure their rights and representation. It recommended the establishment of an administrative structure and would protect the interests and rights of minority groups, promote the economic and social development and prevent discrimination and marginalization. The Wilings Commission report called for the creation of special areas known as special status areas to provide a framework for the protection and development of minority ethnic groups. These areas would have their own legislative councils and would receive special attention in terms of infrastructure development, education, healthcare and economic opportunities. Although the recommendations of the Wilings Commission were not fully implemented during the colonial period, they had a significant influence on subsequent policies and discussions regarding minority rights and representation in Nigeria. The anti-A.G. political mischief of MPC and N.C.N.C. led the constitutional and democratic creation of the Midwestern region in 1963 by the minorities of Benin and Delta provinces of the Old Western region had the expanse of the agitations of the minorities of the Northern region, particularly the TLC, the DOMAS, the ATC who were rioted several times and of the Eastern region whose protestations originally brought about the establishment of the commission and also against the 10 regions of the unit recommended by the commission. The report also shed light on the importance of inclusivity and equal treatment for ethnic groups, laying the foundation for the recognition and protection of minority rights in the country. In conclusion, it is not still appropriate to ask how the minorities of today's producing units like the DOMAS in Benin, Okun Yoruba in Kogi, river and people in rivers, ATC dedicated the minorities, how they are fearing the minorities within the minority state, how are they fearing? Are the dominant minorities similarly oppressing the smaller minorities in their state and does it on the show for tonight? I am Bola Oba.


Luca asks, alternatives to bank savings accounts with time locks. Let's say I want to dedicate a portion of my savings to Bitcoin, and I want to be absolutely sure I won't be tempted to use them. What would be the best way to do it? I could create a wallet and put the keys in a difficult place to access, like a trusted person I previously instructed, not to give them to me until 2030. Or in a location difficult to access, a safe deposit box in the country I don't visit often. Or maybe I could use a time lock. Is this a good idea? Is it safe from future upgrades? Is it easy to use, or do you have any other suggestions? This is a tricky question, because all of these sounds, both cool and interesting and great ideas, if you have very low self-discipline, and I'm the first to admit that I have pretty low self-discipline. But all of these ideas are really bad for a number of other reasons.  Create a wallet and put the keys in a difficult place to access. This is the old pirate technique for hodling. That's where you take it, you put it in a treasure chest, and you bury it in an island, so you make sure that it's not easy to find. The most likely outcome of this is that you are so successful in burying your treasure that no one ever finds it again. That is the ultimate hodl strategy. It's a very, very altruistic hodl strategy, because what you're saying is, I'm never going to use my bitcoin so as to help the bitcoin value for everybody else increase. Thank you so much for doing that. That's really amazing of you.  The best way to put your bitcoin in a difficult place to access is to use the so-called burner address, in which case the bitcoin is destroyed forever. You don't want to do that. A trusted person, you've previously instructed not to give them to you until 2030. I don't know what kind of people you hang out with, but a person who I consider trusted today, I would probably extend that trust for six months. I would not extend anyone's trust until 2030, probably not even my relatives. There's a lot of time between now and 2030. In 10 or 12 years, people can develop addictions, gambling problems, things like that. The trusted person may either decide to spend it on your behalf, because that's the same as hodling, or when you go to them in 2030, they're like, bitcoin keys? What bitcoin keys? Then you have a bit of a problem. I wouldn't do that either. A location that's difficult to access, like a safe deposit box in a country you don't visit often. Well, yes, but if you don't visit often enough to do some basic auditing and inventory of what's...  So that's a bit of a problem. A time lock. A time lock is probably the best idea, or at least the least broken idea, because it maintains the fundamental properties of control of your keys, while introducing discipline in a programmable money approach. So you can use a time lock, and you can move your money into keys that you control, but in the script, impose a time lock. You can construct time lock transactions with a variety of wallets or manually, and you can do that. Is it a good idea? Honestly, I don't think it is. Because if you do this wrong, and it doesn't take much to do it wrong, one digit off on your time lock, and it could be, oh, they're locked until 2130 instead of 2030. Whoops! And there's no going back from that. The moment you execute that transaction, locked forever. So it's very, very risky. At most, I would do it in short increments and keep renewing it. So I'd be like, okay, I'm going to set it for six months from now very, very carefully. And you probably want to do this with some test transaction first, to make sure you know what you're doing, and you can actually recover it. And then maybe in six months, sweep it into another account to give it another six months. It's kind of like a rolling time lock. Is it safe for future upgrades? Yes, it is, not because I can predict what future upgrades are, but because there's a fundamental design principle in Bitcoin, which is that the developers work very carefully to not invalidate any form of unspent UTXO, no matter how weird it might be, or whether it depended on some kind of weird bug, etc., etc. So every change made is backwards compatible, so you never invalidate unspent coins. And all coins are saved from future upgrades. That's been the principle until now for 10 years. I don't see that changing. It's a fundamental principle, and I think it's going to be safe from future upgrades. It's not easy to use, however. There's a lot of risk in trying this, but good luck to you. I'm looking in the chat, and lots of people are liking the idea of time locks and short-term time locks, but I wouldn't do it with my funds. I haven't done it with my funds. I use various other security mechanisms, including multi-sig, and seeds with passphrases, and secure storage locations, all of which are standard-based techniques for reliable and secure storage of seeds. But I don't use time locks. I would be too scared to use time locks at the moment, for fear of messing it up. Good luck.