Hello and welcome to the drum history podcast. Today, we are joined by Ben O'Brien-Smith from Sounds Like a Drum. Ben, how are you man? Doing excellent, thanks so much for having me here. Sure, sure, I'm excited to talk to you about the history of drum heads. Why don't you tell us a little bit about how you got into this and your background with drum heads? Absolutely, so I started working with DiDario and company owners of Evans drum heads back in 2010 and worked for them for a period of just over six and a half years. I was a product specialist there and did everything from brand management to product development, to managing their social channels and then actually went on to focus entirely on their digital marketing and social media strategy and community management towards the last year and a half or so that I was there. But I was responsible for developing products like the Evans UV-1, let's see, the Heavyweight, the Rezo 7, a variety of different very specific niche style drum heads that we added to the line over the course of time that I was there. Cool, cool. Well, it sounds like you're the right guy to talk to for this episode. I am so interested in this because I keep hearing the other experts I talk to talking about stretching out calf skin heads and drawing them on the roofs of the factories and when it actually switched to the Mylar and yeah. So I'll let you take it away, man. Let's just go back as far as you can and learn about drum heads. As far as we know, for as long as there have been drums, there have pretty much been some form of membrane being stretched over some sort of object, whether it was a cylindrical object or any kind of like small cavernous, if you will, sort of device in order to create a resonating body. And drums and percussion are, they are the original instrument. They are the first instrument, maybe second to voice, but the first instrument outside of the voice. And so for thousands of years, for potentially quite longer, you had drums that were being played and being made with all different forms of oftentimes animal skin, animal hide being used as the membrane. And that could vary depending on what animals were around. We often tend to think of calf skin and goat skin as the kind of the be all end all and it comes to animal hide, but there were all sorts of different types of animal hides being used, looking way back hundreds and hundreds of years ago, thousands of years ago because of what was around because of the development and the evolution of these animals, that total instruments, that performance total instruments were brought in, in addition to voice. And even then those were also using the guts of those individual animals to be able to create tension strings and all sorts of different types of plucked and strung instruments, things like that. These hides were being stretched, cured and tucked into some form of what is often referred to as a flash hoop. And that's now in modern drums, it's what we refer to as just the hoop or sometimes we'll talk about it as the rim of the drum head that often gets confusing with the rim of the drum itself. And there were all sorts of different methods for this. You had a very traditional tucking process which is not all too dissimilar from how calfskin and other sorts of animal hide drum heads are tucked today where you would get the material wet. It would be incredibly pliable and malleable and you would basically tuck it around a wooden ring. And so now we're really fast forwarding into the, let's see, looking at like the 19th century or so, 18th, 19th century. And you've got drums that are being, of course, made out of wood. You've got wooden hoops that are being made out of basically off-cut sections of these drums. And then you have this membrane being tucked around it. And then there's traditionally, of course, rope-tuned drums seen in different armies. You've got these armed forces marching around with drums that are affected by everything from the temperature and the humidity to, of course, the rain. And you've got armed forces marching through all sorts of different conditions. I mean, looking back at it, it's kind of amazing that so much of that marching process was based around the drums. It was based around that cadence. And yet they would march through any weather and had to deal with kind of whatever the circumstances were. And there wasn't any alternative whatsoever. And so there wasn't a whole lot of change in that over the course of time.  But for the most part, it was seen as, well, this is what we're stuck with right now. I would wonder, this seems like a pretty specialized skill to be the drumhead maker. So I imagine that was like a role that someone would have.  So I imagine that was probably something that was maybe handed down generation to generation, this technique of stretching and getting the calf skin or whatever goat skin and doing that right. So I imagine that would be something like ceremonial that's a pretty special thing for people to know how to do. Yeah, you know, depending on the culture, I think it definitely saw a lot more focus and was given that degree of importance. It's tough to say whether there was ever a dedicated drumhead maker within a given community, thinking about the way that there would be later on, metal smiths and all sorts of families that would focus on one aspect of life. I think that oftentimes you would have those that were responsible for making the drums were also responsible for making the heads themselves. Yeah, that makes sense. That was all part of the process. Rather than being able to kick it off to your buddy who does all the calf skin tucking and things of that nature. Yeah, well, so then fast forwarding to also what you were saying, I'm assuming once you're getting into more of like, there's multiple, there's factories creating drums, albeit maybe it's early on where there are small factories, whoever, but it seems like it probably got more uniform where the drum was the same size. You're not cutting it out of a tree and then using intestines from a goat to keep the head on. So I think as we're going on from what I can tell is things are getting more uniform. They're getting more, the drums are the same sizes. They're the snare for the army. You're gonna have to make 1,000 of them, 10,000 of them. They gotta be uniform. Yeah, and I mean at the same time it was still, if we're talking about like the mid to late 1800s or so where you've got the development and some of the standardization of drum design there, you're still using these natural hide skin drum heads. And one of the beauties of that is that it's still incredibly forgiving. And if you've got a drum that's slightly oversized or a little out of round, which just naturally these had to be, there wasn't a chance that they were in perfect rounds. And it wasn't really necessary. Again, because you didn't have something that was, you didn't have a head that was being designed and manufactured in such a way that it had to be so consistent. In a way that's kind of the challenge that we see with modern drum heads is that because of the escalation of repeatability in manufacturing, there's this challenge of fitting modern drum heads to vintage drums. And we'll talk about that later on. Getting into the late 1800s now into early 1900s, you've got some of these drum companies, they're starting to pop up all over the place. You've got Gresh drums is making some of their own drum heads. Rogers is making some of their own drum heads. There's a variety of these different brands, often who are already responsible for making something within the world of drums and they're tucking heads to be used on these drums. And at that point we're still talking mostly about marching oriented band style drums. But then of course, getting into the 20s, you've got the birth of the drum set. And you've got, and actually it might be the late teens and I should probably check my dates on that one. But as far as I know the development of the drum set in New Orleans and the pairing of all these instruments into something that is a trap set sort of contraption that one person can play. So you don't need to have one person on bass drum, one person on snare drum and all these other disparate elements. The double drumming kind of technique.  Let me add on these blocks. So yeah, that's cool. So people are, it is as you said, standardizing the drum set a little bit more. Well, and at that same time you've got these drums becoming a stationary instrument as opposed to a marching oriented instrument. So now you've got a little bit more control. You're starting to see that there are drums that are being built with lamps inside them in order to help stabilize the tuning of the drum head because you would have this change in temperature or if you're in certain climates, you're kind of at the mercy of mother nature and where things are at with regards to humidity and temperature and all that is affecting the sound of your drums. And of course, little things like incorporating lamps into the drums seems like a strange thing now but it made all the difference to be able to help get some degree of control over them without having to tune them every time something went out. Well, yeah, and Mark Cooper on the previous episode just talked about that where it also adds that little bit of, I was like, I'm kind of confused because at first I thought it was a cool thing where it's like a gimmick factor and then it is honestly for the, he kind of brought to my attention that it is both. But and just to clarify, which is I think it's pretty obvious to everyone but the temperature is affecting, it's like your skin where if it's colder, it affects it one way by tightening the head and if it's warmer, it will then loosen because it is actual flesh from an animal where it is affected by the temperature. So that is absolutely the biggest issue for these guys at that point in time. Yeah, and you can even see similar effects with modern synthetic drum heads if you put them through extremes. And it's tough to tell, sometimes it's the drum head itself, but oftentimes, particularly if it's a wooden drum, the drum will contract and expand a little bit depending on those factors of weather. So you'll notice that if you leave your drums, if you tend to leave them next to a heater or something like that and you move them away, the change in the sound and tuning overall. All right, so now we're kind of in that 20s area. The drum set is happening, there's trap drummers. This is obviously an industry. So drumming, like you mentioned, has gone from being kind of a less uniform kind of thing and now it's turning into a little bit of an industry. We've got Gretch, we've got Rogers, we've got people doing it themselves. So yeah, why don't you take it from there? Yeah, so this is definitely an interesting one. So you've got, all of a sudden now, music is really turning into a form of entertainment at a different level, at least here in the United States. And as the drum industry is starting to grow, there's more and more drummers and more and more people running into these same challenges of dealing with the temperamental nature of, oftentimes at this point, at least for traditional style, drum set drum heads, the vast majority of them are made of some form of calf skin. There's still some goat skin, but for the vast majority really is calf. And so people started to experiment and fast forward a couple of decades to the 40s and World War II and accompanied by the name of DuPont develops this material, this plastic material, this polyester film that they give the brand name of Mylar. And that all of a sudden kick starts things a little bit with regards to the development of synthetic drum heads. And while there really wasn't a usable, successful, like something that could be brought to market and repeatedly produced synthetic drum head until the mid fifties, there were definitely lots of experiments taking place. And there were some small manufacturers that claimed to have developed some form of a weatherproof drum head. And that's really how they were being referred to is people were looking for these weatherproof drum heads, something that could deal with moisture and whether it was in the form of rain or in a more subtle form with humidity and be able to withstand those changes over the course of time. So lots of experimentation taking place with all sorts of different materials, even outside of Mylar. But in the end, it was Mylar that did the trick. And so this is when we start to have much better documentation of specific years and periods of time when these developments were taking place. And amazingly enough, I haven't seen a lot of this published anywhere. So it's kind of interesting that this, a lot of this history is still pretty closely held. But it was Chick Evans, a jazz drummer in New Mexico, Santa Fe, New Mexico, who was starting to have some success in developing some form of a synthetic drum head that could be repeatedly manufactured and over the course of several years, starting in the, what looks like probably early 50s or so, he was able to get it to the point where he could actually put these heads on and they would hold their tune and they wouldn't die out fast, they wouldn't break. They were actually not very susceptible to at least soccer playing. He was a soccer drummer, at least that's how he described himself as a jazz player. And he decided that he was gonna go about manufacturing these and getting them out to the world. And so this was in 1956, he filed for a patent for the first synthetic drum head. And this is what really kicks off a lot of the drama. And so interestingly enough, and not a lot of people know this, but in March, it was a very early March of 1957, Chick sent a message, a letter to Drum City in Hollywood. And this was a drum shop, this was like the famous drum shop in Los Angeles where drummers were buying it all of their gear from. And it happened to be a shop that Remo Belly was working at. And actually, I believe was a co-owner of. And so he sent this message to them with the announcement of the Evans Weatherproof Drumhead Company. And basically pitching, hey, we've done this thing, we think it's amazing, it works really well. Please don't compare this to any of the other inferior products you've heard about that simply don't hold up. We really truly believe that we have something that's going to change the world of drumming. And they offer to sell them a snare side and a snare batter. And pretty soon after, literally within a couple of days, Remo replies and decides he's going to go ahead and buy two of these drum heads. Actually, I think he bought several more of those. I've seen copies of these purchase orders, that's the only reason I can make specific reference to them. But there are lasting purchase orders of the individual drum heads purchase and the total cost of those. So I think Remo ended up purchasing a full set of them, just one each of like a batter, snare head, snare side head, I believe like a 13, a 16 inch tom and then a 20 inch base drum head. And so they tried these out, put them through the testing and then responded back to Remo or responded back to Chick saying, you're right, you've done it. You think that you've actually come across something that is interesting here and this is working. And so these, to give a little bit of context, these drum heads still looked incredibly similar to what we're used to with regards to cask and heads. It was a piece of polyester film, this mylar that was tacked on, like physically tacked on to a wooden hoop. And I believe these were actually hoops made by Ludwig. I know you're forcing them from Ludwig drums and hand tacking them all on basically with like some tax holding these little sections on. And I've held one of these drum heads and it's amazing.  Nothing is being done to mold it. You're basically taking this material and tacking it on to the flesh hoop. And then that's enough for the drum hoop to contact and then apply pressure to. And then it would mold and conform to the bearing edge of the drum. Wow. And so this is where things really get wild. And so Remo makes it clear that they're quite interested in these drum heads and basically makes the pitch to Chick Evans that he's interested in taking on the Evans drum head, the Evans weatherproof drum head company as a distributor. He wants to distribute Evans drum heads. And I wanna make this abundantly clear. This is Remo himself saying he'd like to distribute Evans drum heads via drum city in Hollywood, California. Oh man, I mean, that's crazy to think of these giants now. Oh my gosh. Absolutely. And it kind of contradicts, unfortunately it contradicts a lot of what has been written down in quite a few places with regards to Remo drum heads being the first ever synthetic drum heads. When in all reality, Remo could have been experimenting for sure, but expressed an interest in wanting to even all purchase these drum heads from Evans was interested in distributing them through his shop. And at this point, Chick Evans has applied for a patent on these and is moving forward with the development of the business. And this is a jazz drummer. This guy's not a businessman. He probably doesn't have the business shops that Remo does himself. He's not working at a drum shop. He's not thinking quite that same way. Industry and yeah. What he's working with. Wow. Exactly. And I mean, at the same time now, Remo's a player himself as well, but has this a little bit more business background with this time at Drum City. And so all of a sudden things really kick into high here and it's kind of, it's strange coincidence that we should be having this conversation today because it was literally 62 years ago this week that all of this conversation was going down as there's telegraphs back and forth and there's letters going back and forth between Remo himself and Chick Evans with their interest in meeting up and discussing this. And, you know, Remo wants to visit in person and they're discussing the kind of the capabilities of this industry and what does this look like from a repeat sales standpoint and what about the aesthetic and the capability? You know, at this point, all of these heads are their clear drum heads. So what are we gonna do about brush playing? Well, Chick Evans mentioned that you can spray on a lacquer of sorts onto these heads from a texture standpoint and you might have to reapply over a course of time but that does a sufficient job with brushes. And Remo had also asked about the aesthetic of bass drum heads with a concern about the ability to see straight through and that's again where Chick assured him that you could easily reapply or apply some form of a white lacquer spray or any color in lacquer onto the material itself. Which is obviously a coated head which we're very, very familiar with today. Exactly. And this is a conversation that's taking place like mid-March 1957, you know, before these things are even out really on the market. I mean, he's been selling these one-off to individual players. There's a potential that maybe he'd sold them to a couple of shops but he didn't have any form of distribution or anything like that. No. He was just kind of like casting about hoping that he would be able to find the right people to take on his heads. And he kind of struck old in the fact that Reno himself was very interested in carrying these drum heads and then distributing it to a wide variety of shops throughout California. So he wanted exclusivity on the state of California for distribution. Wow. And it should be noted that 1957 is obviously, it's mentioned as the year that Reno basically, quote unquote, developed the polymer head which would be using the technology that was originally created by DuPont, right? In the World War II, kind of the 40s, that era. So then Chick Evans, he's using that technology and creating this. Then in 57, it seems like it's locked in that Reno is now gonna use this and distribute it. Under the name Reno. So this is when we are actually, there's no mention of Evans as a company, correct? These are being distributed by Reno. Well, it's still Evans Weatherproof Drumhead Company. Oh wow. That was established in 1956. So, and this is unfortunately where again, some of the companies have talked this under the rug. And some of this information is presented clearly on the Evans website. If you look at the history under the Reno website, it establishes that on June 2nd, the Reno Crown logo is established. And Reno Incorporated is created to market supposedly the first successful synthetic drumhead. Now, of course, one could say that that argument is based on your definition of successful. I was gonna say that's your key word right there is successful. Exactly. And so then we're talking about, well, was it because of the distribution channels that they're defining it as successful and their ability to really bring it to mass market? Or, because oftentimes the presentation will be, well, it was the first usable synthetic drumhead, like it was successful and that you could actually play on this thing. But from a performance standpoint, it was really the Evans Weatherproof Drumhead company that their first head as also signed off on by Reno, Belly and self, they determined that was the first viable candidate for something like this. And they purchased even more drumheads. They started purchasing more drumheads from Chick with the intention of selling these and visited him in person. I've seen copies of telegrams going back and forth between them, mostly showing this urgency from Reno himself that he's very interested in getting this conversation going and keeping things moving as quickly as possible. And we're getting towards like the end of March in 1957. And he pays a visit to Chick himself. And as far as I know, this is, again, this is right about 62 years ago to the week that he stops by, books will fly out to Santa Fe, New Mexico and visits Chick in person. And it's tough to tell. There's some rumor about this and some of it's accounted in the letters back and forth. But from what we can tell, apparently Reno visited and kind of made this decision that he was gonna go out and see Chick in person and wasn't quite able to get in touch with him to get all the details together, but he provided information about when his flight was gonna get in and all that and didn't hear a whole lot back from Chick. And he showed up and I guess Chick was apparently hungover from the night before. And there's all sorts of rumors around this, but apparently Chick was not up to speed. He was under the weather to whatever degree. You can look into that as far as you see fit. But to that point, they met, they had a discussion at Chick's home. And apparently it was a very successful meeting between the two, Chick or rather, Reno had inquired about the inventory list of all the stock that they had ready to go. Basically showing that, yes, I'm interested. I wanna see how quickly we can get this thing going. He wants to know about getting those heads out there and shipping them to California as soon as possible. And Chick expresses an interest in potentially visiting California for the percussion fair that's gonna be taking place in April at that point. And they start to make some plans about this. And they're bouncing around the idea back and forth of should I purchase the entire stock or should we go kind of piecemeal and start to float this idea out there? And Reno basically guarantees Chick that I'm not gonna be selling this directly to customers. I'm gonna be selling this to consumers rather. I'm gonna be distributing this to these different shops and wanna make sure that we're getting a fair distribution price and they're really setting up a good business practice here from the start. So everything, all the conversations you would normally have if you were launching a product even today. Then of course, and I know I said it a couple times but this is where things get really, really interesting. And you've got some questions coming about from Reno himself towards the very end of March about, well, can you tell me some more about this patent that you've got application out there for? He wants to know what the patent number is so he can do a little bit of research on this. And then there's another communication. The details of the patent would be unrestricted in terms of competition from other manufacturers so that this patent isn't doing a whole lot to really lock down what they've come up with or what Chick has come up with. And so they're going back and forth a little bit. And now there's question about the fact that since this head has already been sold on the market and there's question about the degree of protection with this patent, now it's a little up in the air. It's like, well, wait a second, which direction is this going to go? And then as we see on the Reno website, they announced that it was June 2nd, 1957 that Reno Incorporated was born and that there was the adoption of this Reno Crown logo. And it's only a couple of weeks after that that a letter from Chick Evans was sent to Reno himself, basically calling out Reno and asking, well, wait a second, I've been informed now that you're producing your own polyester drum heads. And you're ignoring the fact that I have this pending patent and I want to see what you're doing. And basically said, like, I'm going to buy, I would like to buy two of your drum heads, two 14s, a top and a bottom for a snare. And this is where it's just, the drama is really escalating. And there's now Reno Incorporated is, this is separate from Drum City. This is a whole different enterprise and Reno himself has a secretary that's handling some of these communications now. And there's an offer that comes about with regards to essentially paying off Chick Evans to, and it's unfortunately a lot of the information is, it kind of falls off at this point, but was offering to pay him to essentially provide the patent, the pending patent to Reno Incorporated and to kind of walk away and saying that, we don't really have to do this, but we're going to be filing and we would like to take over your patent and we're willing to pay you a sum of money for that patent. And we'd also like to buy all of your existing stock. And so, yeah. And so this is, we're looking at this point, late July, early August, 1957. And that's where at least the communications kind of run dry, but we can assume that something along those lines ended up happening because the patent that had been applied for, and this is information that's available simply through a patent search, the patent that had been applied for was on the 15th of, let's see, the 15th of August in 1957. And so it looks like either Chick was successfully bought off by Reno or Reno was able to somehow side skirt around this patent that was pending with the development of something that was a little bit more robust and that he could move forward with because he also had made the claims that you didn't really have a whole lot of protection over this, other people could be manufacturing something quite similar. And so he developed his own patent and was granted that patent a little less than three years later in 1960. And then things just take off. And I should also mention as part of the request by transferring over this patent was also that he would not engage in the manufacture of drum heads for at least a period of time. I can't quite remember. I would assume it was something like five years or something like that, five, 10 years. So Reno has told Evans to not compete, do not make any drum heads. I'm gonna be taking all of this, the patents and everything. Oh my God, man, that's wild. Yeah, right? This is the information that I haven't found in very many places, but the reason I can back it up is because I've seen these physical letters and I've seen these telegrams. And I hope that that's stuff that's all made publicly available at some point in the future. Yeah, really. But it really is some interesting, some wild history from that point on. Yeah, I mean, well, just to pause for a sec. It makes you feel a little weird because I personally am a Reno guy and I've always loved Reno drum heads and I equate it to this classic company where I honestly thought they were one of the creators of the modern synthetic drum head. And I don't know why. This is again just something I didn't know. I thought Evans would have just come out of the woodwork in the 70s or 80s and just been a company that was like, you know, here's a, it's similar to I'm a Zildjian guy. I thought Sabian just kind of popped up out of nowhere because they wanted to compete with Zildjian. Then you find out about Robert Zildjian starting Sabian because of the dispute with the whole, you know, they both had the family secret. Man, I don't know how to feel right now. I feel weird. It's like odd. That's just a lot of interesting history that is not widely known. Now, do you think this is something that Reno doesn't want people to know? I mean, are they like, let's keep this under the rug because we're obviously, it looks, it makes us look like the bad guy because we're, I mean, they didn't technically steal, well, I guess they kind of did steal the intellectual property and just kind of circumvented the patent process, right? I mean, can you help clarify that, the legality? Yeah, yeah, I mean, what it ends up sounding like is exactly that, that unfortunately, due to the presentation of this information and the product itself from Chick Evans to Reno Belly and the team at Drum City, that they took that and expressed an interest early on in distributing these and dug in and started to do some of the due diligence and discovered that the patent that was pending did not have, it wasn't exactly a bullet proof. It didn't have the degree of protection that they thought that something like this should have. And I can only imagine, of course, this is just peer speculation on my part, but connecting the dots seems like in some room, there was some conversation of, well, we can do this. And we probably have better resources to do it than this drummer in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Wow. And so, and truth be told, they did. And all it takes is a quick look at the developments that took place, even within only 12 to 18 months after that patent, or yeah, after filing that patent, after Reno himself filed the patent, that they were developing an aluminum channel flesh hoop with a poured resin that was holding the film in rather than having to manually tack on this material on the outside. So they really were taking this ball and going all the way into the end zone. And it was very impressive work in the development. Again, none of this should, in any way, diminish the value of all of the different things that Reno did in developing drum heads and really furthering that technology. But it's very interesting to see how it all came about. Yeah, it's the reverse engineering. Again, I think everyone might feel the same way of like, well, yeah, they made it a lot better, but then they kind of plowed over the little guy, which would be Chick Evans at this point. And I'm now, I guess, just kind of moving it forward here, Evans at that point was a company. So they were then making drum heads simultaneously, correct? They didn't just say, oh, well, we lost the patent. Okay, we're done. Cause obviously Evans today is a massive, huge company. So how did that go? Well, and that's where some of the information starts to fall off. And it's tough to say how exactly all of it came about, but at a certain point in time, Chick Evans sold the Evans drum head company brand to a man by the name of Bob Beals. And that was in Dodge City, Kansas. That's where Evans was moved to. And from as much as I can tell, that's where the development of the next generation of Evans drum heads took place. And unfortunately, Bob passed away in 2010. And some of the information that he has is documented, but there's not a ton out there. Not certainly not to the degree of the letters that I'd shared and the information from those communications between Chick Evans and Rima himself. Wow. Okay. You know, I do believe, let's see. I think it was in, it was like either the late 50s or the early 60s that Bob became involved with Chick Evans and working on the drum heads and taking, I don't know if he officially took over at a certain point early on there or if they were working a little bit more side by side. But Bob at that time had a shock as far as I know. And he was doing, I'm trying to remember what the deal was there, but he was trying to demonstrate, Chick was trying to demonstrate the value of this drum head and he was kind of pitching it to him and went so far as to actually pouring water on the drum head as part of this pitch. Wow. He was a really impressed Bob. He was blown away by these capabilities and they started some degree of an alliance and I want to say that it was the end of the 50s, most likely 1959, soon after this drama had taken place with Rima, that he purchased the Evans drum head company from Chick Evans. Gotcha. And started to refine the design a little bit and develop things and started to come up with the first different designs of drum heads that there would be under the Evans name. To make it more, again, it sounds like Chick was more of a dreamer and a drummer versus like a businessman, which ultimately to his kind of somewhat downfall, Rima was a businessman. Sounds like businessman first, drummer second. Wow, man, that's some wild stuff that I had no idea anything about. So I'm like blown away right now. And they're obviously not the first, they're not the only drum heads in existence, but I think obviously at that point that was what was happening. So why don't we fast forward a little bit? And I mean, so that seems like that's when things changed. That was the advent of modern drum heads where minus some, I'm sure some technical things, it seems to be what we're using today, like the Weather King and all these particular lines. So did anything change after that? Well, there were little changes over the course of time with regards to the consistency of production, especially when it came to the hoops themselves. But if we're looking at immediate developments soon after Rima was awarded that patent, they start to release some different variations on drum heads. The ambassador, as we know it, came out in 1959. So that came pretty soon afterwards. The original ambassador, especially for Rima fans that are familiar with the original ambassador that's now referred to as the Vintage Ambassador, they brought it back, that was a two-ply drum head. And a year later, they decided that they could produce this as a single ply of 10 mil. A lot of this came from the availability of that film. In most cases, they weren't having film custom made for them. They were acquiring this stuff and it was already being made for other industries. In the case of Mylar and Development early on, it was for the aeronautics industry in World War II. I was just gonna say, man, I think I thought I remember reading, didn't they use it as in the film for reconnaissance cameras or something like that? All sorts of different elements.  Not just in packaging, but also it's the material that's incorporated in the screens. It's a film that's used to shade windows, like all sorts of things. In some cases, it is literally the same film that drum heads are being made out of. The great example of this is the film that's used for X-rays. That's oftentimes a seven and a half mil black film. That is very similar to a lot of the other seven and a half mil black films that we see on the market being used in making drum heads. But yeah, so when it came to developments that were taking place shortly after that, Remo was starting to launch different variations on these drum heads.  If you're not familiar with this one, it was basically a 10 foot tall, I believe like 40, 42 inch deep bass drum that was made for Disneyland. Oh, that's cool, I didn't know that. Yeah, it was used in parades and all sorts of things, starting in 1961. And I believe it still holds a Guinness Book of World Records record for the largest bass drum. Wow, that's something. Yeah. And so of course, over the course of this time, they're experimenting with all sorts of different types of materials. But what do we know takes place just about three years after that moment in 1961? Of course, the Beatles perform on the Ed Sullivan show. Yes. And this really propels a small handful of brands into the public eye. And so now you've got Ludwig is way out there. Gretz guitars are all of a sudden quite visible to the point where Gretz had had to move their manufacturing around and start segregating their business with the manufacturing of drums separate from guitars because they simply didn't have the space in Brooklyn to do it all. And so with Remo, they're moving to new locations, they're developing new manufacturing facilities and things are going gangbusters. They're starting to develop different materials like the sparkle tone drum heads, if you ever saw those with the kind of like neared finish similar to what we were seeing and all sorts of different patterns. You'd see like these green and red sparkles and I think they have blue sparkle as well. And then at the same time, Evans was starting to do swirls that they were getting their feet underneath them and manufacturing these heads again and you'll see some photos. In fact, I've seen some of these heads in person of these different swirl materials that again have a very similar polyester film design to them but they've got this kind of appearance almost like a holographic kind of thing where if you change the angle all of a sudden the swirl changes dramatically and you get a really interesting retro kind of vibe out of those. Yeah, which is almost kind of coming full circle to today where you get like the color tone and it's which to a lot of people, it's probably like, oh, that's a new technology but now that's been going on for 50 years now. Yeah, it's amazing. At that point, I mean, you've got things like fiber skin being developed in 1975. And even prior to that in the, I believe it's 1970, 1971 was the development of the Evans hydraulic heads. And of course that was one of those happy accidents of some oil getting between two pieces of material for a two ply head and then discovering that it's actually changes the sound in such a dramatic way. And so Remo answered the hydraulic with the development of the pinstripe head using a very similar concept but masking it off only to the outside, recognizing that way they would be able to fine tune some of the overtone control. And that's really when you start to have the development of this concept of not just aesthetic variation in drum heads but in the construction for the pure state of altering sound and controlling the acoustic sound of the drum head itself. Yeah, cause in the 70s you kind of have that, I always equated to like Steve Miller band but that like very dampened T-shirts on the Tom kind of like dead sound concert Tom kind of thing. So why not play on it and actually create it which is amazing. So that, I mean, in as far as I can tell that seems to be like, I didn't know the hydraulic heads. I didn't know that existed in the 70s. I mean, that's something all of these things, I guess you equate it to when you first discover it. And I think to myself, oh, that must have been in like the 90s but that's the key takeaway from all of this for me is like, wow, this technology has just been so, it's just been happening for so long and you kind of take that for granted. Yeah, oh yeah. I mean, it's incredible how long this stuff has really been around for. And it's interesting how some of this information is very readily available on some of it, not so much. You know, Lima actually has a fantastic timeline on their website that showcases a lot of these developments on their end which is pretty impressive thing to go through. Definitely worth it if you're ever looking to go through and see all the different varieties of heads and really when they came out, it's quite well documented on their site. I kind of wish that Evans had something similar at this point. Yeah, that would help clarify a little bit of the confusion on who did what and who discovered what and patents and all that stuff. And yeah, and now we're lucky because today we live in a time where we can get any kind of drum head we want which there's obviously more companies than Evans and Remo, Aquaria and obviously being one. I'm a big fan of the Superkick 2 base drum head which I love and obviously they're regular heads and there's more brands beyond that. But yeah, and I think this is a perfect opportunity unless there's more things that you'd like to fill in here but I think once you get the drum heads actually knowing how to tune them and how to treat them correctly and even putting them on. We all know about the star formation but if you get your first drum head you can, we've all been there where we screw up a $50 base drum head because we tune it in the wrong way the first time. But Ben, why don't you tell people a little bit about what you're doing? Sounds like a drum and I think people would love it. They'll know how to actually use their drum heads then. Yeah, so of course from working for a drum head company and developing drum heads for them and really experimenting with creating certain sounds for drummers through the development of these products. I got incredibly fascinated with the world of tuning and I have to, I definitely have to give a serious shout out to Bob Gatz and for all of the information he passed along to me. Bob was involved with developing a lot of the early drum heads with Bob Beals. This is before the Darian company had purchased the Evans drum heads company in 1995. There were all sorts of new developments with the addition of these overtone control rings around the outside. That was something like what we know from the Power Stroke series of drum heads. That was something that Bob Gatz and then Bob Beals developed with the Evans EQ series. And coming to where we're at now, a good friend of mine and I, he's a guy by the name of Cody Ron who's a blue collar drummer in New York City. He's a full-time player and recording drummer here in New York. Just a couple weeks ago, we hit our one year anniversary and it was 52 episodes. Without fail, we've released a brand new episode every Tuesday for a year and we just kick things off for season two and have absolutely no intention of stopping. Nice, man. That's a huge time commitment and I can speak from experience of it. It's always after the first couple months, it's like, it never stops being fun, but it's like, I mean, you gotta stick with it. The initial kind of like honeymoon phase where as often you go, holy crap, I gotta get another episode out or another video. So, no, I highly recommend people go to it. If you go to soundslikeadrum.com, it'll redirect you automatically to the YouTube page and you can find them on Instagram. You can find them everywhere. So it's just full of good information and you can actually kind of take what we talked about today and look at drum heads a little bit differently, which I know I certainly look at Remo a little bit different. I still love them, but it kind of puts it all into perspective, the whole Remo and Evans thing. I know I should say I look at Evans differently because I now kind of see him as more of a classic brand than I did before. Yeah, and I think it's also important to remember too that at this point in time today, I don't know how many people at Remo actually know any of that story. Yeah, exactly. It's been bundled and sold. Yeah, it could have fallen by the wayside when Remo himself passed away. So I don't know how much of that information is still documented over there. Yeah, well, I think it's really cool that we can then provide that information to a new generation of drummers and I think you're doing a great thing. So Ben, man, it's been awesome talking to you today. I think we've got a ton of good information and I will, as soon as this comes out, start posting more photos and videos related to drumheads. So check out my Instagram at drumhistorypodcast to see some cool stuff. And I'll be sure to post Remo playing the giant, the world's largest bass drum from Disney World, which that's just such a classic picture. That's just like everyone thinks of that. So cool. Well, Ben, thanks, brother, for being on the show and good luck for season two of Sounds Like a Drum. Great, well, thank you so much for having me and definitely keep on the great work you're doing with Drum History. I think that this is a fantastic thing to have and everything that you do in it is just a really great contribution to the community. Awesome, man. Well, I couldn't do it without people like you. So cool. All right, Ben. Have a good one, man. I'll see you later. Thanks so much. 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. This is a Gwynn Sound podcast.


Lovely to be here today and super excited to be spending this time with you all The session I want to talk about is a topic up in diving a lot into in the last six months in particular Around distributed ledges and blockchains, but don't worry. It won't be too technical First thing I want to say is that I think the word blockchain is pretty much useless That it doesn't convey too much information at all and when I refer to the word blockchain I'm really just talking about this whole space of like digital assets and Cryptocurrencies and decentralized computing systems and it's that it's it's not a correct way of using the term But I think it's the most useful way I'm going to talk a little bit about why I've spent a bunch of time diving into this work and the back story and the biases I've brought to this I'll talk a little bit about the snapshot of the sector. What have I seen about where this blockchain world is right now? I'll talk a little bit about the opportunities for New Zealand in particular, but the opportunities this technology provides And I'll finish with some recommendations So that's that that's the arc of what I'll be going through So the how I got into this work is essentially I'm a long-term programmer anyone else been writing PHP sequel things in the early 2000s a few folks and It's so a lot of technology has started paying attention to this technology as it's been emerging over the last decade So it's something on your little bit a little bit about for a long time I'm also very interested in decentralization I've spent the biggest chunk of my career building decentralized ecosystems of entrepreneurs trying to make the world better and the idea of a Technology which has decentralization baked into its very reason for being with something that also piqued my interest I Spent the last five years building a programming school and we would love to see tech as the biggest export of New Zealand So an emerging technology which might have jobs for people and opportunities for businesses which can help Kiwis have Different better exports and more high-tech exports was also deeply interesting. So that was kind of the starting points But at last year at last six months ago in this space at Edmund Helley Fellowship blockchain is one of the things that we've seen a lot of the fellows responding to a lot of the fellows stepping up and And it was unexpected. We didn't select for this. It wasn't something that was intended It's something that emerged and a lot of the philosophy of EHF is to respond to what emerges One of the things that emerged last year the last EHF was the idea about how can we build connections between what some of these Global leading entrepreneurs are seeing and looking at with this technology and the New Zealand ecosystem particularly the New Zealand government So I was funded to do three months work diving deep into preparing a report Which I'll share some of the insights from at the moment So I spent three months writing this report. It was the biggest literature review I've done since university days It was speaking with hundreds of individuals around the country and around the world People in different governments Pete entrepreneurs locally entrepreneurs globally about what are they seeing in their countries? And what are they seeing in this technology? So that's that that's how I got into this work. So this is some of the stuff that I saw The first thing is I think and my opinion is that Blockchain and distributor ledgers represent a general-purpose technology a technology that will touch most industries If not every industry if you think about how the internet has changed society in the last 30 years I think there's a fair chance that this technology will change society just as much in the next 10 years There are lots of different building blocks There's no one thing in this space if you've heard about digital tokens here are different types of digital tokens and This will be the most technical slide of the presentation But the idea of some of these things that are being built on top of blockchains They're valuable just because everyone thinks that they're valuable and the idea of an intrinsic token There are things which are valuable because they let you do stuff They let you use this this code or this token to do something that has value to you There are others which are valuable because of they give you returns You can use them to vote you can use them to get future things in the future And there are other ones which are valuable because there's something outside of the technical ecosystem Which backs them up maybe you can convert 20 tokens for a car or whatever and these are asset back And so this is the the the main point of this is that there's lots of different things And when you hear the word blockchain It conveys no information that you need to dive deeper and understand the nature of what you're talking about to have a meaningful conversation There's tons of good things happening in the country So one of the the highlights for me was that the legislation in New Zealand is mostly up to scratch When you look at what other countries had to do when dealing with the technology is we have to rewrite stuff Which never thought that we'd ever be dealing with something in this nature But particularly when you look at the financial markets conduct act and the FMA they have in their mandate They are they are meant to focus on innovation, which means they've been paying attention to this quite early on They also have in their mandate the power to give people exceptions So if you went to the FMA and said hey, you've got some rules about raising money Which don't really fit because I want to do something different They have the power to say oh, let's bend those rules Then they don't have to change the legislation itself to do that when I spoke to them no one had asked for that exemption But they have the power to do it and if you look at the way I did and lots of other places But the main thing is legislation. It's good It needs a few little tweaks here and there particularly around GST in particular, but people are working on that When I spoke to blockchain companies the biggest pain was access to bank accounts It's that if I mentioned the word blockchain banks won't talk to me and it takes lots and lots of talking and talking to the right people To get something which is a productive banking relationship. So it can be done. It's just quite painful The reason for that is very much around when you look at when people in the banking sector or people in government First heard about this. They heard about it through money laundering financing terrorism Silk Road buying drugs online with fake money kind of things and that's when most people heard about it And it's a perception that lingers But the the most interesting thing I found was that if you want to launder money Digital currencies are some of the worst ways to do it And when you look at the reports of people who analyze money laundering and whatnot It's way down the bottom below like the banking system Which is much easier to do things in and when you talk to people in this space They get really excited about people using these systems because you can do phenomenal tracking Say I have a bunch of stolen Bitcoin and you know that I stole them You can do analysis to see if they go through lots and lots of people but all end up in Yosef's pocket, you can see that you can't see that in the existing financial system So there are huge opportunities for making financial world safer using this technology But overall the biggest thing I found was that New Zealand is a fair way behind the rest of the world That most there are many other ecosystems which are more advanced more stuffs happening than we are There's some good stuff happening in New Zealand. There's three or four really big outliers centrality here is definitely one of them and there are people doing great stuff, but as a system we're falling behind So now I want to talk a little bit about the opportunities So from New Zealand's point of view if you look at the rate that people get paid in blockchain Companies the amount of jobs and the increase in those jobs. It's going up and there's huge demand So the idea of if Kiwis can get skills to deliver in this ecosystem that has a significant impact on the country overall In particular if you can get those jobs in regional New Zealand that will have a much bigger impact And I want to shout out for epic Westport who essentially want to make Westport the blockchain hub of New Zealand And these are people behind the epic center in Christchurch and they're really seriously saying how do we help people in our local economy? Move from the jobs that they have available now to some of the fastest best-paying and most disruptive jobs that are emerging And I think that that intervention is phenomenal Another big one is that if you're a New Zealand company and you want to raise two million dollars to ten million dollars It's really hard. We're okay at the early stage stuff bigger stuff some sort somewhat, but that particular bracket it's really tough and this what's happened in the blockchain ecosystem is that it's radically Disrupting the way companies can get funded if you're addressing a global issue And so you can see companies get Access to funding that is much harder to get and I think that has a phenomenal possibility for impact in this country And I also think that you're seeing a lot of that There's significant disruption in the way companies get financed overall and in some way what's happening here is a hint of What the future could look like If you look at the work that's going on around security tokens at the moment and people saying actually in a couple of years You could say there's an exchange with 500,000 of the best companies in the world being trained to trade it on it and if you think about what Stock exchanges would look like with that kind of volume and a purely global space not controlled by any one nation And that's that's very disruptive when you think about global international trade Shouting out to Paul Callahan and the strategy of making New Zealand a place where talent wants to live I saw a few examples of companies moving to New Zealand because the regulators were easier to deal with in their home country Not many and I think that if this were if more people knew how easy it was to do this kind of thing in New Zealand And it got easier There is a significant opportunity of just bringing companies that are already set up here The other thing about blockchain companies is that many of them are more comfortable with remote teams than many other sectors Which means that even if the company isn't based here if a if an important person in that company is and they want to build a Local team that can have a very significant impact on jobs taxes a lot of things in the ecosystem So attracting companies to New Zealand. I think it's something that's pretty there's some pretty easy wins there Now I'm going to get into the more I guess powerful opportunities of the technology overall so if you look at the idea of Code as law so in if you look at the legal system and I break the law There's a huge amount of energy and resources and efforts that goes into noticing when I break the law doing something about it discouraging people to and dealing with that consequence in the blockchain world you can think of it as you can build it a Technology a technical ecosystem where it's impossible to break the law within that ecosystem You can break the law on the boundaries But within it you can stop people breaking the law and by law I mean the rules that the group establishes So if you think about I can go and break the law here and bad stuff can happen But in a blockchain world that can't happen. The only thing is the whole system fails So I think there's a very powerful way to think about this as some people who want to have rules They want to have rules about how things are listed on their exchange or how people exchange or all that kind of thing They can agree on those rules. They can codify those rules and they can make it virtually impossible to break those rules and If you and that I think has very powerful ramifications because right now you're getting into the heart of how do people collaborate and how do they collaborate to build governments Build companies do significant projects together In particular so an example at the moment in Australia is the CSIRO and The NDIS national disability insurance scheme. They're running a pilot with actual people where they're saying hey people who have Disabilities and get funding from the government to purchase services We're going to give you money on a blockchain and we're going to give you money where we can program that money and can control What you do with it? We're not going to let you spend on anything We're only going to let you spend on certain things if you just think about the use case of governments where they're saying I want to give you money for a particular thing and That's it and the work they have to do to make sure you don't do something else with it The work they did a track that you did the thing you said you would the administrative headache that that is that's a substantial Pain point and the idea of building a system where you can give someone smart money And when you give it to them you can say here's the thing what you can do with it Here's what you can't you can agree on the rules of the system together And you can do that again and again and again across multiple domains One example I saw was rate rebates in New Zealand So the idea of if you're on the pension and you have to pay rates the government can give you a rebate for rates But you have to pay it first. You have to get a receipt. You have to send it in It's quite a painful system to deal with you Just give someone the money and have the money come back to you if they don't spend it and only that and spend it In certain ways the idea of programmable money. I think is one of the the most exciting long-term opportunities All right, this is a picture of a fork So one of the most interesting things you'll see in the blockchain space is that if we've got a community And we all agree on a set of rules and some people in that community don't like those rules They think they're crap rules. They'd like different rules They can essentially take a copy of the whole system Come over here Invite some people to come and play with them and make new rules together and they can do that very cheaply Well, not very cheaply. There's a cost to it. A lot of it's a social cost But from a technical point of view, it's quite a cheap cost So if you think about in New Zealand, if you disagree with Parliament, you have to do lots of fighting You have to do lots of arguing of people who disagree with you to try and get to some agreement so that we can keep a set of rules all together and That's that's useful in some extent. You don't want to make it completely free just to go and start your own country and keep doing things But the possibility where you can say countries are used for stuff, which we all have to agree on But stuff that we don't all agree on we can actually make little micro systems and we can have differing opinions And when you disagree in one of those opinions systems One of your opportunities is to take a copy, invite some people to come and play and do something different So you can get a plurality of responses So that's forking and I think that's a very powerful opportunity that this technology provides and it's one of the reasons why I think that One more thing I'd say on this is that when you look at governments and you look at monetary policy It's kind of expensive to change It's expensive to take risks with if you are the Reserve Bank of New Zealand You're not going to really take radical experiments on different monetary policy But if you are acting like a reserve bank in a system where you're creating things that are like money You can be take radical risk You can experiment a lot and what we're seeing in the blockchain space is Thousands and thousands of experiments in monetary policy in governance in how do you get people to agree together? And I think in that way you can see the evolution of society is starting to speed up All right Getting there. Okay. The other thing. I think that's really powerful here is the concept of monopolies So if you look in Our economy There's a lot of businesses where they essentially say my strategy is to build a monopoly something That's very hard to compete with I want to be a Facebook I want to be a Google I want to be something which has dominant market power and I want to exert that power to extract profits from the system and On one hand that sucks for lots of people You start to have a system which isn't as good as it could be is it could be because of these monopolies But on the other hand, I kind of don't want to have to have a hundred networks to talk my friends It's really useful to have one network So I quite like that there's a monopoly on protocols without having the power to extract things from it And I think that the trend you see in the blockchain space is saying that actually it's not okay to build something like Facebook It's not okay to build something which has a massive influence on lots of people and they have a take it or leave it Response to it instead. What is okay is having a system where lots of people decide together What is okay and how things should work and that idea of having ethical monopolies which that's take some of our Political theory and bring it to our economic world. I think that's another deeply exciting thing about this technology All right final thought of this section. So the idea of who sort of tragedy of the commons Cool, so if you look at the origins of that in the 60s someone wrote a paper Pardon wrote a paper about the tragedy of the commons And it was it was really interesting because there was no data behind it There was no evidence base that the tragedy of the commons was a thing But I had a huge amount of resonance with people people read the argument and said that makes sense I can imagine lots of people exploiting a commons and so on and when you look at the work Eleanor Ostrom did in the 2000s around actually how do people really work in commons? There's lots of processes and technologies people used to govern a commons effectively and fairly and there was lots of things that emerged But most of them emerged in small-scale groups of people who could meet and see each other regularly because the main Strategy if someone's exploiting a commons people would turn away for them They'd say I'm not going to collaborate with you because you're not doing the right thing They'd have to see that they were exploiting it. It worked really well in small groups It was also always unique. There was no one pattern that everyone worked Eleanor Ostrom ran around the world saying no panacea No panacea and so I think that the idea of how can we use this emerging technology to start to govern commons as together? so that we can actually manage big global resources where we all benefit from them and we can reward people who grow the value of them and we can disincentivise people who detract the value of them and I think that combination of The work around monopolies and decisions and forking and so on to me That's the most exciting potential I see of this technology and it's why I would say that it will be as impactful as the internet is Okay, so a few recommendations in the report. I made a bunch of recommendations for government which probably aren't that interesting for you But I can talk about that afterwards if it is so this is recommendations for change makers So the first thing is if you're thinking about using this technology and you're telling someone about the idea The blockchain part should be the least interest in part of what you're talking about It's about solve a problem. That's worth solving solve it for real people and just do something useful and you can get a lot of value from using this technology But it's not it's just too many people latch on to it and they try and rode the coat ride the coat tails of all It's popular it's big and they use it to get attention that isn't deserved So do something useful first and don't worry about the implementation too much It's if you realize that people have a big allergic reaction to this word and this whole space There are lots of people have seen all the hype and all the stuff which isn't good and they start to write it off quickly So if you're saying particularly if you say I'm going to do stuff. I'm going to do this and that That's not a good strategy in general, but in this space. It's a really bad strategy So don't really start engaging with people until you've got something to show them and so definitely show don't tell more than you would otherwise I think it's really important particularly in this technology to bring more diversity into the room and to bring more attention to people who are excluded from the more high-tech parts of society that if you look at the world of You know people who are connected or comfortable with technology that technology is moving faster and it's moving in Radical ways which could transform society And I think it's the responsibility of anyone who does something in this space to actively do everything They can to bring as many people as you can with them I'll change makers so build stuff that matters. You're doing that anyway. Don't worry But good luck I do think there is value to look at here and it's it's really worth dying deeper into


Hi, this is a video about polynomials to begin. We'll talk about monomials a monomial is the product of a Number and one or more variables raised to a whole number power So for instance, this is any number. Let's say three times a variable Let's use x raised to a power that is a whole number anything zero one two three four five So like three x to the eighth. That's an example of a monomial Three x to the negative second. That is not a monomial So to identify a monomial keep in mind that it cannot have any of the following It cannot have variables in the denominator or bottom of the fraction It cannot have a negative exponent on the variable and it cannot have fractions as exponents or a variable under a radical The coefficient of a monomial is the number in the front of the variable The degree of the monomial or term as it's sometimes referred to as is the exponent or power on the variable So let's identify whether each of the following is a monomial. If so, we will state its degree and its coefficient So in part a let's focus on what is the power on y it is three so part a is yes in this situation The degree is three that's the power on the variable and the coefficient is Negative seven that's the number out front in part B. Let's look at the power on the variable It's negative two since there is a negative power on the variable. This would be a no So we'll write no And that's because there is a negative exponent in part C. I have negative two square root of x And look at x. There's a radical surrounding it. So this is also no So no and that's because the variable is under a radical in part D I just have the number seven think about this one for a minute Okay, your minutes over so think about this more so as like seven Times the variable to the zero power that's seven times one which still has a value of seven Looking at it now you look at the power on the variable. It's zero, which is fine. That's a whole number. It's allowed So the answer is yes the degree is Zero and then the coefficient is We'll just say seven So why is monomial identification important? That's because that's what polynomials are made of a polynomial would be more than one Monomial or term connected with the plus or minus sign a Monomial is just one term 6x squared is an example a binomial is two terms 7x minus one is an example a trinomial is three terms 4x squared minus 6x plus two is an example The degree of a polynomial is the greatest degree of any term of the polynomial the leading coefficient Well, it's the coefficient of the term that determines the degree So we're gonna place a lot of emphasis on that term with the highest power When we say to write a polynomial in standard form It means to write it in descending order based on the power on the variable of each term So like 4x squared minus 6x plus two it's in standard form It's in descending order based on the power on the variable and the degree is to the leading coefficient is four So example two We'll identify each of the following by its number of terms then we'll identify the degree leading coefficient And we'll even write the polynomial in standard form So first start off in part a how many terms do we have well three three means we have a trinomial Now let's look at the term of highest power. That's negative 2t squared This means We have a degree of 2 and it means Still focusing on that terms coefficient. It means the leading coefficient is negative 2 Now let's talk about standard form. I have a second power First power no power that is standard form 2 1 nothing So it's already in standard form So already in standard form Looking at part B Still three terms Still a trinomial look at the term of highest power. That's positive 3x cubed The degree would be three The leading coefficient since it is the term of highest power is three With regard to standard form What is it well the 3x cubed has to come first Then the plus 7x There's a positive 7 and then the minus 1 in the end All right part C It has four terms. So it's not any it's not a monomial. It's not a binomial It's not a trinomial in general. We just say it is a polynomial The highest power term is the z to the seventh. So my degree would have to be seven Now the leading coefficient Remember when there's nothing in front of a variable. It's like saying there's a one there So my leading coefficient is one And then let's talk about standard form obviously the z to the seventh does come first but then the Plus six z to the fourth plus six z squared and then plus two So That is identifying polynomials and listing lots of information about them to end subtract polynomials will literally just combine like terms remember like terms would be the same variable raised to the same power our goal in this Subsection is to distribute drop parentheses combine like terms. So in part a There's nothing to distribute to either set of parentheses so I rewrite it Without parentheses and then we combine like terms. I have a minus 3x plus 7x which is 4x One minus two. It's negative one four x minus one is the answer In part B, there's nothing to distribute to the first set of parentheses, but the second set there is a minus or a minus one So in part B, we have 4x squared Minus 3x plus 3 Distribute the negative one Negative one times 2x squared is negative 2x squared Negative one times 7x is negative 7x negative one times negative one is plus one All right, do a little bit of cleanup here Combine like terms I have a 4x squared minus 2x squared Which is 2x squared. I have a minus 3x Minus 7x which is a minus 10x and 3 plus 1 plus 4 Last one part C. I've got two things to distribute here 2x times x is 2x to the second 2x times plus one It's plus 2x Negative three times x squared is negative 3x squared negative 3 times 4x is negative 12x Negative three times negative five is plus 15 combine like terms 2x squared minus 3x squared is negative x squared Plus 2x minus 12x is negative 10x and you follow through with the plus 15 at the end That's your answer for part C Well, I hope you enjoyed. Thanks for watching


My name is Kat Cosgrove, I am your moderator for this session, and this is Kubernetes Exposed Seven of Nine Hidden Secrets that will give you pause, presented by the incomparable Ian Coldwater of Twilio and Brad Giesemann of Aqua Security. Just a reminder, please hold your questions until after the session is over, then you can raise your hand and I will come find you with a microphone, or you can ask in the meeting play app. Enjoy the talk. Hi everybody, can you hear me? Yep. Y'all in the back too? Sounds good. Fabulous. Okay. Hi! Welcome to Kubernetes Exposed Seven of Nine Hidden Secrets that will give you pause. If you are in the room for another talk, you are in the wrong room, and that's okay, we can hang out anyway. My name's Ian Coldwater. I am co-chair of Kubernetes Security, and I have container things. Hi, I'm Brad. I'm the director of Cloud Security at Aqua Security, and I also hack container things. If you're new to Kubernetes, you may have noticed some things along your way that make you go, hmm, some unexpected behaviors, maybe some weird surprises. If this sounds familiar to you, you're not alone. We've been working with Kubernetes for a while now, and we've seen a lot of strange behaviors. Wild surprises, unexpected gotchas, things that don't always work the way you think they will. And frankly, there are a lot of things that you might not be aware of that you might not need to know. So today, we figured we'd share some of those with you. Grab your popcorn and your 3D glasses, and let's explore some of the hidden secrets, weird science, and fun twists and turns in the land of Kubernetes. Watch out for jump scares. So here's a quick one. You might think that since Kubernetes heavily uses PKI for authentication that there would be a way to revoke a specific certificate if one of the certificate pairs ever got compromised. That would be sensible, right? That seems like that would make sense, but that's not actually how that works. OACSP stapling is not supported. This is a long time issue in Kubernetes, like, no, literally, a long time issue. There is a Kubernetes issue from 2015 about this specifically. So wait, really, what do you have to do then when your cluster gets popped? Well, to be completely safe, you have to rebuild the entire CA chain and redistribute new certificates everywhere. So wait a second, won't that take down the entire cluster? Sure will. Some managed providers will help you with this, but even if they do, it almost is always going to need some downtime. So it's an important thing to be aware of and to be prepared for. Here's another one. Docker has a solid default set-comp profile for containers. They restrict capabilities in a really smart way. Greats to Jeff's for that awesome work. Since Docker builds containers and Kubernetes orchestrates containers, you might think that Kubernetes would inherit those capabilities out of the box, right? Right, because doesn't Kubernetes just leverage the run times profile by default, I mean, right? I mean, that would be sensible, but it's not actually how it works. Kubernetes overrides Docker's default set-comp profiles, and it makes it unconfined. What this means for people who are not Linux security nerds in the room is that it turns them off. All of those capabilities that Docker very sensibly restricts, Kubernetes just turns around and puts back on. Wait a second. I thought the default set-comp went alpha in Kubernetes 122, so it's on by default, right? Well, default set-comp is a great founding name, right? We've got default set-comp on by default. That's great. We've been waiting for that forever. Okay, the thing is that it's not actually on by default. You have to turn it on, and not only that, you have to turn it on twice. The cluster administrator or your cloud provider needs to turn that feature flag on since it's an alpha, and even after that feature flag's been turned on, there is a CLI flag that needs to be invoked every single time. If both of those things don't happen, or if they happen incorrectly, that default set-comp is actually default off. Here's another thing you might not be aware of. You might think if you delete a cluster role binding, it's gone, right? That seems like that would be sensible, but it doesn't always work that way. There's one special exception, and it can be a dangerous one. That exception is system masters, which is hard-coded in Kubernetes to be cluster admin. And surprise, even if you delete it, this one sticks around. Because it's hard-coded, you can't actually really get rid of it.  Their permissions won't actually be gone. Even if you delete them. We need to test this one out to be sure. Okay, you can see my screen. Great. So I'm running a kind cluster. So that's running kube-adm under the hood, and it puts that system masters certificate pair in the local kube config. So I'm going to run a fancy command under the hood. I won't bore you with it, but I'm just going to extract and show you that that is what is in the actual certificate. So you see system masters. So I have this credential here locally. If I use this credential to authenticate to the cluster, and I run kube-control-auth, can I list? This is a command that says, what permissions do I have when it comes to RBAC? Very useful. If you look at the top two lines here, you can see star.star and star on the verbs, and star on the non-resource URLs and star on the verbs.  All's well and good, right? So let's look at the cluster role binding, named cluster admin. It's kind of confusing. But this is the default cluster role binding. It says that system masters, the group, is bound to cluster admin. That's where the explicit definition of those stars happens. So we're going to go ahead and delete that. Wonder what will happen. So did we lose access for system masters, and we deleted our ability to be system masters? Did we actually delete that? Let's find out. We'll run kube-control-auth, can I list again? The stars are gone. So did we lose that permission? Well, let's just find out. Let's go ahead and recreate that exact same cluster role binding. And those astute viewers out there will know that you shouldn't be able to give yourself permissions that you don't have access to, but you can. There, I'm cluster admin again. And we're going to show that just to prove it. There's no cards up the sleeves. Off can I list, and the stars are back.  Thinking of some things that you shouldn't be able to do, but you can, you might think that validating webhooks are good for enforcing policy on resources as they hit the API server, right? But they're good for a lot more than that. They're useful for all kinds of things. For example, they can be a high performance data expiltration tool, sometimes avoiding those pesky network egress charges. So here's how validating webhooks are supposed to work, right? In step one, you have a pod spec, and you submit it to the API server if you're authenticated as the right user in step two. And you have create pod in this case in step three. If you have a validating webhook in step four, what it will do is it'll take that entire pod spec and go send it to another pod. And that pod is in number five. And that pod's job is to look at that spec and say allow or block based on what's in it. Okay, so that's basically how admission control works. So that's how admission control is supposed to work. We can use the way that those things work to make them useful for us as attackers too. So here's one thing we could do. We could set up an external server, maybe one in a different cloud provider, and we can set it up to listen on TLS and log what gets sent to it. Then we could set up a validating webhook configuration that points to it when resources like secrets are created. Yeah, you could embed the data that you want to leak or expiltrate or back up to yourself, right? In the request to create the secret. We know that secrets and config maps can store about a megabyte each. So, and the control plane will use its highly efficient go routines, thanks developers who wrote those, to send that data to the listener. The control plane systems in managed Kubernetes providers don't seem to filter out TCP 443 outbound. And it comes from a VPC that in some cases might not be one that you get billed for. Disclaimer, that's not an officially supported use case. Additional disclaimer, neither of us work for a cloud provider. Anywho, moving on. Let's see that in action. So let's exfiltrate some data. I have very important documents in Latin, about a megabyte of it, 3,400 lines or so, just to give your mind a mental picture of how much that is, the works of Shakespeare in there somewhere. And we have an exfiltrating webhook. And what we've configured here, if you look at the very bottom line, it says we're going to send this to an external server named Hong Kong SH. Whenever a create or an update on a secret happens, so a copy of that secret, if you remember from our previous talk, that was kind of sneaky too, but this is, we're using the secret as a carrier for this data. So we're going to apply that validating webhook configuration, like a good administrator, or not, evil. Okay. We're going to look at that configuration just so that you can see what it looks like. There's some CA bundle things in here. This is basically just showing you that we have every time a secret is touched, we're going to send it to that URL. So what we're going to do is we're going to deploy a pod inside our cluster. And its job, I'll show you in a second. I just want to show you the deployment. Right here at the bottom is to do a loop to simulate our highly efficient exfiltration system. We're going to do a kube control, create secret, and send that one megabyte with every one of those requests. Okay, so I'm going to apply this to the cluster. I'm going to get the pods. We see it's running. Okay, now in the background, it's backing up important data or exfiltrating important data. So let's go over to our external server, SSH into it. And for those NGINX admins out there, you'll recognize the access logs. We're just going to tail those. And as you can see, we're backing up at high speed. Again, I don't know who in the room here might be from GCP. I don't know if those IPs look familiar to you. They might. It's very important to back up your data, you know. So pretty cool. Yeah. You know what? It's very real estate. You know what else we could use for nefarious purposes? Working is designed. DNS. You know the saying, it's always DNS. We've all been there. DNS can cause all kinds of problems. Any pod that needs to communicate with another service needs DNS. So most admins doing the right thing and using network policy still have to poke a hole in for DNS lookups in their firewall rules. And that's actually all an attacker needs for a command and control channel if they compromise a running container. So you see this pod in the red? Without any egress filtering, it can directly communicate with an external server. It's often the default, although not the most secure approach. As a red teamer, DNS is really useful for me. Besides, you know, causing outages, if I have data I need to exfiltrate, a lot of the time I'll need to figure out a way to do that. And sometimes that can be really hard, especially if egress is really locked down. But there's often at least one exception. There's almost always a DNS path outbound. It might not be a direct path outbound, but if you can get onto an internet connected box and get remote code execution on it, you can get data out of it via DNS. One of the ways to do this, to hide your communications, is often within valid DNS traffic, within the lookups. This is called DNS tunneling. And there are tools available that make this really easy to use and challenging for admins to detect reliably at scale. Some Kubernetes admins watching or listening to this might think that this wouldn't apply to their clusters because they have strict network policy in place. Nothing's getting out of there. They're good, right? Well, maybe not so much. Right. Even if all direct outbound access is blocked, we typically have to open up UDP port 53 to the Kube DNS pods in the Kube system namespace because that enables service discovery. That's how things need to work. So we can use DNS tunneling from a pod to an attacker. And we're going to show you how. There it displays. Okay. So on my attacking server, out in the internet, on the public internet, I'm going to SSH to it. And I'm going to run something called DNS cat. Raise your hand if you've ever heard of DNS cat. We've got some DNS tunnelers in the room. Cool. This is our C2. This is what's going to capture all the sessions from our compromised systems. C2 stands for committed control. Thank you. So over here, switching gears, I'm on my cluster that I'm going to compromise. Now for the sake of this, we're going to presume that we've gotten access to this specific pod once it runs in the cluster. So our worldview from an attacker's perspective is, I have a shell on this pod. What things can I connect to and how? And what we're going to do is we're going to use various methods to probe and test that we have egress or outbound access. In this case, we're going to use standard curl, my favorite hacking tool. I know you have those as well. Curl to honk.sh on TCP 443, right? This succeeds. This is, there's no surprises here, okay? We're just validating. We have TCP outbound, but we were talking about DNS, weren't we? So in this same pod, we're going to switch to the DNS cat binary that we've already embedded and deployed to this system. And we're going to reach directly out from this pod inside this cluster, directly out to this C2 server using UDP 53. So it's a direct connection. There's no Mallory in the middle. And it establishes a session just like that. So if we switch back over, now we go back over to our server, you can see it has created a new session. So if I run sessions, you see the number one is added there, that's a new session. So I'm going to interact with it using dash i. It's kind of like a tab and a browser, so we're switching tabs over. And you can see the things that we have access to. Personally, I like running shells. I'm going to run a shell. And again, it sort of spawns another new tab on session two. So we'll control Z out of that. And interact with session two. Cool. Now, entirely via DNS requests, we can run commands on that pod. Okay. This is direct UDP. Okay. Okay. So let's be good administrators and apply some network policy. We have two policies here. And I know they're hard to understand. That's okay. We'll walk through this. The top one says ingress and egress deny everything in the default namespace. So the pod, if you apply just that, we'll be able to communicate with nothing. The second policy right below it pokes that hole for UDP 53 within the private IP space of this cluster. So it can do DNS within the cluster. So let's apply that. It's totally secure. Let's lock it down. Apply security. Okay. Coup control, apply security. Done. Okay. So we're going to go back to that same pod. Now it has that wrapping blanket of a nice network policy only allows DNS to the Coup DNS pods. We're going to try those connections again. So we're going to be on that pod. We're going to try to reach out. And it blocks, right? That's expected. Cool. Just wait five seconds. It's not going to make it. Let's try DNS cat direct mode again. Or again, we're trying to just do UDP 53 straight shot to that server. Not going to work either. We've blocked that successfully. How many people think the job is done? Oh, thank you. I think we know better than that. Let's change it to hostname lookup mode indirect mode, whatever you want to call it. Basically encoding the entire set of tunnels via random hostname DNS requests. It's going to go through Coup DNS to a public DNS server and all the way to our destination. And it still works. And probably looks like pretty normal traffic. All right. We have that command session. Sounds good, right? All right. I guess it really always is DNS. So if we're thinking about wild things that we could potentially do with Kubernetes networking, we've got other options. It isn't just DNS. Have you seen CVE 2020 8554? It's okay if you don't remember. CVE numbers are not terribly human friendly. In this CVE, services that use the external IP configuration can disrupt or redirect traffic within the cluster. External IP services are pretty uncommon, but they're very powerful and they can be very useful. For example, they have a useful ability to modify IP tables. They are literally redirection as a service. So let me explain. You see this pod Yemo, or sorry, the service Yemo. And what it really says is all traffic within the cluster going to this external IP is redirected to the nginx pod on port 80. I'll say that again. All traffic going to an external IP is going to this pod right here. And what namespace are we in? We're in default. We have no special privileges. We're just one service and one namespace, but we can cross all namespaces and modify the routing to that IP with this service. So we can disrupt or redirect traffic within a cluster. Could we also disrupt or redirect traffic out of the cluster? Like make it go somewhere else entirely. Could we do that? Yeah. I mean, we know that important things like validating webhooks rely on services. We could disrupt the traffic from the control plane going to the validating webhooks pods. Huh. So could we like sneak a privileged pod past a validating webhook just by creating a service? Would that work? So remember from before how validating webhooks normally work. When you submit a pod, it reaches out to a trusted pod via TLS to get an allow or a block response. That makes sense. But wait a minute. What if admission control, that admission control pod isn't running or it isn't on the network? Would it still work the same way? That depends. If the configuration is set to fail open after a few seconds of it not responding, it allows the request. So the Fail Your Policy Ignore setting is pretty typical of default settings for webhooks because failing closed might cause even more damage. It might actually cause an outage or block an upgrade.  Anyone? Yes, I see some hands. Fantastic. So you know the pain. So if that's the case, we could deploy an external IP service to redirect the traffic from the control plane going to the validating webhook pod to somewhere else entirely. And then we could cause it to fail open. I think that might buy us enough time to get a privileged pop through. I bet that'll work. Let's try it. I hope you all still have some popcorn left. One second. There we go. Okay. I'm going to leave that. So we have a default cluster. This is a separate cluster entirely from the previous demos. And we've installed Coverno from the defaults. Okay. Just Coup Control Apply from the docs straight in. And by default, validating webhooks don't have enforcement policies on, okay? But we want to block privileged pods in this specific case. So what we have to do is submit this policy and change the word audit to enforce. So I'm going to go ahead and apply that. To block privileged pods. So let's do that. Again, we're applying security with good one shot. There we go. Security is very important. So let's test that. We always need to validate these assumptions, right? That's what this whole talk is about, validating these assumptions. So Ian and Duffy brought the Duffy. There you are. Shout out. Brought this to my attention a long time ago. And it's just elegant and brilliant that you can run a privileged pod and in the same breath, basically in a center and escape to the node if you can run a privileged pod. So this is a one-shot escape. It's blocked. It did its job. Hate it when that happens. So are we done? I don't think so. Let's create an external IP service with those pods of the validating webhook. And we're going to get them in the top lines. We're going to get the Coverno service IP and the Coverno pod replica IP. We're going to grab those. We're going to also deploy an Nginx deployment in the default namespace. So I'm just a developer in the default namespace, right? So I don't really have that many permissions, but maybe I can create pods and create services, right? So I'm going to create Nginx and have it listed on port 80. That's important in a second. Then we're going to create a service with the pod IP of Coverno and the service IP of Coverno, such that all traffic in the cluster, remember all traffic, including control plane to the validating webhook traffic, all traffic going to port 9443 gets redirected to port 80 on Nginx. So what's going to happen? Nginx is going to go, I don't know what to do with this and just send back an error, right? The actual attack is kind of interesting. We scale the deployment of Nginx up to two. So we add another Nginx pod. Then we try to submit the privilege pod. Then we scale Nginx up to three. And then we immediately scale it back down to two. Now why would we want to do that? Because we're forcing Kube proxy to reset IP tables and reshuffle things. We're causing chaos and churn in the networking stack to try to increase the chances that we're blocking connections that may have already been passed through the session table. All that to say is we're playing some shenanigans with some IP tables. So let's run this attack. And it's going to go in this loop. And so we're going to create the deployment, make its two replicas, try the privilege pod, three, back to two. And this is going to go on a loop. What I want to show you over here is the logs from the validating webhook pod. So it's just doing its job. It's blocking the privilege pod, right? We're all good, right? It may be. And now we wait. Over on the other end here, we're waiting for this race condition to happen. And race conditions are not really reliable, kind of notoriously, so you don't really know how long they're going to take. So we don't really know how long we're going to do this, so I'm going to talk to you for a minute about race conditions. If you would like to hear me talk more about race conditions and hear Fred talk more about race conditions, come see the talk in this exact room immediately after this one called Exploiting a Slightly Peculiar Volume Configuration where we, with our hacker crewmates, say, honk, exploit a race condition in RunC. What's going on over here, Brad? So we are still trying. Hopefully the administrator hasn't been woken up by this point because I don't know if you get a lot of alerts on privilege pods being blocked, but we have a short window here that we can hopefully hit generally 30 to 90 seconds where this succeeds. So I just wanted to show you what it looks like. We're causing churn. We're purposely telling the service to add and remove replicas from the service endpoint slices, right? So we're just trying to cause it. Can you grab one more? Yes. So this is the attack bar. This is just engine X. We'll see it. There it is. Hold on a second. We're doing a coup control run. So we got to pull the image really quick and then get a shell. So we'll see. And as you can see, Coverno performed a leader election and lost it because of a health check. So Coverno shut down just in this moment. Let me go over here. It's creating. It's promising. Success. Check it out. Now we're rude on the note. It's important to note that this behavior is not unique to Coverno, although we're using them for the demo. We're not picking on them only, at least. It is also any products that use validating web hooks in this manner are also vulnerable to this, including gatekeeper and some vendor products that you have definitely heard of. Anyway. So yeah, now that you've seen what can be done with these, you should probably block or restrict external IP services with admission control policies because as we've seen, external IP services are extremely powerful and can cause a lot of problems on purpose, especially for multi-tenant clusters. Indeed. As we said, Kubernetes is full of unexpected surprises. Things might not quite work the way you think they do. Things might actually be dangerous in the way that they differ from your assumptions. So check your assumptions. Um, it is possible to secure Kubernetes, but in order to get there, you really need to know how it works and not just how you think it works, know how it really works. And you can do it. We believe in you. Here's a list of resources and links for further reading and viewing, and we hope you've had as much fun as we have exploring some of our favorite, interesting behaviors, and maybe a jump scare or two in the fun land of Kubernetes. Yeah, we've had a lot of fun with it, so thanks so much for joining us. Stay safe and keep exploring. Thanks, everybody.