All right, so we are here with our contest winner, Matt King. Matt, how are you doing this morning, sir? Hey, I'm good. How are you? Doing good. So I want to kind of set the stage for what Matt and I are going to be doing over the next few months. Obviously, Matt's going to be trading our account, which is just over $50,000 at this point. And we put on one trade a couple of days ago. And so I was just kind of getting to know kind of his experience and knowledge and things like that. And so now we're recording this. This is our first video of recording. And we're going to share each of these with the navigation trading community. And so not only, hopefully, will it help Matt become a better trader. And of course, he gets to keep 50% of the profits when this is all said and done. But I'm hoping that it really helps the rest of the navigation community as I'm teaching Matt different things and kind of coaching him through these different trades. So one of the things that we're going to be focusing on throughout these three months is really a heavy focus on futures. And we've got a course coming out here soon that's all about trading options on futures. I know there's a lot of questions and confusion about the difference between trading on futures versus ETFs and stocks. And Matt doesn't really have much of any experience trading options on futures. And so I think this will be a really helpful lesson and continued upcoming sessions on that topic as well. Now, the other thing that I just kind of set in the stage for going forward is to kind of keep this fairly simple and clean. And I want to show the rest of the navigation community how you can do this on a real part-time basis. I mean, Matt has another full-time job. A lot of people are not full-time traders that are going through the navigation methodology. And so I think this will be really helpful. And what we're going to do is we're really only going to focus on three or four symbols at any given time. So like myself trading all the time, I mean, it's not uncommon for me to have 20, 30, 40 different symbols on at one time. But that's just for the purpose of this contest and for the purpose of the next few months of this coaching session, I really just want to focus on a few. So that way it's easy for us to jump on, record the sessions, and make sure that the rest of the community understands how manageable it is and how you can trade profitably, even if you're not trading tons of different symbols all the time. Makes sense? That makes perfect sense, man. I'm glad to be here and learn some stuff from you. And if I have some questions, I'll throw them out. Cool, that's what I like to hear. I want this to be interactive. If you don't understand something, definitely ask because if you have the question, I'm sure other people do as well. So before we jumped on here, we were kind of looking through the different symbols and trying to figure out, okay, what should we put on? And we already have one trade on in the NASDAQ. So go ahead and click on QQQ real quick on your watch list over there. And as we've discussed in the past with the NASDAQ, for example, if you click on the NASDAQ futures, the implied volatility indicator is not accurate. So we've got to use either QQQ or NDX. And it's not, in looking at the implied volatility of the NASDAQ right now, it's not above that 50 level where we prefer it to be. However, it is, and there's the inaccurate reading on the NASDAQ futures. So you can tell that that's not gonna work for you. So you gotta go to the corresponding ETF, which in this case is the Qs. And then you can get an accurate reading on where the implied volatility and where the pricing of those options is based on that. So we actually put the trade on in the NASDAQ, but we're using the Qs as just to get a reading on the IV indicator. Now, same thing on the next trade that we're gonna put on, which is natural gas. So if you click on the forge slash NG right there, you'll notice that the implied volatility indicator is a little wacky, right? Big spikes and kind of low troughs for a while. So in just looking at these over the years, you'll know that that's inaccurate. So what we have to do is we have to look at UNG, which is the corresponding ETF. And this will give us an accurate reading of where implied volatility is, where those options are priced based on the options of natural gas in general. Now again, we're in a situation where the implied volatility percentile and the implied volatility rank are not above that 50 level that we ideally like to see to sell premium or to put trades on. However, Matt, if you hover your mouse all the way back to let's say the beginning of March on the implied volatility indicator, and you look at where it is right now, it's definitely at its high end of the range going all the way back to March. So what is that, six plus months? So it's really at a high point over the last six months. And we typically, we like to see it over the 50th percentile over a 12 month period. But the fact is there's not a lot of symbols out there with high implied volatility right now. So what we're wanting to do is we're wanting to put some positions on. And so really what we default to is, what's the best thing out there? What's the highest implied volatility on the board? And natural gas is the one that meets that criteria. Is that kind of like saying, sorry to interrupt. Is that kind of like saying, yeah, you gotta take a risk with something. So let's do it with this. Yeah, exactly. And the fact is, we make more money and we have a little bit higher probability of success when we sell premium with implied volatility that's higher. But the reality is you can still make consistent returns and you can still make good money. Even when the implied volatility is lower, you just don't collect as much credit upfront. You just don't have as much profit potential when it's a little bit lower. But the thing is, A, for one, for this contest, I mean, we've got a three month period. I mean, implied volatility could stay low for the next three months. And if we're sitting here not putting any positions on, well, that didn't really benefit anybody, right? Right. And the other thing is part of trading and getting to understand trading and becoming consistently profitable is putting on and taking these trades off, learning how to adjust and always staying engaged. So if we have a period of a couple of months where it's low IV, so we decide we're not gonna put anything on, well, we're not engaged in the markets. We don't really have that feel for what's going on. And so I think it's really important to stay engaged, keep positions on, stay active in the markets. And sometimes you're gonna have a little bit better opportunities than others. And sometimes they won't be as great of an opportunity, but it's still a profitable way to trade overall anyway. So I wouldn't be encouraging a trade to put on if I didn't think we would make profit. I mean, this is my money. This is $50,000 of real money that we put in here. So I'm definitely not putting on a trade thinking I might potentially lose either. I wanna win on every trade that I put on. Of course you do. So you mean you didn't want me trading all that money last week? Right, right. I did have one question. I don't know, do you have like a Q and A time or there was one question that I kind of keep thinking of and I wanted to come back to this. And that was like, let's say it just because I'm on UNG natural gas here. We're looking at this and if somebody that's new is scrolling through here, they look at this and they're gonna go 10 and they're probably gonna keep on scrolling and think that it's not worth anything if they're not used to what they're looking at. And then UNG, it's like, okay, yeah, that might be one of the better ones. But at the same time, I kind of be thinking myself, I kind of thought to myself the other day, why wouldn't I just trade the ETF? And I was like, so that's kind of the question. What's the difference? Why would I make the call to trade a future over an ETF or an ETF over a future? Yeah, great question actually.  So if you look at UNG and you see the price of UNG currently is trading at $6.30. So go to the trade tab real quick and open up the options for 42 days to expiration because that's the one that we would trade in between that 30 and 60 days. Open that to all so we can see all the strikes. So what you'll see is, and let's change a couple of columns here real quick on the up right under calls where it says last X, go ahead and change that to basic and then go down to open interest. And then let's under net change, let's change that to under option theoreticals in Greek, let's change that to Delta. So what you'll see here is if you look under open interest, you see that there's thousands of contracts trading at some of those near the money strikes. So you say, okay, well, there's great volume, but if you look at the at the money, what the at the money options are trading at, I mean, you're looking at seven, 10 cents, on the put side, 13 and 16 cents, you just, you're not getting any premium. There's not enough juice in those options because it's such a low priced, low priced symbols. And that goes for stocks and ETFs. If you get under $30, I mean, you're really looking at a situation where you're just not getting enough premium to make up for the transaction costs that you have and the risk that you're taking on that trade. So for a situation like this, with UNG, this is a symbol that I would never actually put a trade on because you just, it doesn't make any financial sense to do so. It's just always low like that. What's that? It's always low like that, the bid and ask prices. They're always, yeah, there's just nothing to trade in there because it is such a low priced symbol. So if I'm trading natural gas, I'm always going to trade the future in this case, but I always look at UNG on the chart for that implied volatility reading. I got you. So, and Matt, this is just a nuance about trading futures. And that's one of the reasons that we're putting out a course here in a couple of weeks to really go through in detail every single symbol that we would trade and why we trade it and how to use the ETF in conjunction with that. So that's not out yet. So great question. So I'm glad you took the time to answer it still. Yeah, so let's go ahead and click on NG, forward slash NG then. And once that populates up, we're going to look at the other nuance to understand on, stay on the trade tab there. The other nuance to look at is, remember we're trading between 30 and 60 days is when we want to enter the trade. So we would look at the 52 days. And if you see, there's two different options. You've got the financial or the physical. So unless you are wanting barrels of natural gas to physically show up on your doorstep, we want to stick to the financials. Barrels of gas. And I'm saying that tongue in cheek, just kidding. That's not going to happen. I've never heard of anyone getting any physical delivery of anything. But for our purposes of trading, we're really just going to always focus on the financial option. Okay. Let's go ahead and open those up. Scroll down to at the money. There we are. And when we put this on, we're basically going to sell a strangle here. And we anywhere from kind of one standard deviation range. So anywhere in that kind of 16 to 20 delta range. And just remember, you know, the closer we go to the money that gives us more potential profit, a little bit lower probability of success. But yeah, that 20 has a lot of volume, a lot of open interest. And so that would be the one that I would default to. It's kind of what I was looking at. That one had more, I guess you would call it more liquidity. Correct. Yep. All right. See, I'm learning something. Let's go ahead and right click sell strangle. Yeah. So that populates our call side. So now we got to go over and view the, scroll up and view the put side and find a similar delta on that side. So there's a 17. Oh, if you went a little too high. Oh, there it is. 17 or the 21. So I would get, yeah, either one, either one of those is fine. 17th, the quality. Yeah, we'll do that. Two, 2.75. Yeah. So you'll change your put option to the 2.75 strike. There we go. And then let's right click anywhere on the red and let's analyze this. Let's trade. There we go.  Yep. So what we've got here is a one standard deviation, approximately strangle. And so if you want to go ahead and set the slices by clicking on the little three bar menu up top there, what, up, up one, there you go. I want to do set slices to break even. And then 1128 is our expiration date. Okay, so that up here. Yep, you're one step ahead. You got, you got, you want to make sure that calendar up there is set correctly and it is. Go ahead and, and go ahead and squeeze that graph so it's a little bit tighter on your screen. This way. Yep. So that, that other, yeah, there you go. So that other break even was, was off the screen. So you'll want to, right there, that's good. Go ahead and set those slices to break even again so we can, so it sets that other slice for us. There we go. So now we got a slice on each side of our break evens and you can see that percentage in the middle, in the middle says 73.07. So the probability of us making money on this trade between now and expiration is 73%. That sounds pretty good. Yeah, that sounds, that sounds good, but what's even better is the fact that we do not hold our trades all the way to expiration. So we're going to manage this at, let's say 30, 40, 50% of max profit. And so our probability of, of making money on this trade is actually closer to 90% probability of success. That also sounds good. So what we need to do, we have our default set to 10 contracts, but let's, so let's go down to your, your red order box down there and let's kick that up to, or down to, let's just start with one. What? One? And when you hover over the graph, what you'll see is that the max profit on this is $810. So the goal of, of what we're trying to do here is I want to get to the point where we're using anywhere from 30 to 40 to a max of 50% of total, of the total capital of the $50,000 that we're working with, but we're, but I don't want to put it all in on one trade. A implied volatility is very low right now.  I want to have some dry powder. I want to have some cash on the sidelines, ready to go. And then, and then it's just never a good thing to jump all in and load the boat in one day anyway. So over the next several weeks, we'll continue to put more positions on until we build up to that point. So let's just go ahead and jump in here with one contract and let's go ahead and get that filled. So simply right click on the red box anywhere and hit confirm and send. Is this, is there anything in here that I should be paying special attention to? Yeah, so what, this is just kind of your, your order details show so you can see over, describes each column on the left. You've got your, you've got your break evens. Well, first you've got your order description. So that's just the order we're placing. You've got your break even. So that's, it's the slices that we just set our, our break evens at just to give you an idea. You got your max profit, which we know is $810. Our max loss is shown as infinite because this is a strangle, we're trading naked options. So it's undefined risk. If we were trading an iron condor where we, or a butterfly or something where our risk was defined, it would show the exact dollar amount there. And that just shows the commissions included the buying power effect on our account. So it's going to take us $650 to put this trade on. Okay, that's the number to look at and make sure we have that amount of money. Correct. Of course we're good to go. Yeah. And then it's the resulting buying power for stocks because this is a margin account. So we, you know, we've got, you know, available for trading 46, but are actually, actual buying power for stock is double that because we're, we've got a margin account. Okay. And then buying power for options after we put this on trade on will be 45,827 which is $650 less than what you see over on the upper left hand column which is the 46,470. Got it. So go ahead and hit send. See if it actually takes it the first time, first run. Yeah, we'll have to, yeah, go ahead and click on that little arrow with the line above it down at the very bottom. There you go. And click on your order bar and right click and cancel replace. And yeah, let's go ahead and kick it down to 0.079. Is this one of those that has to be on the, well, that'd be a big 0.079, there it is. Yeah. So we may get filled the point away, but let's just go ahead and confirm it, send it 0.079 and we'll definitely get filled there. Hey, we're sold and filled. And we got filled. So then now if you hover over your graph, we had to give out just a couple pennies. So instead of the 810 as our max profit, it's 790. So that's the first. Got it. Cool. It didn't cost as much to get into it, but I got you. Yeah, we didn't, you know, the mid price and the natural price that Thinkorswim provides, those are real, those are really theoretical prices at where they kind of a range of where price might be trading. And so that's where we go in and do some price discovery and just kind of, you know, try to get filled at different prices. And sometimes you gotta give up more than you want and sometimes you get filled better than mid price.  And that's just from kind of trading it over the years. Got you. All right. Cool. So now we have a NASDAQ strangle on and now we have a natural gas. And I wanna put on one more trade before we get off today. Yeah, definitely. So let's go to, let's go back to the charts and let's click on TLT. TLT, I'm sure. So this is another situation where TLT is the ETF. And in this case, TLT is a very tradable ETF. So if you go to the trade tab, open up the 42 day options. This one would fall into the realm of what would make the call. Where I was at earlier. Yeah, so you can see, A, there's thousands of contracts trading in open interest and there's decent premium. You know, if we're trading the 20 delta or tighter, I mean those are trading for 47 to 50 cents and same thing on the put side. So this would be a very tradable ETF. However, in this case, I actually want to trade the Ford slash ZB, which is the corresponding future. And again, either one of these is fine. I mean, you could trade, I trade TLT all the time, but just for the purpose of this, we're getting more leverage. ZB is a little bit bigger of a symbol. We're using more capital to put this on. And again, I just want to do a little bit more focus on futures in these training sessions, just to help you learn them and help others learn them as well. So yep, you're right. Yeah, open up the 49 days to expiration. Scroll on down and we'll do kind of a similar thing. We'll do right around that 16 to 20 delta and do that on both sides and sell a strangle. You have a preference either way. It looks like 16 or 21 both look pretty decent. Yeah, they're both decent and it's just preference as far as how close you want to go. So I'm going to leave this one on you, Matt. Do you want a higher probability of success or do you want more potential profit? I was gonna say, I like the higher probability of success. Wait, okay. So you're saying that's the higher probability of success with a 22, but probably get an end up with a higher profit with a 16? It's actually the opposite. Oh. Yeah, the further away, so the price right now is trading at 151.5, let's say. So the at the money, you know it's at the money because the different shaded areas, that's where they meet right there. So the further away from at the money you go, the higher probability of success you have. Okay, so the further down, I'm probably gonna have more probability of success. But lower profit potential. Lower profits. Okay, I think I like, I mean, they're not that far away. So I think that would, I think 22, well not 21, would probably be a good place to sit. Yeah, and we're really splitting hairs here. I mean, we're talking about a few percentage points difference as far as our probabilities. But yeah, so either one. But yeah, personally, I like to always default a little bit closer to collect more credit for more potential profit. I do. Because we're still getting a good probability of success as well. So go ahead and right click sell strangle on that one. I'm glad we're on the same wavelength there. That's good, so, sell strangle. And we wanna scroll up on our put side to check out which strike we need to choose there. 16, oh, I got like our 16 and 22. I was like kind of the same boat over here. Yep. Really fairly liquid in either direction. So that one's sitting around at 22, it's sitting at 148. Yep. So we'll change the put to the 148. Okay. Let's go ahead and right click and analyze that one. Great. Is that right? Yeah, so you can go ahead and set your slices. And then you can widen out that graph there on the bottom if you wanna open that up a little bit. So if you wanna drag the actual graph over to the left, you can click up higher above that line and drag it over.  I see what you're saying. So as you can see with the probabilities here, we've got a little over 68% probability of success. And that's if we held it all the way to expiration, we're gonna manage it early. So we're looking at closer to probably 85-ish percent probability of success. Okay. So let's go ahead and go down below and it's at 10 contracts. So let's go ahead and kick that down to one. Then hover over the graph there and we've got a max profit of, hover over the center of your graph. Yeah, there you go. We've got a max profit of $1046.88. So it looks good. So let's go ahead and let's actually kick down that, go down to the red bar down there and kick the price down to 102 because we probably won't get filled at 103. So I'll not see. Okay. And then right click and confirm and send. And if you wanna pause here real quick, you can see this, the buying power, oh, and we got filled. Sorry. No worries. I was just gonna show you the buying power that it took to put this straight on was a little over 1700 bucks. Oh, okay. So anybody that wants to go watch that can pause it really quickly there during that split second. So cool. So we've got a trade-on in the NASDAQ. So we've got a trade-on in the bonds and we've got a trade-on in natural gas. So cool thing here about this is we've got three completely uncorrelated symbols, stocks, bonds and natural gas. And so that's kind of part of the process of building your portfolio and building the different positions is keeping on uncorrelated positions. So you don't wanna load up on all stocks. I mean, if you look at like the S&P, the NASDAQ, the Dow, the Russell, I mean, if you had positions on in all of those, those are very highly correlated, meaning they move in very similar fashion. But we've got three different symbols that are completely fairly uncorrelated to each other, which is what we want. So if we wanna go back and look at them, we can always just go to the monitor and kinda check things out. Yeah, so there you go. So you've got three different positions on. Obviously we just put these on. So you're always gonna see that you're down on the trade initially because the commissions come out and you're getting filled based on the spread between the bid and the ask. So you'll see your tiny loss at first, but then as this theta decay, as the time decay happens, and as our options decay, as we get closer to expiration, we'll see those become profitable or if we have big price moves, we may have to make adjustments and we'll do that as necessary. Yeah, definitely. So I definitely wanna get used to looking at this and keeping an eye on that. So if we need to make those adjustments, you know, then we can do that or you know, I know it won't happen for a few days at least cause we just started doing these trades, but eventually we'll get to the point where it's like, okay, we're at that 60% that we're looking for where we're gonna get out or 80% or whatever it is. I think on the screen on paper, it's gonna look like around 60 or 70%. And then there's our profit. Let's get out before something happens. What would happen if we didn't get out? Well, if price is in our range and we held it all the way to expiration, let's say we fell asleep and wake up for a couple months and price was in our range, well, it's just gonna expire worthless and we're gonna keep all that, we're gonna keep max profit. If price is outside of our range, so if one of the options is what's called in the money, and in that case, we are, and we go all the way to expiration, we're probably gonna either get assigned the future or it depends on the different contract we're trading, we're either gonna get assigned that specific future or we're going to just get, it settles to cash and then it just kind of wipes out and we move on. Okay. But we are active traders, so we'll continue to manage these and monitor them and hopefully we get a little bit higher implied volatility in something and potentially jump back on here in the next few days to a week or so and find some more stuff to trade. Yeah, definitely, I like that. So thank you for having me coach with you or work with you on this, this is exciting. Yeah, well, we're excited to have you as well and we're just kind of feeling our way out for this contest. We're gonna do these contests more in the future and so we're just trying to make, and so you're our guinea pig, Matt, so hope you don't mind. It sounds good to me. Let the pioneer of the way. Yeah, sounds good. Well, we'll sign off here and we'll catch up again next time and record this for everybody to watch as well. All right, sounds good. Thank you.


Welcome to the drum history podcast. I'm your host Bart van der Zee and today. I'm joined by mr. Chris Bennett of bop works drumsticks Chris welcome. Thank you Bart. Yeah, I'm honored to have you here I want to do more drumstick episodes for sure I've only done a few whereas, you know, you there's tons of snare drum and drum set episodes and I've gotten a lot of requests for them and this actually episode is a Request by a great friend of the show mr. Terry Klein who had nothing but good things to say about your sticks and The handwritten note he gets from you guys with the sticks and it's just cool to have a you know get a direct referral from a fan of the show we include $20 bills to people that we think are going to you know, give us a good good mention on the website Good, okay. I'm sure you're gonna get a lot of orders now. I hope so Yeah, thank you. So Chris you make reproductions of The signature sticks of some of the most legendary players like Art Blakey Malouis Formerly you've done ones for like Gene Krupa Shelley man Tell us about this. What's the story behind making these signature sticks? Then we'll get into each individual You know, what makes each one unique, but what's what's the story with it? Sure.  I just wanted to shout out to those guys. Yeah, it's a cool product What were we talking about? No, okay Okay, so I Was in music retail for a long time and People would bring stuff in on consignment a lot of times there'd be older drums And this was back in the before time before we're doing internet So your only contact with people would be like the not-so-modern drummer Newsletter that was published by John who did John Aldridge. Excuse me. He did a great service So I would just collect these sticks and go oh cool These are old sticks and I just put them in a box And then I had some help from some of my drummer friends who you know be on the road and they'd Pick up some sticks that they thought were cool and bring them back So it was kind of a backdoor thing and I just held on to them for a long time I'm not sure if that's answering your question totally, but that's Initially yet And then the story I'm gonna do a cartoon of this so the story is in like 2005. I was playing a gig at the elephant room which is the sort of the premier jazz club in Austin and I had just bought a Zuljin a case is it even a K? It was one that Bill Stewart was using it was K complex dry ride. There were two additions. I got the first one so I was all excited and it's like okay, I'm taking taking this to the gig and I took it down and set it up and started playing it and it was like The only thing I can describe it would be like it was akin to like geese honking or something It was like completely out of control. I couldn't play it. So I couldn't get a good sound to save my life But it did annoy the guitar player. So it wasn't totally lost That's good. So I you know, I was disillusioned and every drummer who's kind of into this is gonna know the search for the Ideal ride symbol usually the Tony Williams, you know famous for and more K so I'm thinking you know and Bill Stewart's phenomenal. So I just thought yeah, I'm gonna Play the symbol and then I'll move to New York and I'll I'll get Bill's gigs Yeah, that's how it works and that didn't quite happen. So anyway, I I went home the next day and Actually, I went home that night the next day. I just Said they're going I don't understand this So I went to my little box of drumsticks and I pulled out a pair of Lidwig Roy Haynes models from the 60s and Back in the day drummers would call those pencil sticks for obvious reason. So then I set up the again and I played it and It was like, you know, this choir of angels opens opens up and I and it's like, okay That's the deal Except for a bill who of course could play on anything with you know any stick But it occurred to me then that the smaller sticks Were being made these guys could have any stick they want made and Any size any length, I mean it wasn't it wasn't a big deal. So I Played the Roy Haynes and then I found a couple other sticks that were sort of similar and it was like, okay So now we're in the 50s in the 60s. We got these guys playing in jazz clubs Which are acoustically, you know, we're in basements or Right So the reason would be He had a lighter symbol and the symbols back then as drummers will know We're usually pretty thin and had a lot of wash because they just hadn't evolved, you know in zilgen and The case we're just kind of sticking with this uniform Thinness there was no heavy medium Right. So it made sense because then you're Playing with a lighter stick and you can pull more sounds out of the the symbol instead of the wash That you would get with the heavier stick That being said There were certainly guys that were using like 5a Style sticks But it would really depend on the gig and and if you're playing with a trio or a big band So that's kind of how that that Began I guess what's amazing to me before you go on is just that That importance of the drum stick to the sound of something it's kind of like Someone's drum sound is usually made up of like the stick the head choice even the rim choice It's just not like by symbols by drums by sticks. You're good to go I mean you kind of you learn that the more and you were obviously a seasoned drummer at that point and you were sort of learning that it's pretty fascinating that the The amount of detail of each little thing affects to get those signature sounds of guys like Amazing like Bill Stewart. Sure Pretty cool. So yeah kick carry on. Well, that's basically the idea. It's you know and Bill's kind of like a 7a So I just started going through the sticks and what I realized and what you said is of paramount importance, which is You know, and I've been guilty of this as well You go into the drum shop and you grab a test stick out of the bucket and you just go and play all the rides and you go This one's kind of cool Okay, yeah, I'll play this one. Okay, I'm gonna buy this one you buy the symbol and You you take it home and while you're driving home Somehow the molecular your molecular structure of the symbol changes and you get it either to the gig or at home And you play it with your sticks and it sounds nothing like yeah, but you're buying so what that does is it puts Drummers on a continual quest to get that ride symbol sound That we all love, you know the Tony Yep foreign Mars, so It's a vital importance because if you're changing your symbols, you're thinking getting rid of them Then it may not be the symbol right and you as you as you mentioned It's basically an extension of your your hand, right? And you're so you're just using a Connective object Right and then a lot of that has to come with your your technique and how you pull the sound out of the symbols But you know just the historic thing really Got me intrigued because we all love these drummers and it's sort of like well We knew that they played this drum set or this drum set or this drum set But you're playing jazz. You're playing the ride symbol a lot of the time or the hi-hats That's kind of how it came to fruition Well, that's I mean that's fascinating because it's just another Element of the world that we're in where it's like yeah, it's the you could even go It's just funny cuz like they have so many details to them It could be like, you know, they're what shoes they're wearing to play their bass drum pedal Are they barefoot? Are they wearing wing tips? It's just all these little things affect Everything which is just fascinating. So it's cool. You kind of found like a little corner to kind of You know get in and do something really special so what I would love to learn more about is maybe we go down through the signature sticks that you've made and Talk about the process of Recreating them including who what was the brand that originally made them? I mean you can start with whoever but I've got art Blakey first on my list Okay, how did how did you do it? well the Let me first of all preface this by saying Since we're a small company a lot of the other stick makers as well We use OEM manufacturers because to actually buy the tooling and the lays sure you're talking so this the sticks are made to our specs by Initially smaller wood shops that turned out sticks for like silver Fox and There's scorpion drumsticks Danny Anderson Makes a wonderful heavier stick he has those made by pro mark and we've just switched over to pro mark so when You'll basically send the stick or you'll send the specs and they'll run some test models Send them back to you and you kind of go that way So jumping back to your our Blakey question his primary association would have been with a gratch Probably through the early 50s. I'm guessing maybe a little later Until probably the late 70s so what we did is is take the the gratch sticks of our Blakey's and They were somewhat inconsistent. Let's let's kind of So what we did as well as the Mel Lewis we take the sticks five or six sticks do the Micrometer stuff and the taper and how long the tip was tip to shoulder how the back was shaped most sticks now are rounded and Not in the back, but some of the older sticks would be just kind of cut off It's kind of a square and so we would all just try and duplicate that exactly and There's your stick. Yes, so interesting So that was actually our first signature stick One of our sons Takashi Blakey who's a lawyer in New York City has the art Blakey Foundation very cool guy gave us, you know the Authorization to go ahead and do that so Yeah, that's how you find interesting stories that normally don't make it You know to print or you know, there's a lot of stuff floating around out there People are playing arts drum sets and his symbols without even knowing it That's cool. A lot of he had a rather large family and some of them Got ahold of his drums after he passed and you know like pond at them. Hmm. So That's kind of an interesting Interesting thing. So that's Takashi told me that so it's just kind of interesting because every drummer wonders What happened to the stuff, you know? Yeah, I've had some episode kind of suggestions about that what happened to you know X and Y drummers gear after they passed away and it's it's one of those things where it's Who do I talk to about that if because if I could find that person then that would kind of answer the question for everyone I think a lot of people are looking and I can't even remember the drummer Maybe it was like Keith Moon or one of these people where I'm sure they're in museums and stuff But so anyway, that that's fascinating and I know we'll probably talk about it more later with the you know discontinued sticks that you're no longer making but it's it's interesting to me about how you need to go to the proper avenues and Talk with the estate of the drummers because if you don't then that's just not right and that's you know That's Forgery, I guess that's not the right word. That's using their you know dead relatives name to make money which obviously you're not trying to do so Yeah, now What can you describe Art Blakey's stick a little bit for us? I think you did a little bit But was it a what how would you describe it size-wise type of wood all that stuff? These are all hickory Which was sort of the the common Word I think that you know it was plentiful and they would use second-growth hickory And art stick is just kind of a normal looking drumstick. The tip is kind of a little bit triangular If anybody wants to look at the sticks You know, they can just do a model comparison And I will mention also that our Facebook page the Bop Works page I've uploaded a ton of vintage ads and vintage articles Just for you know drum history nerds because now thanks to the Modern communications we know that there are a lot of them out there. So yeah arts would be like a 5a Yeah, there's one and As far as I can tell well the makers who they used to manufacture their sticks again Gretch used Capella, which is a Company in New Jersey to do a lot of their sticks in the 50s and 60s That doesn't mean There weren't other people making them sure right So it's it's kind of fuzzy. So if we were to take the Sticks you often times you'd get the art Blakey sticks they would come in Little plastic bags, which is actually what ours do we just trying to Replicate that so they come in plastic bags and you can look At the ones that we haven't opened and you can see that there's a difference in length There may be like an 16th of an inch difference. There might the tip might be slightly different All those things which would drive everyone crazy Nowadays, it was just sort of standard for a lot of the companies and and Aside from that would be Fred and Diana Gretch, I don't know if it's Diana or Diana Gretch. It's Diana. Diana. We're at a Nam show here in Austin and they had a Q&A with those two and so we went into the little You know kind of lecture room and there were surprisingly few people there and I was able at least to raise my hand and go Something along these lines of well, Mr. Gretch. Thank you very much for being here. I'm really interested in your drumsticks manufacturing and sourcing from say the 50s to the 60s and Fred goes Well, that's a that's a interesting question That's something I was very involved in And we had a hard time getting wood long pause and That was it. Oh Okay Yeah, and so I saw the Gretch rep the next day and he goes Yeah, you probably didn't get all you needed out of that So that's kind of we don't really know who was manufacturing There's six at what time period but yeah, it's interesting and you know, I think it's just kind of a neat You know look in that time frame when The company like Art Blakey is obviously very famously a Gretch player And it just kind of made sense that he would play Gretch drumsticks Whereas nowadays it's almost like That doesn't happen. It's like everyone obviously There's the pro marks and the Vic Firth's and there's the big player the big stick companies a lot of people play But it's kind of been like segmented more where you know Obviously Zuljan still makes sticks, but they're with Vic Firth and stuff You know what I mean though where like yeah, yeah, like I'm playing Vic It almost seemed like an afterthought of like I don't whatever just give me the sticks Gretch makes them great I'll play them cool. They're not totally consistent. Well, it is what it is I guess it was just a sign of the times of like less computer perfect Things but it's just neat that it was all you're kind of all in one Well, because even Gretch would sell symbols and things like that because I guess Gretch had some Zuljan connections with the There was lawsuits there, but it's just a different it's a different era for sure.  I always say don't take it for granted. There's a lot of young drummers Or you know early drummers where you know, that's and be hey I like re-hearing things that I already know so go for it well, so In The the old days right and so a lot of us came up in you know, baby boomers 60 70s and if you were living in a small town or a smaller You know rural area and we're lucky enough to have a music store Then they'd have like a you know maybe a two-foot-by-four-foot stick display and Depending on what they had in there whether it was a slingerland or Capella or Ludwig you basically would just go in there and go yeah, these look kind of cool and you just buy the sticks and If you're an experienced drummer and you were like hip you would at least roll them on the counter. Yep But I never I Don't learn that for ten years. So it was just kind of yeah, these are work. I like these cool Oh, I haven't tried these. I'll try these. Oh, Dino Dinelli front with the rascals.  There's one. Okay. I'll buy that. Yeah, so it wasn't his big a deal I know that the pros in you know, New York and LA everybody Was kind of a head on that but it still wasn't a big deal and no one really cared what sticks Those you know the greats played because they were all more interested in the the symbols and the drums So it was just kind of like yeah, yeah, you need sticks to play those and I think the importance of That kind of came to the fore when you got guys like Vic first or pro mark was wet Before Vic, I think they were early 60s. I'm guessing I've done an episode on Vic Firth There isn't one on pro mark yet and Vader I'll do but Yeah refer to that people can refer to that episode. I kind of forget the exact timeline, but um, you know, that's just interesting It's like I feel like we've become more and more detail focused over time, which is good But there's something kind of like Nice, I don't know if that's the right word or like Uh like Nostalgic about just kind of like yeah, give me sticks whatever and like a guy His snare is sitting on like a chair because he didn't have a snare stand and he's just got to do There's an old picture of my grandpa playing where like I like a couple pictures where he didn't have a hi-hat stand It was like 1957 mm-hmm and his bass drum had a cinder block in front of it And it's just like and there was a guy playing a clarinet and I'm thinking like boy that that You know, I hope it sounded good, but just a clarinet and a bass drum and a snare. It's like I don't know about About that, but it's like it's just fun.  It's just a different uh era that's kind of Very nostalgic Well, and a lot of those guys You can find pictures of them like the joe jones Uh springs to mind Right as he was joining or right before joined bassy A lot of those guys were just playing these ratty drum sets You know and it it's yeah, so then it has nothing to do With what the guy's playing then it's it all comes back to your touch and we all know Joe jones was kind of the master of the hi-hat and So it's just kind of interesting. Alan Dawson in an interview Scott k fish who used to write for Modern drummer and has a little kind of website that you Might want to check out. He's going to interviews that he did. He was talking with alan dawson and First question he asked him was so You know when you're coming up, you know, did you guys like Pay attention to symbols or you know, if you're into joe jones Did you want to get a drum set like him or And you know dawson just goes no None of us cared about that stuff. We were more interested in the sound We wanted to get that sound. We didn't really go to the the brand name and The symbol or drums because these guys were getting an amazing sound And that's what they wanted to get and so As opposed to drum Thinking drums or symbols will give you the sound If that if that makes sense it makes perfect sense. Yeah, it's it's uh Plus there's no internet.  Oh, there it is. Cool. Let me try and you know I can you can now get that same kind of drum set advantage drum set and have it delivered, you know I'm sure it's expensive and it's vintage obviously, but um, it's just different but Yeah, that's that's a great point and Uh, let's jump over quickly just because I want to talk about mel lewis a little bit And then we'll go to your older kind of models gene and shelly. Um, who were both you know just Icons in the drumming world, so I'm interested in that too, but um How did you get them? I know there's the estate and all that stuff. How did it work with mel lewis? The same thing mel's wife doris sakalov had Two daughters so we kind of moved Through them and got the You know the estate and of course When things are working correctly and when we have Enough six Then there's a Licensing fee so they get a portion Of the fee. Uh, shelly man's wife flip who I think is like 99 Wow, uh and is still dancing She sent me a couple of shelly sticks. Uh, I think one was a pearl So we just took one of those and did it. Um but her Request was that all the proceeds go to the la jazz I'm gonna get this wrong la jazz foundation Which nice up and coming. Yeah, so There have been a few glitches where we've been down Uh, uh down production wise and have kind of Had a closed shop In the late 2000s. So some of that stuff gets Pulled around and Sometimes these people move etc. Etc. But they seem all You know willing to answer Whatever questions Like tukashi blakie if you the, uh, hollywood drum shop pro percussion, you know Bobby Eggers Guys that are working there now. They'll tell you pretty much anything you want to know About that because they've been there since the 60s.  So drum. Yes drum shops were like little communities And uh, it was kind of a cool thing I wanted to ask you to before we move on because I've never heard this term And it's probably something where everyone's going this is obvious. We all know this but I've never heard it You said before second growth hickory. What is second growth? When hickory's harvested and it grows back They're calling that second growth, which is kind of confusing It's like the The tree has or the wood is mutated or something. So it's kind of a Standard practice Is it stronger or is it what okay it is? Yeah basically They just think it it holds up better and So it's regrown after a timber harvest and then they wait a lot For the next batch of trees to come to fruition And That's basically it. Yeah, it's just more mature like it's it's second round. Okay. That's cool. I I've never heard of that term Now, you know as much as I do. Let's move forward here and talk about The man that most people love gene krupa How did that go down? I know you mentioned before we were recording that You did make them and then there were some estate things which I know goes back and forth with all these guys Um, what's the story with gene and his stick? his second wife was Pat basically Controlled the estate so it had to go through her um, this the slingolin Sticks that were going after were the ones from the 40s because that's One of the more popular periods for him And the thing was when we when bop works went down Uh late 2000s, I think I mentioned Uh, we just kind of lost the connection and I wasn't really going to go Through that again. So um our 40s swing classic Is the exact Same thing. It's it's the krupa stick. We just got you had to call it 40 swing because it was I don't know. Hopefully people would make that that connection. I guess Yeah, but well, that's a little bit of an insider scoop here where you know, if you want the krupa stick that's what it is And that's uh, what would you describe that stick as like lengthwise size? You know the tip and all that stuff They were basically almost like Five a's ish. They're about maybe 16 inches long So they're actually just kind of your standard drum stick. It's it's interesting How little Things have changed in regard to that Can I ask you like a chicken versus the egg kind of question? did Was he one of the guys who kind of pioneered in making it a standard drum stick or at that point Was it already kind of like the five a 16 inches? Was that already kind of a standard or did did it become a standard? after guys like him were using it I Think if no, I don't think I think prior to that. I mean, we're looking all the way back into You know a hundred years ago when right around when the The talky pictures came in And if you go back and you look at some of the earlier catalogs or I think a lot of his drum history buffs have Copies or archives or that stuff you can you can pretty much see in the 20s and 30s. It's just kind of the same Concept and so there wasn't a huge difference In the Krupa thing it's just it had a triangle tip 16 inches long 0.515 in diameter a little bit over You know half an inch more like a 7a And it it astounded me that And a lot of these guys as you know, we're playing cap skin heads which are not As bouncy if you're in a humid Uh a humid gig so they don't have microphones And they're playing with cap skin heads And they're using these sticks so It kind of begs the question, you know what? Kind of technique where these guys are using or not Technique per se, but it it would make you play differently. Mm-hmm. I think a lot of us would agree If you had sticks like that and we're having to kick a big band Um That wouldn't be common There there are a lot of great drummers in the world right now who could do that but it's just an interesting Interesting point because you he'd have to be kicking it Mel Lewis would be the same way he'd be playing in a big band, but he wouldn't be overpowering He would just kind of support what was going on Shelly man the same thing his his stick was very very close To the birdland Which I guess I should also mention so the birdland is the Ludwig Roy Haynes model That's the one we started with He had the pencil kind of thinner. Yeah, and so I had a hundred of those made at this woodshop in Maine um, and when vicks started he was using that wood shop Until he got going enough to kind of build his own setup, but That was it. I had a hundred made passed them out to some friends And the reception was good. So that's kind of that precipitated the other Models being added. So it took a while. Yeah, I'm sure What's your favorite stick that you've out of these signature sticks that you've played or maybe one that you haven't done and maybe that's a good transition to um The world has been insane. I mean it's 2021 right now. So everything's been nuts, but in the future You know two-part question. What's your favorite stick of any signature vintage stick that you've found kind of in your collecting? and then Do you plan on adding more down the road? What can people look forward to you know in the future? We do plan on adding more now in terms of the actual vintage Uh signature sticks We'll see uh, we want to bring the Shelly back And two of our models are actually contemporary. So we've got one called a Memphis R&B Which is slightly larger Diameter still 16 inches long um And that's got a tip to shoulder ratio a little thicker and it bears a striking resemblance to The Ludwig stick and again a lot of drummers will know this stick from the old days And then the initials Are BR so we'll leave it at that Um, so we got as close to that as we could then we've got another one called a rhythm and grooves which has a slightly larger diameter more like a 5b, but it's got a super long taper So that gives you the feeling of having some heft You know on the body of the stick, but then the taper Enables you to to not wash out the symbol. So that came from a ledi model Probably from the 40s interesting so Is it fair to say that every major drum manufacturer back in the day your ledi rogers gretch Ludwig slingerland and on and on they would sell their own drumsticks. Is that fair to say? Yes, okay? That's actually a great question um I think at the time well, I know for a fact that most of those companies were making their own So what happened when pro mark came in? to the picture A lot of these companies went Well, hell they're making sticks And it's cheaper than having the employees do them paying them And running the lays and all the expense where if you can get pro mark to make them You've cut down on number one the expenses And you have a company that really cares about the the quality of the sex so There are some I can't pinpoint the transition, but that's basically what happened there That was explained to me by tom osborne who Is the brother of donnie osborne? a big band player And tom worked at the slingerland factory Hmm probably for 10 years during that time. So he was there when buddy came in and Um, and that was basically what he told me. He just said, you know, it was it was way cheaper, you know, and cappella cappella, I don't know Collado may have been doing some of that So I think lidwig you can always see pictures of their factory Uh with a drumstick So I think it kind of evolved into a cost ratio and the accountants were going you know Let's let's get these from somewhere else and not you know have to pay these guys and Etc etc Yeah, but it makes sense to offer them. I mean, I feel like in those days you look at the catalogs like the old gretch catalog or anything I mean they offered everything like it would be like, you know Whatever we'll give you, you know, we have symbol stands. We have symbols. We have drums. We have heads You want to whistle? We'll sell you a whistle We'll give you Anything and everything you want just buy it through us And I know that there's a lot of like like walberg and auge like these companies who would really make the stuff Yes Which hey that still happens today. I mean there's still the oem kind of like like it's it's happening with you where you're but you're Turning it and you know making it your own product and and I know it's similar with keller shells where people say Oh keller, but it comes up a fair amount on the show where it's like well people order their special recipe from keller Doesn't mean you're getting the off-the-shelf stuff that we can all buy on you know their website Um, it's just how the world works. So uh, it's it's it's neat to know that that happened so long ago it just makes financial and logistical sense Yeah, and if you're if you're looking at A lot of those catalogs the sticks were offered, but it wasn't a big deal. It's like, you know, okay, we have these We have these marching sticks you know, we have these orchestra sticks Eventually they started 50s probably started calling them dance models um, so I think That's fair to say there they were an item, you know as part of their line But that doesn't mean drummers were always playing them. Um, I can give you a quick interesting thing there Sure So first of all you you got to give you know kudos to rob cook because I think without rob and his great books we wouldn't have had You know a fraction of this information so sure if anybody wants to you know Really get down and look at the I don't know you get down reading books With rob's books you get down reading them right you do and he's reprinted the leady newsletter Yeah, the topics. Yeah. Yeah, so And he's he really cares about that stuff. So anyway the side story to that the color thing There's a lot of stuff going online where there's there's jasper shells being Like the hot thing and better than so the quick story to that is Gretsch made their own drum shells until the early 50s the three ply ones and then they went to jasper in indiana to do that when tommy robertson of tommy's drum shop here in austin Bought the fives name. He went up to jasper to go Look at the molds and talk about you know buying the molds so he would continue And the molds were so in such bad shape because they've been used for decades jasper had them like propped up on Cinder blocks, you know because they were so funky and So he couldn't use them So he actually had to have shell molds made for the fives Which would be enormously expensive But the formula is the same, you know the tolerances are exactly the same the ply direction so You know I just offer a cautionary tail there because You put them side by side tune them up the same It's it's really not you know So anyway, that's that's a little aside there No, I can and I'm I've talked to tommy before and then it sort of Got put on the back burner and we're going to have him on to do a fives episode but There's certain brands where people are very very very passionate and fives is one of them and As we get close to the end here, why don't we talk about you a little bit more? You're a pretty innovative guy with some When we first met you were showing me some products And things you're working on what other cool stuff outside of drumsticks Have you been working on and anything else you want to share with the listeners? We've got a couple Stick I'm trying to do this subtly stick holder Things that we're prototyping Or we actually have the prototypes and the next thing we're going to have to do is go to Crowdfunding to get them Into production but I'm pretty excited about it. I wish I could kind of reveal more but it's I think drummers are really going to like them and that simply comes from You know playing a lot and Experiencing certain things when you're playing that everybody experiences and You know losing your drumsticks or you know trying to get in your stick bag You know on a dark stage and you can't figure out what stick So it kind of addresses that So anyway, that's what we're going to do Prior to adding more sticks or other types of sticks, but Yeah, there and there are stick designs from The before time where you can See some interesting ideas. Leedy had one called the super balance Where the actual back of this it would taper in the back as well slightly Which would make the stick balance in the center So you're kind of automatically getting a fulcrum there. Oh, yeah, that's neat. Yeah, so we're kind of thinking there I've had a lot of guys drummers in austin, you know come up when we'd hang and They'd play the sticks and go this is really cool, man.  Yeah And I love getting guys like you on the show with a different voice because rob has been on the show Probably more than anyone else and he's coming back on at some point soon to do another episode But you know, it can't be a hundred episodes of me talking to rob as much as I would like that So it's good to get other voices and I really love how you started out the episode talking about Uh, just like the importance of like man, this symbol doesn't sound Great and then you try with a different stick and then boom it sounds good. It's like I've also had it where like I didn't like a symbol Like like you said it sounded great at the music store. I got home. I didn't like it But like maybe my ear changed a little bit or I kind of changed Like I lightened up a little bit or I used a nylon tip or something and like You sort of evolve Into it to try. I mean and then sometimes you just return the symbol because it's not working out if you can but It's it's neat. Just how it's like. I mean, it's it's an alloy. It's like a a living evolving thing So it's neat to just kind of think about that and the importance of that and I don't take for granted that maybe maybe people don't realize that that like, oh, yeah, maybe the symbol I I have maybe I should be using lighter sticks Or heavier sticks So that's a great takeaway for a lot of you know A practical takeaway to try different sticks on your symbols And I think a lot of drummers are hip to the fact that you know, I better bring my stick in And and make sure So It's just a word of advice And so the last thing I wanted to say history wise is there's a website called Drum archive. Oh my god, absolutely love it. It is. Yeah Yeah, so there's there's answers to all your questions in terms of Getting in catalogs and you know Yeah, double kudos to those guys because You don't have to pay $200 for a You know 66 gretch catalog like you did in the 80s, you know Yeah, for sure And and I should know their names. I know people who know like I'm sure people we all know Of the drum nerd guys I'm sure someone's screaming their name and I and I cannot remember the the actual drum archive guys names and I wish I could but I It's drum archive com and as chris said, it's just like I mean, I'm looking at it now. It's ajax to ziljim I mean yeah, and everything in between and it's got just catalogs and pricing sheets and British drums and japanese and it's everything. So that's a great suggestion for everyone So and I if people have seen on social media where I post like an old catalog It's without a doubt from from there. Yeah, it's yeah it's uh really good resources and Can I can I mention one other thing that was interesting? Which was I thanks to robin flance who was a writer for modern drummer Um, and she actually just put out the book about jeff pacaro. So I basically kind of messaged her on facebook and asked if she knew how to get a hold of bobby columbi Um, who of course we know played with blood sweat and tears And a lot of drummers love the guy And he just downplayed his abilities to the fact that you know when I first read the interview It was like that she did in 82. It was like what I was outraged.  So he was endorsing fives and then premier then slingerland But for some reason he kept Using the fives which are now in mark knoppler's studio. I think in england. But anyway, so I said So bobby when you were like recording second album, you know spinning wheel and all that stuff I already know the answer to this but I got to ask it. He said did you you know, did you like Change drum heads to record and stuff like that.  No It was like no I we've got and play a gig and then we'd set him up and you know, so But everybody loves his drum sound. Yeah, right.  He's just like they don't care as much.   It's all just the passion of playing and all that stuff. Um It takes all kinds It does and I think we're all subject to you know way more marketing Now and Sure, I think Probably, you know, so some of that's just kind of inherent and you know I'm as nerdy as everybody else when it comes to stuff like that Even though I know better. It's still kind of fun. So it is that's why we're here. Yeah, exactly You're doing a great thing incidentally Oh, well, thank you these podcasts and you have a great voice art if I I've never told you that but I appreciate it I appreciate it. I um I did when I was freelancing Doing video and audio between kind of jobs. It would be like I would do voiceovers Uh for like friends doing videos and it was like good easy money But man, that's a hard Once you get in once you get into the voiceover world. It's um, it's good, but it's hard to get in um And I work at a studio where I record a ton of voiceovers, but It's uh, they call it mailbox money where if you get a good gig like being the voice of like something like uh Fifth third bank, which is here, which is I work on their spots It's like of another voiceover talent, but it's like they just you know, it airs they mail you a check mailbox money, um, but Anyway, I appreciate it. Um, so chris. Why don't we tell people now where they can find you and we'll wrap this up and then chris has been kind enough to join me for a little bonus episode, which Uh, I hope you're still okay with it. I want to hear a little bit about there was kind of a story of doing the buddy rich drumsticks and it was kind of a little bit of a Not controversial thing, but but like it's just a bit of a story So if you're still willing to hang out and share that story, that would be great Sure. Okay, so Uh, yeah, why don't you tell people where they can find you a good email social media And then we'll hop over and and get some buddy talk for the patreon bonus episode Very cool. Okay. So they can find us of course at the www.bopworks.net Uh, we do have facebook page, which I mentioned has In the photo section has like a billion uh vintage ads Some of which are are really cool. Some of which are are funny And there's some articles So, you know Even if you were never to buy a bopworks drumstick You'd still get a real kick out of just going through those those photos Yeah, and uh, so if anybody wants to just shoot us an email that's info at bopworks.net Uh, the biggest thing I get is people are going can you make A stick exactly like something or I need it to these specs And what I do to save save them time There's uh in Louisiana. There's a drum shop called la backbeat And my good friend Frank Kinsell. Yes And frank makes great drumsticks Um, and actually I play some of his on gigs that I'm playing a little louder but If anybody's looking to do a custom thing frank is the guy You know shoot an email He's uh Yeah, and he's knowledgeable. You can tell you anything you want to know about would so That's yeah, I'll have to talk we'll have to get him on the show later I always see him at the drum shows um and stuff and just a super nice guy.  Um, so Uh, yeah, everyone. It's bopworks. B. O. P. W. R. K. S. Dot net Chris thanks for joining me here today and everyone else if you want to join the patreon You can go to the drumhistorypodcast.com click the link Uh pay any amount of money. I think it's two bucks is the lowest and you get these bonus episodes such as what I'm about to do with Chris talking about mr. Buddy rich and the drama that came from trying to get signature stick made So yeah, yeah, Chris. Thank you for being here my friend. Thank you, Bart If you like this podcast find me on social media at drumhistory and please share rate and leave a review And let me know topics that you would like to learn about in the future Until next time keep on learning


Hello everyone! Thanks for joining us for this interview section. Before we begin, I would like to give a big shout out to the CTF team. Once again, they allowed all the players to dive in an incredible world. Thanks to them and to all the staff who made this possible. Hi, Eric and Marc-Olivier. Actually, you too are part of this incredible team as a scenario designer and a challenge designer. Could you please each describe what is your role? Yes, my name is Eric. My role as a scenario designer is to create an overarching story that surrounds every single challenge in the CTF. So that way we have a cohesive story to give more reason as to why people are working on. My name is Marco. My part is to create challenges and coordinate with Eric to create a challenge with a theme that merges well. Great, thank you. I have a question for Eric. How is the theme of a CTF created? Could you describe the steps involved in creating the theme? Naturally, CTFs are not necessarily a team. The goal is to have technical achievements, things that you exploit in different ways. Over time, what we figured out, it makes more sense when there's a team. The way that I find teams is by taking inspiration from everywhere. I look at what is going on in the world. I think of interesting stories. It's done way in advance because the team pays the way for all challenge designers. What I do is I think of a few ideas. I keep thinking about what could be an interesting NordSec team. Then I show my ideas to the challenge designers. When I feel that we're into something, we start with it. The challenge designers build around this team. It's a long effort, but it's always very interesting. I would say also, the team evolves over time. What was initially just a simple idea? For us, for this year, it was what if there were computers during medieval times? Just a one-liner, but now it evolves and it's much more precise. It's more rich because there's a story that is built through all the challenges. It's interesting. Thank you. This could be a question for both of you. How long does it take from the idea of the team to the finalization of the safety F, including the challenges and everything? I can start on my end. The initial idea was probably given, well, it was given last year. I think it was around last summer, actually, that we started to have a team. At this moment now, I have an overall draft idea and we pass it into the challenge designers. Marco? When we create a challenge, we mainly take the main team, the medieval team, and then we try to find a way to make it work. We play on words and stuff like that. Then Eric comes back with us to create a very big team that goes with it. It's not that complicated, but it's very fun. It's definitely very fun. Yeah, it seems so. Do you have any funny stories to share about the team creation and the challenge creation? Well, I know that this year, we're talking about medieval times, which it was different costumes, different way of thinking. We have a challenge at our work with Marco. I still feel guilty about this one. It's called kinder market. It's like kinder, but instead of finding a date for you, you find a date for your children. It's a very unusual challenge that we present. Marco was sometimes feeling weird about it. Are we really doing this? Yeah, we can do it.  Any team solved it already. I'm glad about it. The conclusion to this particular scenario is a super positive one. It's about building peace with a neighbour kingdom. In the end, if the participants solve this track, they actually build what could be one of the first steps of creating peace for North Sectoria. It's a weird challenge, but we always try to bring it in a positive way. One thing about that challenge, it almost never come to light because it took me a lot of time to make it work under a container on Linux. We are very limited on the resources that we have and the database that I used is very demanding. I think it took me more than three months to make it work. I worked a lot with the infrastructure team to make it work. It was crazy. Even a week before the CTF started, it almost never came to light because it was taking too many resources and stuff. I'm glad it came to light and people were able to solve it. That's true. With many challenges, you have to be careful with the resources, obviously. Yes. How many volunteers are working on the CTF? This is a colossal endeavour. We have somewhat like 20 challenge designers that work and produce challenges. Then you have all the behind-the-scenes work, people that coordinate the efforts, people that do the communications, people that do the infrastructure also. For challenges, what people might think you are also, is that there's a lot of people that work behind the CTF. You see currently on your screen, you see a Nordsec 21 logo. That's one of our artists, Jeremy, who does an amazing job. All the kinder market photos are from Jeremy as well. The picture of the children that you look at, they are done by Jeremy. There's a lot of people that work to give life to this event. It's such a pride for us to do that and to bring that result to our participants. All these people, how many tracks are created by CTF? This year is very impressive. Actually, this year, I think there's more tracks than the two previous years combined. It's absolutely crazy. We have what? It's really hard to say first CTF because it depends on how many challenge designers that you have. It depends on the time that they have. I know some people that do challenges year by year. This year, they went there. With them, it would have been even bigger. It depends on how many people that wants to pitch in. You don't have to be a pentester or somebody on the blue team or whatever to create a challenge. Anybody can create a challenge. This was actually my next question. In what areas do the volunteers of the CTF team work? You said you don't have to be a pentester. Anybody can create a challenge. It depends on what you want to do. If you want to do a physical challenge, you don't need any web expertise. You don't need network expertise. It depends on what you want to do. Laurent did a lot of the luck-picking over the years as well. You don't have to be a pentester to be able to do that. To make a good challenge designer, I would say you need experience. You need to do a lot of CTFs. That is when you realize what you like in the challenge and what you don't like in the challenge. Because a challenge that is too gassy, it's not fun for anyone. You really prefer to have a challenge that shows you where to go. From there, you try to work your way around it. The experience in your field, like pentester, blue team, purple team, web developer, anything can work. You need to have creativity, of course. But what can help? For me, what can help is all the mandates that I have throughout the year. Because many of my challenges, I take real mandates, real-life situations, and then I make a challenge about it. It's astonishing because you can find those things in real life, but it's true. If you work as a pentester and you see a lot of these things, you can make challenges really easily. That's something super nice with the wide variety of volunteers that we have. All these people have their own experience. They can bring into the CTF what they've seen. With the team now, we just put it into a different color. Even if you're doing weird things in a medieval team CTF, you're actually doing real things on the field that you can have to do. We have an incident response track this year. That's amazing. That's very blue team. That's very procedure and investigative, but it's real experience that you will get in the field. Cybersecurity is so large. There are so many skill sets involved. It's not one single set of skills and type of activities. We go from data science to web development, networking, and reverse engineering. All these things come into play, and it's thanks to the variety of volunteers that we have that we can make this so rich. Yeah, this is so cool. This field is so big. It's so cool to be able to have it in a CTF. This year, there is a beginner track, and it's good because it's an introduction to all those different fields. That's really amazing. That track, I'm proud of it because I made it all by myself. It was an idea that many North Sex before they wanted to do it, and this year I came in. I'm new to the Chinese designer team, so I took the responsibility to create a full track for beginners. I see that it's not that easy. Some people are still struggling with it, but many people learned. I got great comments on it. A lot of people talked to me about it, so I'm pretty proud of that one. Cool. Are there any challenges that you are most proud of? I'll say Kindermarket is one of them, but GoldConnect is one of my favorites. We made it last minute, and it was a team effort, so it was not just me, it was also Maxim Nadeau, David Lebrun, and Nicolas Lamour. We created that big challenge. It has six flags, including one that is worth nothing. It's just a meme. It's just for fun, but it's a very big track. It's worth a lot of points, and it's very fun, but we had some challenges with it because it's running on Windows, and it takes a lot of resources. I like that one very much because it's also based on a real-life situation, so it's super fun. When I found this in real life, I was super excited. Talking about resources, are there any challenges that you had to lost because they would take too many resources? We haven't lost any so far, I believe, but we came close to lose, like, Kindermarket. We came close to lose GoldConnect as well. We were close to lose, I don't remember the name, but it's like a three-container one made by Max and Nado. Most of them were running Java, and Java takes a lot of RAM, and we are very limited on resources per container that we have. It's crazy, but we made it work, and we are proud of the challenges as we created. We also tried stuff throughout the year. We have tried to install the SSDual on Linux, but it takes, again, a lot of RAM and a lot of resources, so we decided to make it on Windows Box instead. We've got a lot of challenges, creating challenges because of resources and stuff. Were there a challenge that was particularly difficult to implement? I'll say Kindermarket is one of them because I haven't played that much with the database that I used, and I remember playing with it in college, but it's a long time ago, during only one class, so I don't remember everything, but I made it work and it helped me a lot with this, to install the language that I used, to install the database, to make them work together and stuff, so it helped me a lot with that as well. This is amazing. All this great energy between your teammates, so I'm really thinking of joining the team one day. It looks really like a great experience. By the way, if there are people in the audience who are interested in the challenge or scenario design, how can they apply to be a volunteer? So there's on the website, there's a way to subscribe as a volunteer, so you can go in there. But of course, for challenge designers, we do like to make sure that we recruit people with experience, so one of the best ways actually to become a challenge designer is to win the NordSec, after just like someone like Marco, when someone wins the NordSec for a few years, these people are good, these people understand and want to give the chance. So yeah, you might be recruited just like that. For scenario design, this is a bit different because I'm working as... I create the story and it's one narrative and historically I've managed it all by myself, and it's a lot of effort. And I think maybe next year I would like to share the work. So if someone is interested, just hit me up and just ask and we can check how we could have this done. So yeah. Cool. Well, thank you very much, Eric and Marco Olivier. I hope the audience enjoyed as much as I did. I had a lot of fun with YouTube and thanks for sharing with us what's behind the curtains when you build a CTF. And on this note, I wish all the players good luck and enjoy the rest of the CTF. So bye and back to you, Sébastien. Bye. Bye-bye.


From San Francisco, extracting the signal from the noise, it's theCUBE, covering VMworld 2015. Brought to you by VMware and its ecosystem sponsors. Now your host, Stu Miniman. Hi, and welcome back. This is theCUBE's coverage of VMworld 2015 here from Moscone North. I'm Stu Miniman with wikibond.com. Real excited for the next segment here. When we put together the director set, we want to do some panels. And of course, from wikibond's core, we love talking to the practitioners out there. We feel there's no better way for practitioners to learn about new technology than learning from their peers. So, we've got two end users and a channel partner here of VMware. Talk about the virtual SAN, or what most people call VSAN product. So, I'll go through a quick introduction here. We've got Todd Huber, who's the director of information technology at MasterLot Company. Kenny Wilder, who's the director of infrastructure with the Fulton County Schools. And Chris Scaling, who's the regional practice manager for Fulton Storm. Gentlemen, thank you so much.  Thank you for joining me. Thank you. Thank you. All right. So guys, I think the two of you, at least you're new to VMworld, the people that have watched our show, we've done hundreds of interviews at these. We really try to help extract the signal from the noise. So, here at the show, VMware, last year, hyperconvergence and VSAN and the whole Marvin EVO stuff was like the top topic we talked about.  So, I really want to talk about your business, what you're doing, why you're looking at some of these technologies and Chris will be your surrogate for many of the companies that he talks to. So, before we dig into it, Todd, maybe you can give us a little bit about your organization and your role inside the company. Sure. Director of information technology for MasterLot. We have a global presence, 21 offices in seven different countries. We run, we actually run VSAN today in five clusters spread out throughout the world, three node clusters. And we've been using it for about, probably nine months. We just implemented our last cluster in July. All right, so we'll get into the VSAN stuff just for your organizations at 21 sites. How big is the IT staff? What roles do you cover? Sure, IT staff right now is at more or less 13, spread globally with a home office is the bulk of the IT users or administrators, engineers, et cetera, as in Oak Creek, Wisconsin. Excellent. All right, so great. Kenny, if we can go to you, obviously a school system, talk a little bit about the scope of the IT role there and your responsibilities. Okay, well, I'm the IT infrastructure director. I've been working with the school system for 21 years and we service 96,000 students and 14,000 employees. We've got about 40,000 endpoints of computers and 10 to 20,000 more iPads and growing. And I support a couple of data centers that are running VSAN. And we have about 30 engineers that support the infrastructure, additional IT staff for other areas. But we have a very large task, very dynamic, fast-paced environment where we're entering into a one-to-one initiative where we're putting tablets in every student's hand. Oh yeah, so my kids are going back to school this week. I've been getting a lot to emails about security settings. My daughter just got a Chromebook, so boy, we understand how much mobility and boy, there's a lot of stuff going on that really beefed up, gosh, when I went back to school, there wasn't much IT, maybe a couple of computers off on the side, but it's changed a whole lot. It has changed a lot in the 21 years I've worked there. Yeah, I have to imagine. So yeah, education is super important. Chris, let's bring you into the conversation. Tell us a little bit about FusionStorm and your role there. So FusionStorm is a national VAR. We're a large, large VMware partner. We're very VMware focused. I represent the Southern California region. We represent, from the biggest customers in the world to some of the smaller ones and all in between, so customers come to us with all the challenges that they have and it's really our job to kind of figure out and present them with a solution that works and VMware's one that generally fits quite nicely. All right, so when people think about, you know, there's this term hyperconvergence and it's very polarizing sometimes. We've done it with a lot of research, tried to help educate the market on it and sometimes it's like, well, is this an evolution of what we're doing with storage? Is this a complete way of just changing my infrastructure? You know, I guess I want to get to, you know, what led you to start looking at this type of solution? What problems were you facing? And, you know, before we get into kind of the B-SAN specifics, we'll start. So what led us into the project was we were moving towards a hub and spoke strategy for our locations and so we had servers in every location and that just isn't feasible with the amount of staff that I have to support that. So hub and spoke technology, we also needed something that was available, scalable and we had limited support at locations so it needed to be something that could be easily managed. Okay, was there a specific use case where you're rolling on a new project that was just kind of that centralizing IT role? Yep, just those three reasons. We had some legacy technology that was out, out-installed at sites that need to be replaced, so. All right, great. So Kenny, 21 years, you've seen, I mean, storage industry, you know, heck, there barely was a storage industry 21 years ago, I mean, you know, I actually, yeah, but so, you know, what led up to this looking at B-SAN and what was kind of the before picture? Well, I've been a VMware customer since 2005. Okay, great. Version two or 2.5 or something like that. And we have a virtualization policy that everything's got to be virtualized. And about a year ago, back last June, we were faced with replacing the hardware on our student information system and it was already performing kind of poorly on hardware. And the vendor and the department, our student information department were kind of resistant to let me virtualize it. So I put my reputation on the line, my 20 years of reputation on the line and I went ahead and purchased a three node cluster, a very large cluster, scaled on the server because the SQL server and that virtualization was gonna be 40 CPUs and 386 giga RAM. And I ran some tests against the current environment and I proved to them that it would run fast enough and finally convinced the vendor to let me virtualize it. And it took some of the processing, some of the things they were doing from 45 minutes down to about five minutes on their back end jobs that they were running. All right. Chris, I guess for yourself, were you guys a VMware shop that were expanding what you're doing? Is this complimenting, replacing some of the storage stuff you're doing? How does your company fit into the VCAN discussion? Yeah, I mean, a lot of our customers, what's happening is we have a lot of customers that are kind of coming out of stealth mode. They're growing rapidly and so a lot of them don't have storage expertise or a lot of storage expertise on site. So they come to us with the problem of how do we stay agile? How do we stay nimble and the small staff but yet we need to triple or quadruple our infrastructure to deliver this stuff. We don't necessarily want to hire a storage person so do you have anything you can offer us? And that's where virtual sans coming in nicely. It scales very easily and it's really no storage expertise needed. Yeah, I guess one of the premises we've had is the operational model, the way I'm building it, consuming it, running it, it's quite different from what I did before. I mean, the biggest thing we've talked about storage is no matter what you're doing, storage is growing super fast. So obviously there's cost challenges but from an operational standpoint, I just can't, if I manage a certain number of boxes per person, it's untenable because it's going to keep growing. So yeah, maybe we can, you know, talk, you know, walk us through. You talked about kind of the before picture. I know you said you're running three nodes to start. Walk us through, you know, who ran this project and what were your experiences? Oh, I ran the project with a couple engineers that we have mainly on network side and server side. And so... I'm sorry, Todd, is there a storage team or... No, in the infrastructure group we run pretty light. So it's just basically three of us that we're doing the project from an implementation perspective. And we just kind of scope it and scale it for the sizes of our offices that we have. All right, Kenny, let's talk about your experiences as to, you know, who ran it, you know, organizationally, were there any changes and what is the scope of the vSAN solution that you're using? Well, we started off with a one three node back last July. We now have three clusters, one of them a brand new 6.0 cluster with all SSD five node that we're migrating that same student information system too. And I've led the charge on all the projects. We have two VMware system engineers. I haven't gotten rid of my sand jet. I actually still have three, so I still have a sand engineer. But the benefit of the vSAN is the VMware guy can do it all. I don't need my fiber channel guy or my sand guy. He can provision it, he can set the policies. And so it's allowing me to buy all of this hardware and manage it with the same staff instead of having to hire more. All right, so I guess question for both of you, Kenny, we'll start with you. When you bought the vSAN, did you just buy, you know, were you an ELA customer and you started using vSAN? Did you look at the vSAN ready nodes? Did Evo Rail fit into the discussion? What was the kind of the consumption purchase model? I'm an ELA customer now. Recently, inked a deal with VMware to purchase your services on a contract. When I first bought it, I was not. I just- Their services, you tell me. Yeah, well. VMware service. Yeah. So when I first bought vSAN last year, I was not an ELA customer. I just bought it through my reseller of the servers. And I'm really enjoying that relationship because it's brought a dedicated TAM. I've got an on-site person from VMware. And it's been very beneficial to be in that agreement. Yeah, MasterLock has been a longtime customer of VMware. As a result of moving in and making a decision to go with vSAN, we actually ended up going on to an ELA as of last October. So, expanding our purchase and volume of software quite a bit with VMware. Just to understand, though, both of you, it sounds like the software you got, but the hardware components were something that you followed kind of the hardware compatibility list. You didn't buy something that was put together like the vSAN Ready node or anything like that. Oh, no. It was all from scratch for us. Yeah, that's kind of the way we started as well. At the point in last year, this point last year, there wasn't really, the Ready nodes really weren't really available. So, we ended up scoping out what would be like a series four Ready node today. Same exact thing. Yeah, so Chris, maybe we talk about, what's your experience been in the field? How do you guys put together that package? Do you have a hardware solution that you kind of have ready made? And how many customers do you have run in vSAN today? I mean, we have quite a few. I mean, there's one we did a fairly large, well, about a 70 socket implementation. We basically, that was one of the selling points was the fact that we as Fusion Storm took our engineering effort and we basically custom designed three different sets of nodes that address their problems. So, from like a small, medium, and high compute nodes that were not necessarily in line with what VMware has published for those. This is more directly toward what the customer needed specifically. So, as they ordered new compute, new storage, they could order from kind of a catalog that we designed for them. So, that really helped address their needs, the fact that they could scale at a very specific type of level with a fixed cost. All right, Chris, I'm curious, when you compare out there in the selling, how's vSAN priced? Is it something that you say, it's cheaper than what you have before? Is it something that most customers are saying, oh, I understand the ROI on it. How does cost play in the equation? There's definitely a combination of both. I mean, first, I think the hardware vendor you team up with, getting commodity hardware, it's always going to be cheaper than you're buying your traditional sands. But, it's also explained to the customer how different it is and how much money you're going to save on administration costs. The ROI is almost immediate because you're not having to employ someone to manage that storage, monitor that storage. Your VMware guy already does it and there's very little to do. I mean, vCenter and VMware really handle all that complicated tasks for you. Kenny, it sounds like there was a specific, I mean, use case performance that you were pushing, but how'd you, walk us through a little bit selling to the organization, you know, what are the results you found to help justify what you did? Well, the use case is, the application was running on 21 physical servers and I was either going to have to buy 21 more no servers or a three node cluster. Of course, the individual nodes cost more than one of those 21 servers, but it was a whole lot cheaper. The storage device, the sand was also slated to be replaced. I was going to have to buy a new sand. I was having to make a decision on whether or not to go ice guzzzy or to go fiber channel and then just consolidating it all down in a one box or three boxes in this case. It was an easy sales pitch, is financial wise. I just had to make sure it worked and proved itself on the back end and it came through and turned me into a rock star with my organization anyways. That's great. Todd here, what was your experience? Same kind of experience actually. I kind of painted a picture of what our network server infrastructure looked like before the project and what it was going to look like after the project and it was a fairly easy sell as well. And again, you know, after we implemented it, the management of our infrastructure has become much easier. As you said, you have one person who can manage the storage, the network, all that in one three-node cluster and it's simple. Okay, so I've been watching vSAN, I mean 1.0 a little over a year old. The vSphere 6 version, 6.0 came out early this year. They announced 6.1 this morning. I think it was yesterday actually, but you know, pretty fast pace of change.  You know, are you working with VMware on you know, any enhancements that would help make, you know, feature set that would make solution better for you? You know, we'll start down here. Okay, actually someone asked me the same question yesterday and I said, you know, my response was basically it's been a fantastic solution for us as of, you know, a year later, almost a year later after our first implementation, I guess I couldn't ask for anything more. It meant all expectations. So I guess I really didn't have anything else that would go on a wish list for it. All right, so just to poke at that a little bit Todd, you know, through deployment, is there anything that, you know, once you've done it once, you said, oh, you know, lessons learned that the next time I do it or if I was telling somebody to start in the first time that you might recommend to them? Sure, one of the lessons that we learned was we first put our first cluster into Mexico and ended up trying to do a lot of the work onsite in Mexico as opposed to doing some of the work at our corporate office and in shipping. So that was time consuming to be able to do that onsite.  So that has been a real positive bonus for us. Yeah, it reminds me of, you know, the early discussions we had.  You know, VMware helps us to consolidate that. Okay, so same question for you is, you know, lessons learned and, you know, how much of the roadmap are you looking at when it comes to VSAN? Well, lessons learned for me is I have to be very careful on the hardware compatible with HCL. I have to make sure my drivers and my firmware are updated. I do struggle sometimes with the OEM version of say a flash card and they have their own version of the firmware and the drivers. So I have quite a few lessons learned on trying to get all of that tweak just right. And as far as future or enhancements, always looking VMware, every time you come out with a new version, it's got twice the number of CPU capabilities, more RAM capabilities. Well, VSAN does have some limitations. There's seven spindles in a cluster node limitation. It's got memory limitations on the flash, which I'm looking forward to being increased. And I was just in another session I was speaking in where deduplication is beta officially announced today. So I'm looking forward to deduplication. All right, so slightly different question for you, Chris. So I mean, last year, VSAN really had everybody talking about hyperconvergence. So how much do you find when you're out talking to your clients? Are they aware of this technology? Where is it along the education process? And what are some of the kind of big questions that you need to answer? I would say, you know, almost everyone's aware of it.  What they're coming to us is saying, can we trust it? You know, is this a solution that can be trusted? You know, it sounds a little bit too good to be true.  And all the new features you guys are bringing out, like today announced to stretch clustering for VSAN will absolutely help us grow into some of our biggest customers now.  So, all right, well, great. Gentlemen, really appreciate the time. You know, last thing I want to ask is, at least for the two of you, it's your first time. What's your experience been so far at VMworld? What are you excited about? What have you learned so far? What would you say to your peers has been the value of you coming to the event? I would say the value of being here, getting some exposure that you may not necessarily get while sitting in the office, obviously. It's much larger than I thought it was going to be. Can be a little bit overwhelming, I guess, but it's a good opportunity to learn about VMworld products, services, et cetera. So, I think it's been a great experience. Yeah, okay, Kenny? Well, to me, an attestament to VMware is the number of partnerships they have. You just look at the floor of the vendors and all the products that integrate in. You got to have a really good product in order for all these different vendors to want to integrate into yours. And so, not just vSAN, but there's some other volume connections to just a regular sand that you guys are integrating in with all the storage resellers. And so, it is overwhelming. There's a lot here. There's a lot bigger than I thought it would be. But that's why, because it's a great product. Yeah, a lot of walking to do. And just wait, next year's going to be in Vegas. They'll be even more. Chris, have you done the partner exchange in the past? Yeah, absolutely. Okay, so VMware partner exchange, VMworld, what's your take on those these days? I mean, it's just like they're saying, it's overwhelming. It's absolutely overwhelming. And I think every year just reinforces the fact that VMware is the leader in this space. So I think you just have to take it in chunks. And my recommendation is just network with people as much as possible, because that is something that you can't get anywhere else other than here. All right, well, Todd, Kenny, and Chris, absolutely, there's so much to cover. We appreciate you sharing a slice of the discussion here at VMworld, and we'll be right back with lots more content here from VMworld 2015. This is theCUBE, thanks for watching. All right.