my home made brush practice pad - took 20 minutes

A long time student of mine is leaving for university and as a going away present i got a good bottle of wine and a fat gift voucher for amazon. so i decided, after all these years of playing with sticks, to make a proper go of learning brushes. i've always had them around and played them my own way but the time has come to get serious. i love watching steve smith brushing and i want some of that so i have purchased ''The Art of Playing with Brushes'', a pair of good new brushes and decided to make a brush practice pad.

I had an old unused coated ambassador and a spare 14'' rim. i cut a piece of plywood to size and then cut 5 sheets of bubble plastic into discs 13'' across. these were then all sandwhiched between the head and the wood and i simply tied the rim to the wood. i used spares so it cost me nothing and took 20 minutes to put together and works perfectly. you can make one too...

Definitely looks more pro than my pizza box.

I've considered doing something of the sort, I've got a couple extra rims kicking about and some time, might as well give one a go myself.

Does the brush practice pad make substantially less noise than a snare drum when it is being played with brushes?

Do you mount the practice pad on anything other than a table for practicing?

Cool Idea by the way.

Great idea, and well executed! Inspires me to do something similar.

As for brush playing tutorials - there's a superb 2-DVD set "The Brush Secret" by Florian Alexandru-Zorn (he's a DW member - 'FAZ') that came out in 2012. Florian has a very modern brush playing style and is incorporating lots of linear motions.
http://thebrushsecret.com/

Here's the DW thread on that tutorial.
http://www.drummerworld.com/forums/showthread.php?t=88777

Almost all of the best ideas are simple Nice job!

bobdadruma said:

Does the brush practice pad make substantially less noise than a snare drum when it is being played with brushes?

Do you mount the practice pad on anything other than a table for practicing?

Cool Idea by the way.

Click to expand...

no - in fact i wanted it as loud as possible because it is already a soft sound though the strikes are much softer than on a drum. but the swipes are the same volume. the idea was to have something thin and light (i'm keeping it down the side of the couch).

i have a spare snare stand it would fit in but i'm just putting in on top of my cajon.

thanks everyone.

if anybody else makes something like this please post it up on this thread - would love to see them.
j

That's my kind of penniless ingenuity! Well done, sir!

The remo practice pads have coating on them and I find they work great for brushing, but this is cool too. Only problem I see is that I don't know too many folks with "extra" rims sitting around.

true - though i'm hoping to see their solutions to that problem.
j

I've heard using coarse sanding paper helps getting more volume out of heads. Might be worth a try on some heads which otherwise would be too smooth for brush playing.

Great idea Jason and creative!

First question I want to ask is how you managed to keep an extra head without being tempted to strap it on and beat the life out of it?

I guess that was my only question actually! Great idea man! Only hand made item I had was a self hammered 16" brass cast crash cymbal That I turned into a china. It was a miserable failure as are all brass cymbals hah. But still I tried

I'm curious as to how it sounds!