Material selection and lots of sewing...
Now it was trial and error time. Real felt drum pads from a music shop might have worked but at around £50 for a set, I wasn’t about to fork out that much. But pads are obviously the way to go. So last night, with bugger all on TV, I decided to make some.Fishing through the loft I found a bag of old material and, happily for me, some swatches of coloured felt that we’d bought ages ago for the kids to do various cutting and sticking projects with. I also found a load of that fake fur stuff they make cuddly toys from, perfect as the padding for my pads… now all I had to do was find the right thickness.
Click for larger imageThis bit was important as too much padding and a hit won’t register, too little and you still get a noise from the pads, which kinda defeats the object of the whole thing. So after a bit of experimenting I found that three layers of this fake fur is just about right. It deadens the sound of the sticks whilst still giving you a positive contact… now to make some pads!
Each of the Rock Band pads is 7” across, so I made a circular template from a sheet of paper to then draw around onto my material prior to cutting out the circles. The easiest way to get a 7” circle is to fold the paper continuously around one corner, then measure along the (several times folded) cone and cut it at 7”. Once that was done, I just draw around each one with some tailor’s chalk and cut them out. For the filling, I cut another ½” off the template so I would only be stitching two layers together with a third sandwiched between the two.
Click for larger imageNow this is all well and good but how’re you supposed to see what colour pad is what? This is where the felt comes in. Before sewing the pads together, I sewed a circle of coloured felt onto one side of each pad, to match the colours on the Rock Band drum kit. Yeah, I could’ve gone all the way and made the whole top section of the pad from the same coloured felt but I thought the felt would probably wear away too quickly.
Note: measure your circles every time… I couldn’t be bothered and did mine by eye which proves two things; I’m crap at doing circles and it takes ages to try and trim a big circle to a medium circle… and you usually end up with a lot of trimmings and a small circle…
Click for larger imageAnyhoo, I still wasn’t ready to sew my pads together as I needed some way to hold the pads onto the Rock Band drum kit. So the NASA space program came to help here with Velcro. The idea was to attach two strips of Velcro to the underside of the pads and, because it was sticky-backed stuff, stick two corresponding strips on the Rock Band drum pads so if I fancied an un-muffled thrash I could take the pads off and belt away.
Note: Sewing sticky-backed Velcro to thick fake fur is near-on impossible. The glue on the Velcro binds up the needle and you end up with masses of thread breaks… and a with a glue ridden needle it’s even harder to re-thread the bugger.
So after much struggling it was arbitrarily decided, by me, that my assistant should sew the Velcro on by hand. Serves her right for never doing the cooking.
