--gear--
Re-inventing the basics
When Mark Steele returned to drumming after 26 years away from the sticks, it was as if nothing had changed. Some would see that as a good thing, but as an airline pilot who is used to constant technological enhancements, Steele was disappointed. So much so that he has spent the past nine years re-inventing the tools of the trade. Allan Leibowitz caught up with the self-styled drum revolutionary. STEELE, WHO DOUBLES as the proprietor of Drumagination Inc. when he’s not on the flight deck of a Delta jet, recalls that when his wife gave him a drum kit as a present, it surprised him that “so little progress had been made in the 26 years that I was away”.
His first port of call was the bass drum pedal, which, despite ever-increasing price tags and more bells and whistles, has not changed in basic form since its invention. “At first, I just wanted an extra note here and there, and I couldn’t play it consistently on a conventional pedal,” he explains. “I’m talking three or four 16th notes in a row. There is a physical limit to how fast you can press the pedal down to get notes.” The flash of inspiration: Why not find a way to use the upstroke? “So, I added a second electronic pad and started experimenting.”
The result was the TwinSteele Electronic Drum Pedal, basically two trigger surfaces with a beater in the middle. “The cool part is that the beater (on all my pedals) returns to the at-rest position between the two pads. No false triggering. The upstroke part of the pedal remains dormant when you don’t want it, and is always immediately ready when you do.”
Captain Steele
The result, he says, is that he is now as fast and nimble with one foot as he is with two hands.
“You can’t imagine how much I hate that phrase,” he insists.
The original pedal paved the way for the “SpeedSlipper”, which Steele says was originally a concession to the marketplace “in that it looked more like a ‘real’ drum pedal”.
“I did not expect this pedal to work at all because of the increased mass, but when your foot gets into the strap, you can really horse it around,” he notes,
The invention is typical of Steele’s approach: ”I design all of my things for the same reason. I set out to make instruments that help me play better. I don’t build anything that I wouldn’t gig with, and I don’t waste my time with things that aren’t compellingly better than anything else in the marketplace.”
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The Speed-Slipper is basically a conventional directdrive pedal on which the speed has been more than doubled by adding a second impact pad, a lifting device (foot strap or toe clip), and a drag strap on the axle (this invention prevents the beater from flying past the neutral position and false triggering the upstroke).
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