Or no tipper at all as I've been suggesting.

How did bodhran technique happen? Frame drums have been played for thousands of years and many cultures have worked out how to play them effectively - that Pompeii drummer must have been pretty good to be worth putting in a mosaic, and variants or descendants of that technique have continued uninterrupted in places as far apart as Sicily, the Basque Country and Iran. There's a picture of a player from 19th century southern Scotland who appears to be doing the same thing, and I've seen an archive film from Ireland before WW2 of a woman with a tambourine doing a less elaborate version of the same style.

Or with long drums, you have the whole military/danceband idiom that started with the armies of the 18th century, mixed in a bunch of African influences and ended up with the shatteringly effective sound of the modern pipe band drum corps.

Or across the pond you get all the multi-layered rhythms of Latin American percussion which make an independent contribution as important as the chords or melody.

So, there is no lack of precedent for trad percussion which draws on a long tradition to do something that really makes a difference to the music - heightening expression, energizing the dance, sustaining the endurance of dancers or marchers, drawing the audience into a trance.

But somebody in the Irish scene around 1950 decided that what trad instrumental groups needed was sluggish thumping with the world's most useless beater design which made no attempt to relate to the rhythms of the tune or do anything at all functionally related to what the music was for. Who do we blame for this?