Grab your free transcription of the exercises in this video (it will be emailed to you).
I’ve had a number of new coaching students for whom fixing the kick drum was a priority in recent months.
For one, I recorded a mini-youtube-lesson off the cuff, which ended up being almost 8 minutes, and which we titled The Kick Drum Crash Course. This video got passed around so much in our coaching discord, I decided it was time to update my Youtube kick pedal houvre.
At issue: students often complain of a “sluggish” feeling. But everyone thinks the solution is improving their speed. It’s a reasonable assumption, considering that 98% of the kick drum material online or otherwise promises more speed, usually with multiples of BPM in the thumbail.
And while it’s true that you can’t go faster without solving some of the underlying technical, it’s also true that pure speed, which is to say reducing the space between consecutive strokes as much as possible (and maybe doing as many of them in a row as possible) is only part of the issue.
My humble thesis is there’s another part entirely to feeling dextrous on the kick drum, which is only tenuously related to speed, but which many drummers and most instructionals ignore: placement precision.
If speed has to do with how few mili-seconds are between your doubles, precision, (or “agility” I’ve heard it called) has to do with how many mili-seconds off the grid any individual stroke is.
If you don’t think they’re different or important, just listen to Clown Core’s Computers, which I demonstrate in the lesson. Isolate the kick drum part, and there’s nothing terribly “fast” - no two of the strokes are closer than an 8th note. But put them back in context in the beat, and if any one is more than a few mili-seconds off, the beat loses its “snap” entirely.
So what’s this mysterious bass drum skill that can fail you, even if, once in the rhythm, you can play reasonably fast doubles, or even triples?
It’s some part technical - so we want to eliminate technique as a bottleneck - but after that, primarily “calibration”. Because of course time elapses between when you think “I’d like a bass drum note”, and the signal traveling to your ankle muscles, your muscles making the movements, overcoming the inertia of the machinery of the kick pedal, then finally the beater “winding up” and traveling to the head. But our nervous system can compensate and anticipate that delay. Provided it’s well-calibrated. So we’ll hit you with some exercises to do that.
Finally, you’ll have to overcome something I call “the dead zone”, a tempo range where doubles naturally feel sluggish, because you’re in between “individual stroke” tempo and “elided stroke” tempo.
We’ll show you exercises for all of it.
P.S. If you like the theory and material in this video and would like me to take you through it one-on-one, I’m doing a quiet 2-seat enrollment in my coaching program. (SHHHHHH.) More info and the link to apply here.