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Today, a meditation on kick drum technique. I’ve been thinking a lot about a Nassim Taleb mental model called “teaching birds to fly”. I recognized what this was immediately, because it’s rampant in drums.
Loosely defined, it means “instruction led by the imperative to have something to talk about, not by the need to solve a real problem”. One imagines teaching a woodpecker the “stem twist technique”, or somebody developing an alternate way to flap wings that works just as well but is harder to learn.
Marketing is rife with teaching birds to fly. If you’ve got a course or software product to sell, it’s important that your prospect believes your solution is the only way he’ll solve his problem; otherwise he’ll ask the question “what do I need you for”?
Such is the ecosystem we have with kick-pedal playing, where people are developing all sorts of crazy and difficult techniques just to do basic things. (Metal drummers, with real problems to solve, appear to be the exception, and their technique has remarkable convergence around a small set of simple best practices.)
So when I surveyed my audience about their biggest issues playing the kick drum, the answers I got were things like “can’t balance on the throne”, “can’t find the right spring tension”, “need a way to carry my kick pedal with me to gigs”, and “can’t play both loud and soft without tension”.
If they’d said “I can’t play double-kick 32nds above a certain tempo and keep them clean”, I would’ve sent them to 66Samus. But 98% of the problems people described were (1) problems I used to have which (2) I solved with one variation to my technique.
As always, if it’s working for you, don’t change it (I’m not trying to teach birds to fly), but if you have any of the above issues, you might want to consider that they have a single source: your kick drum technique. And further, that a simple fix (though there will be a learning/adjustment curve) can do away with most of them.
In this lesson, the simple technique fix that will hopefully solve most of your basic kick drum problems.
Enjoy.