First things first - grab your free show notes here.
This week we have a block-and-tackle kick drum lesson.
Little metaphor: stand-up comedy. As I’ve heard on countless comedy podcasts, you’ll start killing in most situations many years before you get on top of all the reasons you might bomb. Until you’re like ten years in, there’s always the possibility you might bomb and not know why. It’s simply impossible to get on top of so many facets in this complex system of mood, material, room acoustics, crowd makeup, etc. in a way that you can engineer success in a short period of time.
And so it is with the kick drum.
And this is why I, and my students, continue to make discoveries long after most of us can be assured of a decent kick drum performance in most situations.
But what about when you suddenly start getting “extra” sounds between your intended strokes? You can go years without that, then suddenly somebody changes something about your pedal, and all of a sudden it’s “double bouncing”.
So I thought it was time for my pretty-close-to-annual check-in on the kick drum, to deep dive on the thing I’ve realized is the culprit for so much suffering: the spring tension.
Why does it all come back to spring tension?
How do you tell if your is set ideally?
What does that mean for technique and setup?
And how do you stop those pesky accidental ghost strokes.
We’ll get into all of this in the video.
Hope you enjoy!