One of my students is a Metal drummer, which is kind of unusual for me. Part of our lesson time is workshopping methods for improving his double bass drum technique. I’ve had him do a […]
Category: bass drum
Reed tweak: filling in 16ths – 02
Boy, if you’re not doing all my Reed stuff, you’re really missing out. These things square away a ton of stuff that people generally have to put together piecemeal— I had to do that. Figure […]
Feathering by not feathering
Here’s kind of a funny video by Alvin Atkinson that was shared by a forum user asking about about feathering the bass drum in jazz— the technique for playing jazz time that includes running quarter […]
Four on the floor
It is said that, on the drum set, there are snare drummers and cymbal players— I would also say there are bass drummers and hihat players. I’ve always been a hihat player— meaning, I’ll often […]
Grooving with a feathered bass drum
A couple of weeks ago I made some comments about hearing some younger drummers, and someone asked me to elaborate on this part of it: [I was hearing people] feathering the bass drum in a […]
Max on the bass drum
An exchange on the evolution of the bass drum in jazz, from Max Roach, circa 1981, from his Modern Drummer interview with Scott K. Fish. SF: Back in the ’50s and ’60s jazz drummers were […]
A minor rant: Elvin’s 18
In Elvin Jones’s 1982 Modern Drummer interview, Rick Mattingly asked him about his use of an 18″ bass drum: RM: I’ve heard various explanations of why jazz drummers started using 18″ bass drums. Some people […]
Bass drum rhythms for pad practice
This is a page of bass drum rhythms I use for pad practice— I have one of those Gibraltar bass drum practice pads I sometimes use. These are good for anything with a running 8th […]
This / not this: what’s a bass drum for?
First, an eerily-passionless video demonstrating the manipulation of a piece of machinery: a pedal mechanism, which is attached to a product called “a bass drum.” We are left to speculate about what purpose these space […]
Mickey Roker on the bass drum
Mickey Roker is kind of an under-appreciated player— by me, too. We often focus on the ultra-modern star-type players, but he was a very hardworking musician in his day, and there’s a lot to learn […]
DBMITW: my fat bass drum
Just sharing a little piece of my own development here. From the early 90’s, until I finally submitted to the too-soft, you-don’t-really-want-drums-on-this-gig-do-you craze of the mid-oughts, I played a 20″ Gretsch bass drum with Remo […]
Making bass drum punctuations while feathering
A couple of the problems I have with the idea of playing time with the bass drum (“feathering”) in jazz are: 1) it’s easy to play the feathered notes too loud— a very hokey thing […]