Double Pedal

[Tony Ward]

Well, for some reason it's hard for me to keep a steady double pedal beat. I always tend to speed up. Any reason why, how do I keep myself from doing this?

I play heel up.

[RHD03]

Hey Tony - have you tried just practicing with a metronome?

[Tony Ward]

No I haven't. But I'll try that, thanks!

[drummer]

That is definitely the right answer and the right approach Tony. It forces you to control your strokes and improves your playing 100%.

[RHD03]

Also over time you can increase your speed by gradually stepping up the bpm...have fun.

[Tony Ward]

Well I also get tired. How can I increase my double pedal stamina?

[mainedrummah]

Practice. Lots of practice. I'm not a double bass player, but I feel that practice can be the answer to most questions like these. Have fun, man!

[marko138]

Practice. Lots of practice. I'm not a double bass player, but I feel that practice can be the answer to most questions like these. Have fun, man!

Absolutely. Metronome and practice. Repeat.

[MrB]

Well I also get tired. How can I increase my double pedal stamina?

Bike riding helps as well, especially when the practice room gets stale. It forces even strokes, works all sorts of muscles and cardio, and fresh air and scenery are nice too. Just watch out for cars, pedestrians, dogs, the usual.

[xweasel]

Stamina + speed + control + power + accuracy... all comes with practice. Practice, practice, and practice some more, preferably with a metronome, hehe

[Drumbledore]

Absolutely. Metronome and practice. Repeat.

Exactly. And the patience and time to do it repeatedly. Once you go down the road to playing double-kick, it never really stops, great players are pushing the barrier all the time.

[jordison515]

Stamina + speed + control + power + accuracy... all comes with practice. Practice, practice, and practice some more, preferably with a metronome, hehe

+1

Double bass came a little more naturally to me than anything else in drumming, but i'll try and give a few pointers.

First off, like everyone's said, play to a metronome. If you don't like the metronome, here's what I used to do.

Find a song with a straight back beat. Like, a classic rock song, or hip hop. Play the tune, but instead of doing all the kick patterns, play straight 16ths at whatever speed the song is at. Make sure you're counting 1, 2, 3, 4, as you might get a little thrown off due to the fact that you're playing to an actual song and not a click. But even if you do play to a click, count out loud.

Second tip: It takes time.

I haven't gone a day where i've tried to do 200bpm for 30 seconds straight. And more often than not, I always goof up, whether I get tired, or my feet hit the chain, or my foot slides off (I have gotten into the habit of wearing shoes, mainly for this and also because I want to start playing shows with my band by the end of this year hopefully).

Third tip: No excuses.

There's a time for excuses, and then there's double bass . When you're playing double bass, it's easier to notice a mess-up; especially on 16th notes or 32nds. You could say that, oh, I messed up, I'll get it sooner or later, but double bass takes practice, practice, practice! Don't convince yourself that you've got it down for the most part until someone tells you that you have it down or you've practiced it so much you can't feel your feet!

I hate to be harsh but that's what I believe in.

Jordison

[Xoferif09]

Practice Practice Practice. If you get fed up, stop, cool off, and come back at a later time to retry. Also..I've been told doing calf raises will help you with control, depending on how you play. Couldn't hurt to give that a try.

[Drumbledore]

Any of you guys practice heels down as well as heel up to work on your control? Heels down really does force you to slow it down a bit to work on control. Really good when you want to change rates of notes from eighths to 16ths to 32nds. Or accents with the feet, if you want to really work on them.

[quikstang2]

I don't like to play double bass at slower speeds either. Using a metronome forces me to stay at lower speeds. Then you have to build muscular endurance. So just keep playing along to the metronome while you tune other drums, work on other things with your hands and play other beats on top of the double bass.

[trickg]

I'm going to jump on the bandwagon with the whole "practice with a metronome" thing (even though I don't play double bass and likely never will) but I also wanted to add a though regarding playing a musical instrument in general.

I've been playing an instrument of some kind for about 30 years - mostly trumpet, but I picked up playing drum kit at the tender young age of 33. Most of the basic parts of playing trumpet or drums came pretty naturally to me and didn't require a lot of work, but I really came to understand the concept of patience, discipline and dedication in my 30s. This came at a point when my trumpet playing had degraded a fair amount simply due to a lack of time on the horn, and I was trying to get my chops back together.

As I got back into really practicing, I had to keep reminding myself that Rome wasn't built in a day, and my chops wouldn't build back up in a day either. Every day I'd hit the practice room and doggedly work the basics. I think something that added to the frustration of that was that my drumming was progressing rapidly, mainly because I was still in that early learning phase and the basics were really starting to solidify. But, within about a month to 6 weeks, I started to get back the kind of chops and consistency that I used to have and that had been lacking in my playing, and I developed good work routines to maintain those rebuilt chops so that I don't degrade quite that badly in the future.

So here I am, 40 years old, and I'm still working to improve my technique on both trumpet and drums. Stuff with drums slowed down a few years back and now progress there can't be measured in days, or even weeks - sometimes I've really got to push the wood and spend a lot of time really working on things before I notice changes or improvement.

Last night was a prime example. I have a groove in this song my praise band plays and I wasn't really playing it correctly. The hats are being played in a straight 16th pattern, but the bass drum hits are sycopated, and prior to yesterday, I kind of just let my hands go with my feet, mainly because I needed to do something in order to get through the song. Yesterday I sat down and really figured out the correct groove and developed the interdependence for that groove. It isn't there yet because it's going to take a few weeks of working that kind of concept before it becomes second nature, and so functionally I'm not quite there yet and I know it's going to take some time before I don't have to think about it so hard and it feels good when I play it.

So, the point I'm trying to make ot the OP is to realize that certain techniques are not going to come naturally, and you'll have to put in the disciplined, dedicated work to get it there, and that sometimes there is no trick that can be employed to help - you are just going to have to grind out the time in the practice room, and it might be weeks before you start noticing any kind of marked improvement.

Good luck and work hard!

[markthechuck]

practice is the worst answer to get after asking a question but 9/10 times it the best answer.

[trickg]

practice is the worst answer to get after asking a question but 9/10 times it the best answer.

I know I've been pretty wordy in this thread already, but I'd also like to pass along a story that a college level percussion instructor passed along to us at a clinic I attended.

He said that not long after he got to college as a percussionist he asked his private instructor what he could do to improve his roll. He asked thinking that his instructor was going to show him some secret trick or technique that would do it. Instead his instructor said, "if you want to improve your roll, then roll - 10 minutes a day, every day."

No trick, just patient, dedicated and disciplined hard work toward a goal.

Try that sometime - 10 minutes worth of buzz roll at one stretch seems like it lasts forever.

[Zeta]

Well I also get tired. How can I increase my double pedal stamina?

time yourself. then next time force yourself to go longer (even if you can barely do it and are sweating like crazy), and do this over and over until you can handle it for 10 minutes, because then a 3 minute song will be easy

[Martinez12]

[ame="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qPFEP_stPGI"]YouTube - ‪Derek Roddys Drum Lessons & Solos Part 2‬‏[/ame]

[Drumbledore]

I know I've been pretty wordy in this thread already, but I'd also like to pass along a story that a college level percussion instructor passed along to us at a clinic I attended.

He said that not long after he got to college as a percussionist he asked his private instructor what he could do to improve his roll. He asked thinking that his instructor was going to show him some secret trick or technique that would do it. Instead his instructor said, "if you want to improve your roll, then roll - 10 minutes a day, every day."

No trick, just patient, dedicated and disciplined hard work toward a goal.

Try that sometime - 10 minutes worth of buzz roll at one stretch seems like it lasts forever.

That's exactly it. To program your muscles and memory, you need to take one thing you're working on....not a whole bunch of stuff....just one or two things....and practice them as daily as you can, not cram it all in in one afternoon. And not just at one or two tempos....you got to work on your consistency at the slower tempos, not just fast. Had to do that with one of my students earlier this morning.......again...lol. Everyone wants to be a speed demon, like, yesterday, but not all want to put the time in. So sometimes I got to sit there, almost acting like a producer and say....."That bar there.....you sped up..." or "your hands put in an extra note on that syncopation over there instead of here, slow it down so that you're giving the correct note value if you want to get it right before you rip into it"....or...."if you want get even rolls with your feet, get control of 1/8ths and 16ths in as many diferent groups as possible before we start to work on tricker stuff " .....and of course the perennial "you're rushing that fill, then coming in and dragging on the beat again. Work slowly through the fill, that's the hard stuff...." and so on. Yep, takes patience and a calm disposition on an instructor's behalf, but they eventually get it. Same with me.....I have no problems being my own unbiased critic when it comes to working on anything. But that's what you got to do to be good at this, daily practice.

[trickg]

Heheh - I'm about to add some more stuff to the thread.

Back in my first couple of years playing trumpet as an Army bandsman, I started to take a different approach to how I practiced. Typically a trumpet player's practice will consist of the following: (In no particular order)

Warm up/Long tones
Articulation exercises
Flexibilities/lip slurs
scale drills
Etudes
Music

The problem with this approach, for a trumpet player anyway, is a stamina and endurance issue, so while everything is getting touched on, the amount of time spent on one type of technique usually isn't that much and IMO doesn't fully work it because the average player doesn't have the kind of endurance, either physical or mental, to productively work each aspect fully.

Since I was already playing a lot of music throughout the day in rehearsals and gigs, and it was all pretty much under my fingers, I decided to change up how I approached my practice. Rather than trying to fit everything into one practice, I would pick one aspect of technique, and only work on that for the entire practice session. One day it might be long tones, the next day it might be flexibilities and lip slurs, and the day after that it might be articulation and tongued scale drills.

The amount of technical progress I made in the time I was doing that (just a month or so) was considerable, and (IMO) it took me to the next level as a player.

The trouble with practicing like that is that it really takes patience and dedication, because it can get a bit boring and tedious. Another trick I found was making sure to do offsetting exercises so that I wasn't burning the same set of embouchure muscles every day. For instance, I wouldn't want to do a lip slur day and a long tone day back to back - splitting those two with articulations, or even a music practice, was a better way to go. I also made sure that once ever 4-5 days I took an easy day of practice so that I didn't burn out my chops with too much work - I had to keep it in balance.

So, to apply that concept to the OP, it would be a thing where you take a day and the ONLY thing you work on is systematic work on your double pedal technique. We're talking an hour or two of doing only double pedal exercises to a metronome or click track. If you do that, say even every 3rd day, you'll probably find yourself able to do things in just a few weeks that you didn't even know you could do.