How To Play Double Bass Drum

Today we'll teach you a drum technique and lets talk to you about tuning drums. So, the double bass drum pedal is mainly associated, I guess, with heavy metal music and that's definitely how I came into it. And, the three main focuses for me are articulation and accuracy and then getting a good sound off the drum as well.

Speed, obviously becomes kind of important in a lot of metal music as well but this is only developed through, first of all, concentrating on accuracy and then increasing your speed very very gradually with quite a lot of hours putting on the pedal. Here's the double pedal with the right hand main pedal and then the left slave pedal. Obviously, some pretty obvious things, you want both to be at same length, ideally you want both spring tensions to be the same as well to create a nice even sound and I personally think that there should always be a fair amount of distance between the pedal and the drum.

I've played a few pedals on people's kits, when I borrowed them, where the action is very very close to the skin and I physically don't know how you can make a big sound on the bass drum in that. The bass drum sound should be really big and strong in an awful lot of metal beats. It's not a particularly delicate technique, so it needs to sound big and strong.

Now, I'm just going to do a simple beat, demonstrating the use of double pedal. So, to round up the important factors of double bass drum playing are accuracy, precision and sound. And, once those three are happening, then you can move up to work on speed as well.

Try and concentrate on how your legs are moving and make sure that the calf is being used and you are really swinging those toes down on the pedal. And, that's how to get started on double bass drum technique.