What exercises/drills improved your bass drum foot technique and speed the most?

I’m trying to learn “ Good Times, Bad Times” by Led Zeppelin. John Bonham had some amazing feet. He could keep his left foot playing steady 8th while playing some really sick bass drum patters. My goal is to play along with track ( slowed down a bit) by June 1st. There‘s so many “ exercises” in this song, I don’t know what took me so song to finally sit down and really learn this gem of a track.

Another exercise I do is loop the last few bars of “ Hold The Line” by Toto. Of course Jeff P. had great bass drum foot too.

And one day I’d to tackle Steve Gadd’s “ Crazy Army”
 
What helped a lot with ankle strength and endurance was adding a few minutes of standing on a vibrating platform every day. I used https://merachfit.com/products/whole-body-vibration-plate during warm-ups and cooldowns. Felt like it loosened everything up and got the fast-twitch stuff firing better. Didn't replace practice, but it made longer doubles and fast singles easier over time without my ankle locking up.
 
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The very first band I played in was as a blues band with all guys in their late thirties or forties, while I was 17. I didn't know anything about playing shuffles, so instead of playing the shuffle rhythm on the hihat or snare, I played it on the bass drum with quarter notes and backbeats up top, just following the rhythm guitar or bass. Strictly speaking all wrong of course, but I didn't know any better and they liked the bottom end drive it gave the music.

I think doing all those rehearsals and gigs with shuffles all the way up to 150 bpm and beyond for a couple of years, got my right foot in very good shape for anything else I was asked to play or learn. Have never had any problem with anything doubles, stamina or speed related. All heel down though, still the only way I play 35 years later.
 
Paul Blood said:
And one day I’d to tackle Steve Gadd’s “ Crazy Army”
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Why wait with it, Paul?

I tackled it a few years ago and you inspired me to see if I could still play it. Its on bouncy Roland pads without sound, but if you're familiar with the solo, you'll recognize it (the version from Gadd's Up Close video from the early eighties)

By no means as fast as he plays it, and certainly not as fast as the intro to Mangione's Legend Of the One Eyed Sailor, but screw it...how often am I gonna be asked to play continuous sixteenth notes on the bass drum...I'm not a metal drummer.

All flat footed (heel down) and I kinda flubbed and improvised my way through the very last two bars, but overall I think I still got the gist of it. Which is the important thing for me...I don't learn stuff like that to play it note for note at the same speeds or something, but rather to get some of that vocabulary under my belt and be able to work with it in my own ways.

 
toddbishop said:
You can already play really fast in an uncontrolled way by just letting your foot twitch out. With some fooling around and sounding bad, you can gradually gain some control over that so you can use it musically.

I also suggest working on audible stuff first, deprioritize inaudible stuff.
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The main problem (IMO) is that a lot of drummers have difficulty playing the patterns correctly while playing different patterns with their hands, this tends to make them fumble one pattern (usually the feet pattern). The solution (as with learning most things drum related) is to take those 2 or 3 different patterns, then start each pattern individually, build the muscle memory, then, add the second pattern, then get them to 100% perfect and finally add the last pattern, (the most difficult part) and you might have to slow EVERYTHING down to get all patterns to play nice, but once you do, speeding it up should be quite easy.
years ago I saw a Mexican band (Caifanes) playing live, I was very close to the drummer so I had a very good spot to see everything he was doing,
He started a song that had 4 different (simple) patterns. I learned it on the spot (the pattern) but it took me a few tries to play everything together.
Now it's second nature.

The pattern below is the ride cymbal plus snare and bass drum and hi hat opening and closing.
 

Attachments

  • Caifanes Pattern.wav
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doggyd69b said:
The main problem (IMO) is that a lot of drummers have difficulty playing the patterns correctly while playing different patterns with their hands, this tends to make them fumble one pattern (usually the feet pattern). The solution (as with learning most things drum related) is to take those 2 or 3 different patterns, then start each pattern individually, build the muscle memory, then, add the second pattern, then get them to 100% perfect and finally add the last pattern, (the most difficult part) and you might have to slow EVERYTHING down to get all patterns to play nice, but once you do, speeding it up should be quite easy.
years ago I saw a Mexican band (Caifanes) playing live, I was very close to the drummer so I had a very good spot to see everything he was doing,
He started a song that had 4 different (simple) patterns. I learned it on the spot (the pattern) but it took me a few tries to play everything together.
Now it's second nature.

The pattern below is the ride cymbal plus snare and bass drum and hi hat opening and closing.
Click to expand...

There are different ways of doing it. He was asking about feathering the bass drum in jazz. The best way to learn to do that is to get a swing gig, or an organ/blues gig where you're playing a lot of shuffles, maybe a dixieland gig, and play the drum for effect. Like all the original people who did that did. Then when you go to play bebop where it's more subtle, the movement is there, but you don't have to wail on it.

Relevent: I just shared a quote from Billy Hart's autobiography on my site:

Feathering the bass drum is very important. Max Roach played 4/4 on the bass drum. Art Blakey played 4/4 on the bass drum. Feathering the bass drum creates depth and a certain mood. It immediately affects people pschologically. There are subtle versions of it, depending on how smooth the texture is: Is it cotton? Is is silk?

You might not think Elvin Jones does a lot of feathering, but he’s doing enough; certainly, when you think about Elvin Jones, you think about his bass drum depth. Feathering is not boom, boom, boom, boom. There needs to be a bit of syncopation or even clave in feathering, something more like a human heart, keeping the music round.

I don’t feather that much. Offhand, I think the only place on record you can hear me playing obvious 4/4 on the bass drum is on Don Byron’s Bug Music, an album that features repertoire from the swing era. But over the years, when I gigged with the old-school and deeply swinging bassists Milt Hinton, Eddie Jones, and George Duvivier, I offered some stumbling, fragmented approach to feathering, like going to a foreign country and attempting to speak their language.
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toddbishop said:
There are different ways of doing it. He was asking about feathering the bass drum in jazz. The best way to learn to do that is to get a swing gig, or an organ/blues gig where you're playing a lot of shuffles, maybe a dixieland gig, and play the drum for effect. Like all the original people who did that did. Then when you go to play bebop where it's more subtle, the movement is there, but you don't have to wail on it.

Relevent: I just shared a quote from Billy Hart's autobiography on my site:
Click to expand...
I believe feathering the bass drum is a nice concept to maybe ultimately top off your feel when playing jazz, if you feel like putting the time into it, but by no means, in my opinion, is it "essential" in getting how to play the music.

If you started out with it, kudos, you've got it good to go, but I've seen players, and I'm including myself, get hung up on that concept, while otherwise being perfectly capable of providing a perfectly good groove with just the hihat/ride and comping over it.

I just don't think it's a worthwhile investment in one's practice time to get that "felt but not heard" thing going, unless you actually started out with it from the get-go.
 
"Dribble" everything. Singles, diddles, flams, crossovers, etc.

Any exercise you're doing with your hands you can add dribbling to.

Dribbling is just playing a note with your right (or whatever) foot after you play something with your hands.

Many benefits. You develop your foot. You develop greater control between your feet and hands, but also in your feet and hands individually, since the amount you can stray off grid while remaining coherent becomes much smaller. And, especially at the start, it forces you to practice *much slower* with your hands while being *much less boring* than practicing at that tempo would usually be. This provides a good opportunity to work on perfecting hand technique and motions. As much as some people don't practice at fast tempos as much as they should, far more don't practice at very slow tempos as much as they should.
 
Sebenza said:
I believe feathering the bass drum is a nice concept to maybe ultimately top off your feel when playing jazz, if you feel like putting the time into it, but by no means, in my opinion, is it "essential" in getting how to play the music.

If you started out with it, kudos, you've got it good to go, but I've seen players, and I'm including myself, get hung up on that concept, while otherwise being perfectly capable of providing a perfectly good groove with just the hihat/ride and comping over it.

I just don't think it's a worthwhile investment in one's practice time to get that "felt but not heard" thing going, unless you actually started out with it from the get-go.
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I never routinely did it, except on swing tunes and shuffles, I do it more in recent years. Usually I'll sketch it in, not unlike what Hart was talking about there.

The conversation about it is real one dimensional, just a question of "doing it" or "not doing it"-- like, when, and what else do you do with that drum, and how do those things work together? And I don't like the idea of trying to do it as a vestigial thing from the beginning. Kenny Clarke and Blakey developed in the 30s, Philly Joe was on the road playing R&B gigs for like three years before he started becoming known as a jazz drummer-- situations where the bass drum is played to be heard. They didn't start out doing it inaudibly.
 
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