Bass Drum Technique
First off, this is no authoritative tract on how to play a bass drum. There are books on that, which cover considerably more nuance than I'm about to. However, this is intended to answer a couple of quick questions:
- Which is better, heel-up or heel-down?
- How do you do those fast sequences of strokes with one foot?
I get asked both of those a fair bit, so it seems a suitable topic for an article here. Keeping things brief, here's my answers.
Heel-up vs Heel-down
My opinion? Neither, they're both good. Not only that, I don't think just saying “Heel up” is very specific. There's a bunch of ways of playing bass drum that involve lifting your heel, and I only use one or two of them. Now, there are LOTS of good ways of playing bass drum. Billy Cobham plays almost exclusively heel down, while Vinnie Colaiuta plays heel up most of the time. But I personally find that each of them is good for different things.
Why play heel down?
If you're going to play quietly and you don't want to play a lot of fast sequential strokes, heel down gives excellent control over the beater and lets you relax between strokes. It also helps your balance as you don't need to shift the weight in your legs around.
Why play heel up?
For playing with power, heel up is king. Applying force from lower-leg muscles is just not going to cut it when you put it up against dropping the weight of your whole leg on the pedal. And for playing fast sequences of strokes I find it easier to use a heel-up technique called the “Foot-Leg” stroke. I'll get onto that in a second, but first I want to talk a little about why I think saying “Heel-up” is not sufficiently detailed.
It all comes down to your rest position. Some players like Mike Portnoy and Vinnie Colaiuta rest their leg between strokes by putting the weight of their leg on the pedal, pressing the beater into the bass drum head. This is what people commonly mean when they talk about heel-up playing. Personally, I don't like it and I don't generally do it. Why? Well, if you're pushing the beater into the head then your foot is tense. Try it. You can't relax the muscles in your leg while holding the beater against the head.
That's not necessarily all bad. It has a certain sound, and if it works for you then that's fine. However it does tend to make your leg very tired very fast, and tension in one part of your body has a nasty habit of spreading. Vinnie Colaiuta does a great job of relaxing everywhere apart from where he needs to be tense to execute this technique, and he's developed it to a very high level — so all power to him! However, the same is true of Billy Cobham and heel-down playing, and most of us will probably agree that heel up gives us a few more options for playing harder.
The other way of playing heel up involves having a heel-down rest position. If you're not playing bass drum, your foot is resting on the pedal in the same way a heel-down player would. If you are playing, it moves between heel-up and heel-down positions whenever it gets a chance to rest. This allows you to relax more while playing.
Two kinds of stroke
In order to play using this technique, you need to learn two kinds of heel-up strokes. Considering my mention of a “Foot-leg” technique above, you're probably not going to be surprised to find out they're called the “Foot stroke” and the “Leg stroke”. First up:
The leg stroke
This stroke starts with your foot resting on the bass drum pedal as if you were playing heel-down. Your ankle then pivots forward a little, but not enough to push the beater into the head. As you do this, you lift your leg, “rolling” the leg up on the ball of the foot. Once your foot gets to a suitable downward angle, stop pivoting your ankle. This will allow the beater to fall back to its furthest point from the drum. At this point, you drop the weight of your leg onto the pedal, driving it into the bass drum. That's your stroke. However, there's an extra movement: As the beater hits the drum, relax your ankle and let it fall back to a heel-down position, releasing the beater from the head almost as soon as it touches. All of this has to happen fast. You can't slow it down, unfortunately, without tensing up. You'll know when you're doing it right, it feels like one consistent movement and is very relaxed without losing power. It's quite hard to explain this in writing, so I've made a video:
High Quality (DSL) / Low Quality (56k)
The foot stroke
Next up comes the foot stroke. You'll need this when you want to play more than one note in sequence, at a moderate to fast tempo. The foot stroke basically involves lifting your heel off the pedal (to the same position you would be at when at the top of your leg stroke, before you drop your leg) and then playing bounce strokes with your ankle. Don't move your leg, and you will need to keep it lifted for the duration of your sequence of foot strokes. To practice this stroke, work on it in isolation as shown in the following video:
High Quality (DSL) / Low Quality (56k)
Combinations
Once you've got the hang of both strokes, you need to learn to combine them. Here's the rules: Every series of foot strokes must by ended by a leg stroke. You never stop with your foot up in the air, it finishes in a rest position. Next up, a good general rule of thumb is that at moderate speeds (i.e, 70-120bpm) you can generally get away with playing 8th notes or longer as leg strokes (so, for example, “We will rock you” would be all leg strokes), but 16th notes or faster would be played as a series of foot strokes ended by a leg stroke. To play a swift double you would lift your foot as normal for a leg stroke, play one foot stroke with your leg up in the air, then drop the leg back to the rest position. Here's another video:
High Quality (DSL) / Low Quality (56k)
What next?
Of course, mastering that doesn't help the fact that you can't do it while playing things with another two or three limbs. There are co-ordination problems to be worked through, and for that you can either wait until I can muster enough time to write another one of these things or you can come see me for a lesson — assuming you're sufficiently nearby.
