this post was submitted on 04 Oct 2024
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Mildly Interesting
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All you gotta do is play some Metal. I would imagine that the continuous double bass drums in stuff like death metal should probably get to marathon distance step count pretty quickly.
It'd be interesting to see one of these things on someone like Tomas Haake from Meshuggah.
Haha I've grown up jazz trained and subsequently suck at double-kick and most metal in general. We have sheet music for our similar precision parts like metal, but mainly entire sections where you just ad lib on a minimalist setup, never sounding the same twice.
It's like, metal is Formula 1 and my code is World Rally Championship. Yeah, I can fling a car sideways through dirt, but introduce aero and grip, my brain never got exposed to that, so it struggles.
You can stop reading now, but I find this next part interesting if you're curious about drums...
I can use a double-kick better than your "average" drummer (being that the average drummer sucks at or doesn't know double kick at all), but no where near as fast and sustained over time as metal drummers. But, in jazz and Latin, I've learned heel-toe and slide techniques on a single to do brief bursts with one foot only. It's hard to explain, but effectively rocking and sliding the foot to catch the pedal bouncing up on each stroke to hit again. The result is it sounds like a double kick briefly bursting, but just one foot.
What's insanely impressive is metal drummers that apply this to both feet on the double kick mechanism. I imagine it takes a long time to get their bad foot up to scratch, but the result sounds impossible when you look at their leg movement.
An example (no slide though, as I don't think it's possible with double kicks) https://youtu.be/YnFU9IqCTIc?si=AZKXNRvcdXjKDbYg
That heel toe technique stuff is black magic to me as a simple guitar player. I play in a metal band, and our drummer does that double heel toe technique, and it just looks like it shouldn't work, but it does somehow. Even being able to do it with a single foot version is insane.
I love jazz and have nothing but respect for Jazz drummers and musicians, in general. The insane amount of knowledge and practice required to play odd time signatures and be able to improvise is not lost on me.