Quote (dysgenics @ Sat, 28 Mar 2009, 16:43)
to start yourself off on your way to 200+bpm double bass, you need to learn stretches - if you dont stretch AND warm up before any good practice and performance, you will find you have some pretty bad injurys that will stop you doing double bass, sometimes for up to 2 or 3 weeks. forever if its serious enough. so dont strain, just relax. even if your just playing at a steady 130bpm to start with, dont push yourself too much, speed comes in time not by pushing yourself, and im not joking here. only pushing yourself when your TOTALLY WARMED UP and played double bass speeds your used to for at least 10-20 mins. if your dont do this you wont get great results, and theres too many cool grooves out there to only go fast anyway.
Ill explain stretches when you ask because the fact is i still dont stretch all the time when i need to, and when your not over exerting yourself with continuous double bass for an extremely long time (5 minutes without stop etc) you wont really get any injurys...
So to start, you need to be seated slightly furthur back from the drumset than your natural playing position, if you have a rack you can just push your bass drum slightly away and keep the toms in the exact positons, but seeing as you probably dont, just move the whole kit away from you slightly, so your lower half of your leg is at an angle kinda like this:
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If you can imagine a person there, the standard forward slash has actually given a pretty good degree of the angle your leg needs to be at. and the top half of the legs really needs to be complelely as flat as you can get it, not angled in any way. and you want your bum pretty much at the edge of the seat with no legs on it, you generally need a pretty big seat if its circular throne because you want a large portion of the bum on the seat, without having any parts of the legs on it. BUT on the standard starter thrones (10-12 inch sitting area with rock solid foam) this will be real unconfortable so just put some leg on there too.
explanations:
- The reason your legs need to be at this angle is that you want your leg muscles to be as stretched as possible while moving, sitting like this will increase your legs performance and stamana while giving you loads more control at high speeds. low speeds are easily adjustable to in any seating position of course. and you'll get use to hitting things furthur away from you if your toms dont have a rack, its all easy really - but very important (this is the stuff you usually dont find out from anyone ffs)
- the top half needs to be as flat as possible to give you more leverage and concidering fast speeds are 100% ankle related, theres no need to make any muscles tighter by having your legs angled up or down
- you need to sit on the edge of the throne to grant your legs as much free space to move around as possible, no point in having anything interupting the movement of the legs eh
anyway hope it all made sense and i didnt babble on too much.
technique will be soon
thanks very much
u talk a lot about stretches here, what ones should i do :)??
also, are there any warm up things u do wen u sit down on ure kit or do u just play sum simple (simple to u, amazing to me) grooves to get ureself started?