Comment by jefftk
5 days ago
[author]
This is fantastic! Do you have more videos of your foot-drumming? Or could you say more about how you do it? Are the pedals velocity-sensitive?
This is my setup: https://www.jefftk.com/p/making-a-pedalboard Four beaterless kick drum pedals. Another example in use https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TcQLBfuaNqs
Not having tried it, I'd guess your setup is much more flexible, but requires much more work to provide a really steady beat on? And so would be a bit less well-suited to playing dance music (the main thing I do)?
Thanks. I have mostly audio recordings (and even MIDI files from all devices connected to the computer). There are a couple of videos and one short on my youtube account (https://www.youtube.com/@RochusKeller/videos) but thei're more than ten years old. In 2022 I switched to a Mac M1 mini with MainStage and the plugins I still use. This post includes information about the equipment: https://rochus-keller.ch/?p=1268. The bass pedal uses essentially the original drum assignment besides that I doubled the snare (on D and D#, to make rolls), and reorganized the toms to three and used the remaining upper keys for cymbals. The assignment never changes, just the kit. I have little idea about "how I do it"; it just works; and I think it got better over time by just playing. Just contact me via email if you have more questions ;-)
So cool! The YouTube short is helpful, though it's still a bit hard to see your full technique. If at some point you recorded another video focused on the feet I'd really enjoy being able to get a better sense of how your technique works in practice.
Changing the kit without the assignment seems very much the right way to do it. No need to confuse your muscle memory.
Would it be ok if I wrote a blog post about your approach here, based on what you've written and shown? The general idea of playing drums with the feet is massively unexplored, and while I'd considered using bass pedals this way I didn't anticipate it was possible to get them working this well (which is part of why I went in a different direction).
I should indeed make a video which shows the sound assignments on the bass pedal and how my feet operate on them. Let me see what I can do (video is not my medium).
The "muscle memory" is extremely important, since the feet are working "blindly"; I don't even see them when I'm sitting at the keyboard.
You're free to write a blog post; I will read it with interest ;-)
A few years ago I announced what I'm doing on a few Subreddits, HN, Facebook and some other places, hoping to find people with similar interests. But that wasn't successful. I found an American company building and selling physical/accoustical foot drums, but no one so far using a bass pedal.
I have been using bass pedals just for playing the bass since the nineties, so the step to using them "polyphonically" for the drums was natural, but it took quite some time until the idea manifested and I really tried. Here are my first recordings after a few weeks of practice: http://rochus-keller.ch/?p=317
EDIT: Here is another recording from 2014 where I play together with a very talented sax player. This might be interesting for you because I overlayed a whole big band over the piano and even the bass sound and was able to fade it in and out by key pressure (what you seem to do with the breath controller): http://rochus-keller.ch/?p=962 Depending on the music I use a "bite switch" to operate the sustain pedal. I also made experiments with singing (http://rochus-keller.ch/?p=828) and voice to midi conversion, but that doesn't work good enough yet.
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