Control Dig & Rebound on a Bass Drum

Video Transcript

"JOEL SIEGEL: So, one thing I want to point out as far as playing the bass drum is there are those two techniques but there's also another two ways of thinking about the way your beater's interacting with the skin. You can either, strike the head and come off of it with the beater. You can also strike it and dig in, okay? It's kind of like what we were talking about with the brushes earlier. It's not that one is better than the other necessarily, more often than not, you going to want to come off the head to let that head resonate and just produce more sound. Sometimes there you'll find that kind of deadening the head by driving the beater into it is going to be more the sound you're going for. So, check it out, here's the difference. I'll start with the heel down and start with the open stroke then go to the closed digging stroke. Here's the dig. Let's do heel up now, the same thing, open stroke, and here's the dig. You can hear it's accentuated particularly on the heel up dig that it really cuts off that sound. It chokes the sound and doesn't let it resonate. That's just giving you more attack and more punch but less of a resonance."