Bass drum pedal feeling.

Herzeleid

Member
I'm currently using a DW 5000 drum pedal, and the spring tension is around medium loose, I have my batter head about 2 full turns tuned and my resohead around medium-tight setting.

My bass drum pedal does feel light, but for some reason everytime I do 16th note grooves or fast 8th note grooves on the Hi hat, my feet/lower leg area feels weird and unstable when preforming the stroke making me feel loss of control to the pedal and makes me feel tense around the leg area. (I gets worse tightening the spring tension)

I've tried multiple drums sets and they feel a lot better and I dont have that sense of struggle and lack of control when playing those types of grooves.

Any tips? How can I make the pedal feel heavier without spring tension adjusting so that way I can control the bass drum better? Tuning perhaps if so how?
 
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Maybe your getting too much bounce back from your bass drum head. Perhaps loosening the batter head might help.
 
Which drive system are you using? When you say other drum sets you mean with the same pedal? Because if you like your pedal on other sets but not with yours, this would mean the problem is not the pedal setup, so as Bert said, loosening your batter head might help. Is there a hole in your reso head?
Another thing you might want to try is using a weight on the beater. I use a beater memory lock to balance my bass drum pedal. By raising or lowering it you get very different feels. You have to find an alternative way to make sure you keep the memory lock in place (remember it wont be "memory locking" anymore, it will be balancing your pedal), a permanent marker usually takes care of this. If you like the solution but still need to use a memory lock for it's primary purpose, try balancing two locks on the same beater, but it might get just a little too heavy for some.
 
Just as the stick is an extension of your hand, the bass drum pedal is an extension of your foot. However, the bass drum system is a lot more complicated. The bass drum has to have the right amount of bounce, the pedal has to glide freely and return. Your foot has to fit the pedal in size and angle. Even the angle of the leg has to match.

Each of these components can be broken down further. Spring tension is paired to the rebound of the drum head. If you have good bounce off of the bass drum head, either by tension of the front head, or muting, or by pneumatically tuning the base drum with or without ports.

The length of the mallet/ beater arm, angle of drum head to the floor, height of thrown is linked to your foot on the pedal. What you wear on your foot i.e. barefoot, socks, worn shoes are all part of this system along with the length of the foot board on the pedal.

Not every drummer is built the same. Some have short legs with large feet, while some have small feet with long legs. Some drummers never twisted their ankle, while others had multiple breaks on their feet, toes, and ankles.

After playing for a while you get better at using the pedal system, but you will still find some combinations of all these adjustments to be your best set up for you.
 
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