Mike Johnston and Heel Down

G

gazzdw

Member
Hi Guys,
I am sure alot of you are aware of Mike Johnston and his incredible lessons. If not I highly recommend his website for lessons (mikeslessons.com). He is also known for his speed and endurance on his right foot, which he uses heel up with.
The problem I am having is that because I have to subscribe to his live lessons and their too expensive for me to afford...I cant ask him how he would recommend building speed and endurance with heel down. So I was wondering if any of you guys use it, and if so, have you also reached a brick wall of speed and endurance that you cant seem to get past? Advice would be greatly appriciated.
Many thanks
Gazz
 
I'm a live lesson subscriber and mike gets asked about foot speed all the time. The advice he gives is to play RRKK for 1 min then LLKK for 1 min then both hands KK for 1 minute as 16 th notes to a metronome. Do that a couple of times a week then increase 5bpm.

He also has a speed chart out via vater. With loads of exercises for developing hand AND foot speed and it's free. Basically he says just go to your local music store and ask them to call vater and order the mike Johnston speed chart and vater will send the store some for free (anywhere in the world) and he also said the music store doesn't have to stock vater products to order the speed charts

hope some of that was useful
 
Grace :) said:
I'm a live lesson subscriber and mike gets asked about foot speed all the time. The advice he gives is to play RRKK for 1 min then LLKK for 1 min then both hands KK for 1 minute as 16 th notes to a metronome. Do that a couple of times a week then increase 5bpm.

He also has a speed chart out via vater. With loads of exercises for developing hand AND foot speed and it's free. Basically he says just go to your local music store and ask them to call vater and order the mike Johnston speed chart and vater will send the store some for free (anywhere in the world) and he also said the music store doesn't have to stock vater products to order the speed charts

hope some of that was useful
Click to expand...

Any idea what sort of bpm you should be able to get up to over time doing this ??
 
As fast as you want to take it i suppose. I started at 120 bpm and now can do it 180 bpm. admittedly i stopped working on this so much when i got to 180 bpm because there were other things i wanted to work on. If you keep pushing up the bpm you should keep seeing results (you might have to reduce the increase in tempo to 2bpm a week when you get to really high tempos or it will become too fast to keep up with).


i think mike himself goes up to 230 bpm and higher -im not sure what his top speed is but obviously his bass drum speed is something he has been working on for years and years.
 
I'm also a subscriber and I use the RLKK pattern all the time in my playing for a fill.

Mike is a heel up kind of guy with the beater resting on the batter head. I only realised I has a heel down guy when I went to one of his camps. I thought because all my doubles and triples with with heel up, that I was a heel up BUT no. I never leave the beater on the head.

Either way it doesn't affect your ability to perform quick doubles on your Kick.

As an aside he also suggests practicing RKRKRKRK and LKLKLKLK as well. This is surprisingly difficult to do at speed at first.

As always start slowly and gradually built your speed up.

Davo
 
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