Improve your Rock Band Drums Ability

The great thing about Rock Band drums is that it is the most realistic part of the game, and certainly a lot more realistic than pressing down buttons on the guitar controller, and that can also be the most frustrating part of the game.

The most seasoned video players have likely never had to focus so much on rhythm technique, nor have they likely ever used their feet in conjunction with a game (with the exception of racing simulation fans).

So what will set you apart from the rest to launch your abilities above that of your average Rock Band drummer? Practice and Technique.

What seems to be the most difficult part of the Rock Band drums for most people is working the foot or bass pedal, so that is where we will begin our journey…

Bass Pedal Technique

It’s completely understandable that you would have less control in your feet compared to your hands. Walking and standing may come naturally to you, but how often do you use your feet for precision excercises and control? So good bass pedal technique is a must, as is practice of the technique. When you practice your technique you will be able to play faster and with greater skill.

There are two main schools for bass pedal technique, and they are “heel down” and “heel up”. Those are simple and descriptive terms that mean you are either playing with your heel down on the bass pedal, or with your heel up in the air.

Heel Down

In the Heel Down technique, you are using your calf muscles to press down with your foot on the pedal. As strong as your calf muscles may be, they’re likely not nearly as strong as your thigh muscles, so the heel down technique is mostly employed during slower (or if you’re translating this to “real” drums, it’s also employed for ’softer’ parts where you don’t need to hit the drum as hard).

Heel Up

In the Heel Up technique the heel of your foot is up off of the floor and you use your thigh muscles to lower and raise your foot, with the front of your foot making contact with the bass pedal. For new drummers, this is a good technique to employ for drum parts where you need to hit a lot of notes at a fast speed. But don’t get too comfortable with using only the foot up technique because with practice you can play fast with the heel down technique as well.

Practice both the heel down and heel up techniques to find out what works for you. When you know what you’re comfortable with, force yourself to improve what you might be having trouble with through practice!

Bass Pedal Speed

To work on your speed is fairly simple in theory, just press your foot down and lift it up, do it fast, and repeat. As a bonus, the bass pedal is spring loaded to bring the pedal back up, so in essence it is doing half of the work for you.

To allow the bass pedal to do it’s job, you need to get your foot out of the way as quick as possible. You don’t need to thrust your knee in to the air or lift your foot off of the pedal to get the job done, just practice easing up on the pedal as soon as it registers a hit on the drum set so that you can quickly press down again. As you don’t need to hit the pedal hard in Rock Band to register a hit, practice easing up just a little and quickly pressing down again. Practice this in both the heel up and heel down techniques.

Advanced Bass Pedal Techniques

Now that you’re getting comfortable with the different heel techniques and getting your speed up, here are some advanced techniques to improve your bass pedal skill further.

1) There’s no need to raise the kick pedal completely between hits, try raising your foot just slightly. By using minimal movements, it will require less effort and will help to further increase your speed as well as precision

2) Try making a conscious effort to keep the pedal completely down between hits, only raising it before you need to hit the drum. Once this becomes comfortable to you, everything becomes much easier and you will find that your foot is being controlled subconciously, allowing you to focus on your hands. If you’re employing mostly a heel up technique, you can keep the toe of your foot holding the pedal down while still keeping your heel up. As a bonus, if you find that the muscles around your shin are becoming sore, there is a reason for that - it is because you’re constantly holding your foot up and using the muscle. When you sit in a chair with your foot on the floor, do you keep either your heel or toe in the air, or do you keep it flat on the ground?

3) When hitting a quick series of bass pedal notes, what you are doing is less a concentrated effort of hitting the notes, but more of a controlled bouncing. Try practicing a bouncing technique, hitting the pedal 2 times, then try practicing bouncing it 4 times in a row, 8 times in a row, etc… Then try hitting it just 3 times, then a quick 3 with a 1 note pause, then another quick 3.

4) As we mentioned above, minimizing the amount your foot needs to travel to register a hit can help improve your speed. By placing your foot further down the pedal you will not have to move your foot down as far to register the hit. The only downside to this is that the Rock Band bass pedal is built in a way that makes this technique a little more difficult as more power needs to be applied to the pedal compared to a regular bass pedal. But again with practice, you may find this technique really works for you.

Hitting The Sticks

Here comes some more stick trickery. Rock Band did a great job of choosing songs that feature a wide variety of stick techniques that will need to be employed. There are a few songs that have very simple hand patterns. They’ve included songs that have fairly straight up fast playing required, but they’ve included quite a number of songs with off-beats to test your limb independence

Grip

New drummers will become very tense with the grip on their stick and will use their arms to hit the sticks against the drum pads. That’s fine if you want to hit the drums really hard, but it’s not neccessary in Rock Band.

When hitting fast rolls, or 8th or 16th notes, you should be letting your fingers and your wrists be doing most of the work. When you first start out, you are likely bring your arms and hands straight down in front of you so that your thumg is pointing up. By moving your thumbs down so that they are almost pointing at each other, and so that your knuckles are facing the sky, it will help to force you to hit the drum pads using your wrist.

Now that your hands are in the correct position, loosen your grip so that your thumb and index finger are doing most of the holding of the stick, while the tips of the other fingers are on the stick mostly for support.

With the tips of your fingers on the stick and the thumb and forefinger providing the grip, you can quickly “flick” the drumstick with your middle, ring, or pinky finger. The drums stick should hit the pad and bounce back into place where you can flick it again back to the pad. By using your wrist and fingers you will get faster because you’re using less movement, but you will also gain more control.

Start practicing this finger bounce technique with a very simple R L R L or L R L R pattern(alternating right and left hand drum hits), starting off slowly and increasing your speed.

Practing Paradiddles and Rudiments

A paradiddle is one of the most common and basic drumming rudiments that is used to help improve overall technique by getting you used to patterns that aren’t a simple R L R L. The basic parardiddle pattern is R L R R L R L L. Practicing your paradiddles and other rudiments will be extremely helpful to your drumming ability. A rudiment is considered a basic building block of the drumming vocabulary. The Percussive Arts Society (PAS) has a set of 40 essential international drum rudiments that you can view at the link provided.

A list of all 40 PAS Drum Rudiments

Limb Independence

For most drummers limb independence will be one of the most difficult and frustrating things to learn. I had difficulty with it when I used to play drums, and I can’t say as though I’ve perfected it now. Here are a few techniques that are commonly taught top help improve.

1) Switch it up. If you’re used to playing patterns a certain way, have what you would normally have your right hand playing be played by your left hand and vice versa. Try switching it up so that your foot is playing what one of your hands might normally play and vice versa. Get out of your comfort zone and more things will become comfortable (and that’s good life advice as well).

2) Practice in front of a mirror. It may seem silly, but you will be able to see what motions come naturally to you and seem most fluid, but you will also be able to see where you are struggling and what you need to work on and practice.

3) Pat your head and rub your belly. This doesn’t really help, but if you can do that you should have confidence that you can learn to play the drums.

4) Let it flow. My old music teacher would drill this into my head. If you’re putting too much focus into any one thing, you will lose it all. Just keep trying and you will eventually have those “A-HA” moments. She would have me concentrate on everything before I started playing the rhythym, but she said to “zone out and let it flow” as soon as I started playing. It worked.

5) Do an internet search for “limb independence”. There are plenty of drumming sites out there which have free excercises listed that can improve your ability.

Metronome

If you are serious about improving your drum technique, it is recommended that you get yourself a metronome, and I can not stress enough how useful a metronome is. A metronome is a device that will run at a consistent tempo, and will either let you know when the beat is, usually by sound or sight, although there are metronomes out there now that will notify you of the beat through touch. A metronome will help increase your overall technique by pushing you to keep in time, which will help with your overall precision.

Good Luck

Following and practicing these techniques should give you a good start to becoming a proficient drummer at all levels. The key here is to continue to practice.If you wish to further your skill, you could do no wrong by enlisting the assistance of a professional drum teacher. There are also plenty of books, videos, and webites out there that would be of help.

Related Links:

Percussion Performance Techniques