Learning to control the bounce in your sticks is crucial for speed, rolls, and variability in your playing. However, learning to control the bounce from the bass pedal and bass drum itself has turned out to be, at least for myself, one of the most challenging but beneficial techniques to master.
Just like on your snare or tom drums, the bass drum pedal will have a natural tendency to bounce back. To see this in action strike the bass drum with the pedal and make sure you take your foot off the pedal after it hits. You will notice that it bounces back and forth until its momentum wares off. If you can utilize that bounce and strike the head again on the recoil stroke, you can speed your bass drumming up by a ridiculous amount. You would be amazed at the things you can do with just a single bass pedal, seeing as double bass pedals can cost around 300 dollars for a decent one.
One of the best examples of great bounce control, and utilization of the technique is by Chad Smith of The Red Hot Chili Peppers.
You can tell when he using the double bounce technique on the smaller “bass cam” when his foots seems to slide up the pedal. He hits the pedal once, and then catches it a little further up the pedal to create the double bounce. This is not something that you will just pick up right away. It is going to take practice and here is a good exercises to practice double bounce bass drumming. Make sure you start slow, use a metronome, and can stay at a constant speed consistently before moving on to a faster tempo.
Add some variety in the tom parts by moving around from one drum to the other. After you’ve got it down try adding cymbal crashes or switching the drums around even more. This is just a good exercises to help you while you work on speed and control of the double bounce.
