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Tag: led zeppelin

  • Why No Double Speed King?

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    For my regular audience this article’s a bit of a departure from norm (and is probably the sort of thing I should’ve been doing more of when I was working at Musician’s Friend in the late 2010s!), but we’re going to take a look at a legendary bit of music equipment and its list of idiosyncrasies, and then explore the ultimate question: why has there never been a double Speed King pedal?

    For drummers that question will make sense and most of them will probably know the answer instinctively, but it’s an interesting set of observations, an interesting (and unsolved) engineering problem, and a fun bit of music history that I’m very well acquainted with as my first bass drum pedal was a Speed King, and I played it for about a decade as I was coming up. Very familiar with it, and it’s such a unique bit of work that its little tricks and trials tend to stay with you. (Note the navigation, it’s a multi-page article.)

    Bass Pedal Basics

    For our non-drummers reading, we’ll take it all the way down to the basics: bass drums in modern “trap” drum kits (i.e. what most people think of as a “drum set”) are played with a footpedal that uses a pulley-camshaft system to pull a mallet into contact with the head of the drum, and that’s all attached to a spring return to pull the mallet back when you lift your foot, with a great deal of variety available to the player depending on how they bring their foot down and other variables. A brief example:

    Trivia: I play my bass drums the same way…and I started playing when Lars was about fifteen (I was 8, 1978) so I didn’t get it from him. It’s just the way my foot fell naturally into playing, I never had lessons to “correct” the problem, and now it’s part of my playing style.

    So you see the basic mechanism. The pedal should be fairly obvious. Bass drum pedals come in a few different “drive” types. Most are either “chain drive,” like the ones Lars is playing, or less expensive pedals will come with a “belt drive,” which amounts to a leather strap. Either way, they’re connected on one end to a cam shaft on which the mallet is mounted, and on the other to a footboard at the toe end. Belt drive pedals will have a smooth cam and the belt will be bolted in to a mounting point on the cam; chain drive pedals will have geared cams, like on a bicycle gear (it’s the same type of chain as well). These will typically look a bit like the derailleur gears on a multi-speed bicycle. All of these little bits can be adjusted and modified to suit the players preferences in terms of how “stiff” or “responsive” or “quick” they want their pedal, how much force they want to strike with, and so forth.

    Camshaft and chain drive from a Ludwig Speed Flyer double bass pedal, on the secondary side. (This is one of those things that historically has been called a master-slave connection, with the “master” being the pedal that’s at the drum, and the “slave” being attached via a crossbar and played with the other foot from a distance. I think “primary” and “secondary” or “remote” are good options that avoid troublesome language there.) All images in this article courtesy Sweetwater.

    In the video above with Lars, he’s legit playing two bass drums, each with a single pedal. In 1968, a double pedal was invented, but they really didn’t start catching on until the time I was coming up in the late 70s and early 80s, most notably with the release of the DW 5002 pedal. (An uncomfortable sidebar: I’m a huge fan of DW’s gear but their constant claim to have “invented” the double-pedal simply isn’t legitimate. It had already been around for fifteen years when the 5002 came out. They made some major refinements to the design, including universal joint connections on the crossbar and repositioning to have one pedal center-on the drum and the other offset, as opposed to the true “first” double pedal, invented in 1968 and patented in 1971 by renowned drum innovator Don Sleishman from Australia.)

    There were many excellent reasons for this:

    • one less big, heavy bass drum you had to carry around
    • your drummer could fit on smaller stages and still have more room for things to hit
    • on a more “pro” level you only have to tune one (and tuning two to each other could be challenging!)
    • if you’re gigging live at the level where your kit’s mic’d you only need one bass drum mic rather than two, one soundboard channel rather than two, etc.

    It was a real game-changer, especially with the rise of what we were still calling heavy metal then – early Motley Crue and Metallica and Iron Maiden, Venom and Slayer, etc. brought the double-bass playing style to prominence as it never had been before.

    History of the Double Bass

    It’s worth pointing out that double-bass drumming by no means started with early thrash metal. There were many jazz drummers who used them even mid-century, for instance. While it’s certain there were others who experimented along the way, it’s generally taken as canon that the first “real” double-bass drum kit was designed by Louie Bellson in 1939, and he had a hard time even getting somebody to build one intentionally that way – Gretch finally did it.

    You can see Bellson here on the left in this 1968 clip from Johnny Carson’s “Tonight Show” (Carson was actually a pretty decent jazz drummer as well, although I’m not aware that he ever did it for a living), and if you listen you can hear him start in on the double bass riffs about a minute and twenty seconds into this amazing drum duo piece with Bellson and the legendary Buddy Rich.

    Years later, Ed Shaugnessy became the Carson show’s backup bandleader; he also played double bass.

    As proto-metal started coming up in the late 60’s you saw folks like Ginger Baker from Cream start making them pretty popular (the outro to “White Room” is generally understood as the first really notable use of double bass in rock), and double bass drumming began breaking forward in rock into the 70s as Keith Moon from The Who, then Carmine Appice in the US (Vanilla Fudge), then folks like Tommy Aldridge from Black Oak Arkansas, Neil Peart from Rush, Chester Thompson (various) and Terry Bozzio (Frank Zappa) really started pushing the boundaries of what you could do with that extra drum.

    This brings us to my own beginnings as a drummer at age 8 in 1978. I started off more in what you’d likely call the “classic rock” space. At that age I was just barely old enough to have started developing my own musical tastes, and the day I started playing my favorite band was the Beach Boys. The person who started me – an older relative – did a lot of cover band work in bars, so early on I was exposed to a lot of things like Lynyrd Skynrd, Zeppelin, Sabbath, Steely Dan, Peter Frampton, Bay City Rollers, Badfinger, Hendrix, and so on.

    As a hard rock and metal drummer coming up then, I watched the double bass pedal quickly go from rare to requirement around…oh, I’ll say between 82 and 88 or so. In 1982 most double bass drummers were still using two drums, but it was definitely getting to the point where maybe 20 or 25% of the working players in bar and garage bands playing hard rock were using double bass. By 1988 probably 95% of rock drummers were playing double bass (or at least had one for looks!), and half of them were doing it on one drum.

    Today it’s a very rare drummer in rock who doesn’t at least have a double bass pedal they use to practice with, even if they never use it in performance…but it’s far more rare to see anyone short of a nationally known club-level act or nostalgia act with two bass drums.

    A double bass pedal as seen, more or less, from the drummer’s perspective.

    There are various ways to engineer the basic setup, but they all rely on the mechanics of that camshaft turning when you push down on the pedal, rotating the shaft around it’s center axis “forward.” As you can see in the above photo, the two pedals are connected via an adjustable linkage bar between them, with universal joints on each end that connect to the spindle of the camshafts. The primary pedal then has two mallets, and the camshaft will be designed with a bushing, or a split, or similar mechanism allowing the two mallets to be controlled independently, one with each pedal. So if I step down on the left pedal, the left mallet goes forward and the right stays still, and vice-versa. Magic! I’ve now turned my single bass drum into a double bass, without adding another drum!

    The Speed King

    The Speed King is a different setup altogether. This pedal is neither chain nor belt driven, but rather what’s called a “direct drive” mechanism where the chain or strap is replaced with a solid, inflexible linkage mounted between the pedal and the mallet mechanism.

    A whole different animal, this is.

    If you’re a little mechanically inclined – and it’s okay if you’re not! – you can imagine how this arrangement creates a much more precise and responsive playing situation. Especially for us old-school, self-taught, toe-down rockers, it’s an amazing tool.

    The Speed King has been used on thousands of your favorite songs and by nearly every notable drummer ever including Ringo Starr, Melvin Parker, Stevie Wonder, and the man who truly made them famous Led Zepplin’s John Bonham. Bonham’s playing style includes some mind-bending bass drum work that people swore he was using two feet for – legendarily he used to play a double-bass kit and got chewed out so often for playing double when he wasn’t, he chucked the second bass drum (long before Zep), but I don’t know if that’s true, just one of those stories you hear. True or not, the man was absolutely amazing with his right foot on that bass drum, and it wasn’t long before a whole lot of people decided the reason his feet were so quick was because of the pedal he was using…and I can tell you as a drummer who’s used them extensively that there is definitely merit to that argument and it’s no slight against Bonham to say so.

    In spite of the mechanical superiority of the SK, it does have some drawbacks that are inherent to the design, which has made them sort of a debatable legend in drumming. Personally, given a blank check, I’d rather play with two drums and two SKs than one drum and anything else…but with a blank check I’d be able to afford the extra maintenance and a kit that’s built to be tuned to itself!

    But…

    But. It’s worth pointing out that the linkage has been considerably beefed up over the years; the model I played, which was probably made in the mid-70s, the linkage bar between the pedal and camshaft was much thinner metal. It still didn’t bend, mind you, but it wasn’t as heavy as it is now, and basically just slipped over the crosspins on either end, being stiff enough to flex just a bit to get them on with a snap, but not enough to bend while playing.

    Problem is, over time with regular playing those rubbing parts start to wear and loosen up a bit. The bend spring that created the clips on each end would tend to lose their “closed” tension with repeated removals and re-attachments (easier to pack if it’s unhooked), and the movement of the pedal while playing has some impact too although these are REALLY well made and extremely durable. Unfortunately no matter how durable, occasionally you’re going to get a bit of rattling with all that metal-on-metal connection.

    Additionally – and this is what the SK is really legendary for in terms of why people look at ’em sideways – there are ball bearings in the mounting points of the camshaft at the top of the “legs,” very similar to what you’ll find in the axle of a bicycle wheel for instance. With time and being thrown around and dragged around the country for a few years, they can dry out…and they’ll start squeaking.

    There are classic, legendary tracks where you can actually hear the pedal squeaking on the recording. Some of those include “Come Go With Me” by the Del Vikings (where it’s so audible it sounds almost like a tambourine through contemporary playback equipment like a little record player or small radio), it’s picked up a bit on “Superstition” by Stevie Wonder, Moby Grape’s first album, a ton of James Brown cuts with Melvin Parker and/or Jabo Starks…and again, legendarily, on probably half of Led Zeppelin’s recorded catalogue, most notably (to me) the studio version of “Since I’ve Been Loving You,” “All My Love,” and “When The Levee Breaks.” Any drummer who does serious work with a speed king carries some kind of lubricating oil with them, because when it starts it will NOT stop until you do something.

    There’s a break at about 1:10 where you can hear it quite clearly, even if you’re older like me and don’t have as much high end in your hearing range anymore. As I’m listening to it through my monitor speakers while writing this, I’m picking up other little bits and whistles of it, sometimes sounding almost like the finger-snaps, others little a bit of microphone feedback.

    It’s also worth noting that the body of the SK is made of cast metal, and occasionally metal casting creates an object that may have a minor flaw or weak spot in it that might never be noticed e.g. in a kitchen pan, but when you’re using it as a lever from which to beat on something really hard a few million times, they can break.

    One of the things that can break is the shaft that the mallet is mounted on. If you look at the photo above you’ll notice that there’s not a mechanical cam on a straight shaft as with other pedals. On the speed king, the entire shaft is cammed by being curved. That is the clue that brings us to our title question

    Why Can’t The Speed King Be Doubled?

    In short: it’s mechanically impossible to engineer a pedal with the features unique to the speed king that make it what it is, and still be able to manufacture it practically and with a level of reliability that is acceptable for commercial production.

    It would in theory be possible to run an extension arm between two pedals, which is half the problem. The other half, however kills it. The mallets have to be able to move independently of each other. In order to do that with a Speed King, the only real option would be to split the camshaft where the mallets are mounted, one for left and one for right.

    That would result in an extremely weak mounting point right where most of the impact force lands on the mechanism. You could likely compensate by going with a much heavier shaft or what have you, but to do that and still have a practical pedal that was durable and that you could manufacture at a sufficiently low cost to not have to charge more for the things than a good mid-range drum kit has, thus far, eluded the Ludwig company for about a century and a quarter now.

    As an engineering problem, with the single mallet setup you have all the impact stress going through the mallet rod into the mounting bar, which is a nice, solid piece of metal that’s taking the majority of pressure at the “top” of the arc in that bar (I’m sure I don’t have to explain the strength of arches to an engineer), the kinetic energy is dissipated more or less evenly across the piece from center.

    With a double mallet setup on a split shaft, the pressure is all at the “split” end of the shaft, and it’s not even reinforced. Not too hard to see that in this configuration the mount shafts would bend and/or break constantly. While in theory one can envision a sort of “M” design like the McDonalds logo, with a mallet at the top of each, I’m gonna go ahead and give the company that’s been making them for a hundred years credit for having already considered that and found it an inadequate solution for one reason or another, again probably relating to the practicality of manufacturing the thing without it costing a mint. Given that Ludwig does in fact have a double-pedal and it’s not based on the SK design tends to validate that theory.

    And that’s the story of what is probably the number one most famous bass drum pedal in history, and why it will almost certainly never been seen in a double-pedal configuration. Are you a drummer who’s used the Speed King pedal? What was your experience?

  • Why Rock Music Has Sucked For 15 Years (2009)

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    Introduction & Argument

    Originally posted to LowGenius.Net 6-Feb-2009.  As I’ve been going through this process of tracking down and curating my old content, once in a while I come across something that still makes sense word for word.  This article is now in seventh grade, so to speak – twelve years old – and as I re-read it for spellchecking and so forth I realize that pretty much every word still rings, and I wonder whether that reflects my own stagnation in musical taste, or if I’m unwittingly just being the grouchy old man, or if this is just an ongoing and unfortunate reality that I desperately hope finds a cure. 

    In the end I suspect it’s probably a little of all three.  But I still wouldn’t change a word.

    And for the record I know there’s bands out there that don’t suck.  Some of them are friends of mine.  It’s a hook to get you to read the bigger point about the emotional commitment of the artist to their art and why that’s required for art to be great.

    Yes, I know.  It doesn’t all suck, but there’s not much room for nuance in a headline.

    And most of it HAS sucked, and sucked hard.  There’s always been a problem of style over substance in music, and in every other part of the entertainment business.  Unfortunately, over the last decade and a half, the suck has so far outweighed the substance that I’m really afraid a lot of people my daughter’s age (20) [she’s now 32 -jh, 2021] are losing the ability to even recognize quality music anymore.

    Why does it suck?  Oh, let me count the ways.  The world is filled with bands and performers who are, at best, marginally talented.  They rely on studio tricks and technology to substitute for talent, but the talent is only one part of the issue, and it’s a small part.

    No, the real problem is this:  what we’ve got now, by and large, is an entire generation of recycled imitative crap pretending to be the heroes they grew up loving.  There’s nothing wrong with having influences and incorporating those influences into your work; that is, after all, where everything starts.

    All these wannabe’s and pretenders spend years trying to learn how to imitate their idols, getting the chops and the techniques and the riffs and the styles down pat, but they don’t get it.  What makes great music is not how well you play your instrument, or how many notes you can cram into a single beat, or how fluid and tasteful your fills are.  What makes music great is one thing, and one thing only:

    The heart of the musician.

    THAT is what people don’t seem to get anymore.  It’s all just flash and show and technical know-how, and there’s not an ounce of genuine passion involved, except for maybe the passion for money, ego gratification, and easy sex.  Any asshole with corporate backing can make a record that will sell a half-million copies, but it takes something that you can’t buy, you can’t learn, and you can’t imitate, to touch hearts and move souls.

    What’s Missing

    Musicians don’t put themselves in to the music anymore…and what’s worse, the music public doesn’t ask them to.  Instead, it seems like people are going to concerts so they can hear the songs played note-for-note as they sound on the CD.  Not only is that not the point of live music, that’s directly contradictory to the very idea of live music.

    VOLUME does not make music good.  There is nothing even a tiny little bit special about seeing an artist go up and pantomime themselves.  If that’s what music is about to you, then you may as well just say to hell with it, save some money, and start doing “listening party” tours where the musicians aren’t even involved – just get five thousand people together in a hockey rink with a giant PA and play the damn CD!

    No.  Live music is about broken strings and spur-of-the-moment extemporaneous speeches and singers who are hoarse at the end of the night and blood and sweat and tears and most of all, it’s about power.  Not amplification power, but the power to move human beings.  Speaking as a musician, I don’t much care if I get every note right when I’m playing live.  What I care about is whether I can make you cry, make you laugh, make you angry or sad or wistful or hurt or horny.  I care about making you love and making you hate.  Even agreeing with what I say isn’t important, but feeling what I feel, THAT is what matters.

    It seems like today’s crop of musical impressionists have completely missed that point.  You know, Zeppelin had some really terrible shows, from a standpoint of technical musicianship [Atlantic Records 40th Anniversary Special anyone? -jh, 2021]…but people loved them because they went out there and put their hearts in to what they were doing.  They reached down, picked you up, and ripped your face off, and they made you come along on their ride for three hours whether you wanted to go or not.

    This is why 4 Peace remains my favorite “Kalamazoo Scene” band even though a lot of people would say they were far from the “best” band on the scene.  Not because they were the world’s greatest musicians – certainly they had legitimate talent and instrumental skill, but that’s not the point.   What made them my favorites was simply that when they picked up their instruments, everything else in their world stopped and for that half-hour or 90 minutes or whatever, their hearts and souls were right there on display, pouring out of their speakers and into your face with all of the fire and fury that four pissed off Gen-Xers could muster.  I don’t take anything away from any of the other bands on the scene, but that’s the band that, for me, consistently grabbed me by the throat and flat-out refused to let go until they’d had their say.

    By the same token on a wider scale, that’s why I’m still a huge Pearl Jam fan, and why I dig Chris Cornell much…and why I absolutely loathe bands like Staind and Puddle of Mudd.  I don’t care HOW great they are as technical musicians, all they are is shallow imitations of bands who actually went out and put their balls and hearts and souls in to what they were doing.

    Watch this: Pearl Jam, “Alive” (SNL 1992) [Sorry it’s a FB post; NBC yanks this clip within seconds every time it’s posted to YouTube.  Hilarious note: originally it linked to a file on Google Videos, that’s how old this article is. -jh, 2010]

    That’s what a band looks like when they’ve got their heart on.  More important, that’s what a band feels like when they’re in the groove.  You can almost smell the nerves and excitement – this was by far the most exposure they’d had at that point – but by the time Ed rips that first “SAHHHHHn” out, they’ve forgotten where they are, they’ve forgotten the cameras, the crowd, Sharon Stone, the millions watching at home…all that matters, all that exists in those five minds for that five minutes is the groove.

    The Magic

    You can’t learn that, you can’t imitate it, you can’t bottle it, you can’t package it, you can’t put a surcharge and $20 for parking on it, you can’t control it, you can’t capture it, you can’t imitate it.  All you can do is grab that sucker by the tail and hold on tight while it takes you where it wants to go.

    That, my friends ($1 J. McCain) is the magic.  That is why I’m a musician.  Not because it gets me laid or makes me money or gratifies my ego, although it does do all those things at times.

    I’m a musician because I have to be.  Because whether it’s just me playing with myself (pun definitely intended) in a basement, or me and my band, whoever they might be at the moment, playing to a couple thousand people, that magic, that power, that undefinable thing that leaves me hollowed out and spent in a way that no sex, no money, no fast car, no drug, no woman, no THING ever could…that’s what matters, and I don’t give a rip if you can fool ten million people into buying your pathetic imitations and flimsy, saccharine parody:  that is what the people and friends I respect from John Lennon to John Riemer have and were born having…and that is what almost nobody who so callously refers to themselves as musicians in 2009 could ever understand because they don’t have it, they can’t have it, and they wouldn’t know what it was if it slapped them in the face.

    I don’t need a record contract or a multi-million-dollar tour or fifty grand in flashpots or computer-controlled laser shows, and I don’t much care if Britney or the Jonas Brothers or Coldplay are selling millions of records while I sit in a drafty shack in rural North Carolina re-rolling smokes from the butts of the ones I hand-rolled earlier.  I don’t need a billion hits on a MySpace page [chuckles in 2021] or a billion dowloads of MP3’s to prove that, because it’s mine and nobody can take it away, nobody can water it down, nobody can say it’s fake or not good enough or not ‘accessible.’

    That is what’s inside me, and that is what flows through me when I play regardless of who, if anyone, is watching, listening, or even gives a rat’s ass, and that is what is most emphatically NOT in 99% of the shallow, commercial crap that pollutes the airwaves today, and the best and worst part of it is that it doesn’t have to be a big secret, it doesn’t have to be hidden or kept private or kept away from anyone finding out.  It can’t be stolen, it can’t be taken away, it can’t be bought or sold.  It just is.  Some of us have it, some of us don’t, but it’s sure doesn’t seem like anyone who is passing themselves off as a musician or rock star in 2009 could ever come close to understanding what that feels like.

    And THAT is why rock music has sucked for 15 years.

    [All of this applies to my writing, too.  If you pay attention you’re probably seeing a theme by now.  I’m real big on authenticity and sincerity and meaning it.]