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:
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?