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by Rochus·22d ago·view on hn ↗
I should indeed make a video which shows the sound assignments on the bass pedal and how my feet operate on them. Let me see what I can do (video is not my medium).

The "muscle memory" is extremely important, since the feet are working "blindly"; I don't even see them when I'm sitting at the keyboard.

You're free to write a blog post; I will read it with interest ;-)

A few years ago I announced what I'm doing on a few Subreddits, HN, Facebook and some other places, hoping to find people with similar interests. But that wasn't successful. I found an American company building and selling physical/accoustical foot drums, but no one so far using a bass pedal.

I have been using bass pedals just for playing the bass since the nineties, so the step to using them "polyphonically" for the drums was natural, but it took quite some time until the idea manifested and I really tried. Here are my first recordings after a few weeks of practice: http://rochus-keller.ch/?p=317

EDIT: Here is another recording from 2014 where I play together with a very talented sax player. This might be interesting for you because I overlayed a whole big band over the piano and even the bass sound and was able to fade it in and out by key pressure (what you seem to do with the breath controller): http://rochus-keller.ch/?p=962 Depending on the music I use a "bite switch" to operate the sustain pedal. I also made experiments with singing (http://rochus-keller.ch/?p=828) and voice to midi conversion, but that doesn't work good enough yet.

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Thanks! Posted: https://www.jefftk.com/p/organ-pedals-for-drumming

If you do end up making a technique demonstration video I'd love to see it!

Here is my first attempt: https://youtu.be/u4RSlO9nS50

Bear with me, video is not my medium. I used my photo camera with a tripod and a light I had around. To avoid the need of cutting I just used the microphones built into the camera, which I agree is suboptimal. But I hope you get the idea. The video demonstrates both the key assignments and how I use them for the music. I didn't play for a few weeks, so I'm a bit out of practice, but it's all live and improvised.

If you wonder what I wear: these are padded socks, three layers, to avoid hematomas.

That is super impressive, thanks for sharing! Really interesting to see the layout and technique.