Nicko McBrain has been talking about his long-held aversion to a double bass drum set up.
The drummer, who spent over forty years behind the kit for Iron Maiden was a guest on the Loudwire podcast with Joe DeVita. Ostensibly, he was talking about his memoir Hello Boys And Girls!, which is out right now. But while discussing a drummer he admires – Dirk Verbeuren of Megadeth – he got onto the subject of double bass drums: “Many years ago, I’d sort of, kind-of got down on people that [double-bass drum players]. I thought it was un-drummer-ish… Yeah, back in the ’80s I did. And my philosophy behind it at the time was it’s bad enough using one, it’s hard enough using one. Why compound it with two?”
“But the thing is, it’s the opposite to compounding,” he explains. “It actually makes things easier to do, like a 16th-note grouping with two pedals instead of trying to do it with one.
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“I mean, it makes sense. It’s easier. I was just trying to make the point that I thought that a drum set should only have one bass drum. To me, it was un-drummer-ish.”
Having said that, McBrain did mention a long list of players who chose to go down the double bass drum route that he admires – jazz drummers Louie Bellson and Ed Shaughnessy and late Slipknot man Joey Jordison.
There are others too: “You hear about the blast beats, like Derek Roddy, for instance. He’s incredible. It’s like when John McLaughlin came out and the great Billy Cobham. I think, yeah, he was two bass drums, but his speed around the drum set – he took it to another level. And the Terry Bozzios of the world. These guys, they just blow me away.
“You think it can’t get any better, it can’t get any higher, and then you see these guys coming out with these amazing time changes and technique. Beautiful.”
But that approach has never worked for McBrain, who as he explained in 2018 at an event at the UK Drum Show is very much a creature of habit: “When you learn to play with two bass drums, and you use your left limb, it becomes easier to do quarter-note fills and stuff like that,” he said, before admitting, “I just thought, ‘I’ve been practicing on one forever.’ And I just didn’t have that gene in me that said, ‘Yeah, go for it.’”
