BONHAM BASS-PEDAL BREAKDOWNS

Some of the best examples of John Bonham's use of "single-pedal quads" come from the song "Night Flight" on the album "Physical Graffiti."   Bonham was legendary for his heavy-hitting, lightning-fast bass drum foot, and in this song he uses it to his advantage on these cool-sounding drum fills.  In this first example, Bonham ends the fill with a quick quadruplet involving the snare, tom, floor tom and bass drum.  This is a quick 1-2-3-4 in quick succession covering a single beat.

To show you how this actually looks in action, here I am performing this move on the LudSlinger kit:

In this second example, Bonham uses the same technique to insert two quads in a row:

This looks exactly like the previous fill.  You just execute the quad move twice:

After you master this easy version of the quadruplet, perhaps you may be ready to take on this much-more-difficult fill.  This time Bonham strings a series of quads together to fill four beats, but in this case the four hits are: SN, FT, BD, BD.  That's the denotation for a left-hand hit on the snare, a right-hand hit on the floor tom and two rapid-succession bass drum kicks.  In other words, he is doing a double-bass quad with a single pedal.

Remember now, this was 1975.  There was no such thing as a double-bass pedal.  It hadn't been invented yet.  As a matter of fact, the modern chain-drive pedal had not yet been invented, so all Bonham had was a standard Ludwig Speed King.  So even if I can manage to pull off this ankle-straining quadruple move, Bonham is still incredibly more-awesome than me.

Okay.  So there you have it.  That's how to play those fills.  Wasn't that fun?  I thought so.  Maybe next time I'll show you how to use a double-pedal to do a double-triplet, or sextuplet, and a double-triplet plus one, or septuplet.  Oh yeah.  It can be done.