Cocktail Kick The Bucket

Since seeing Glenn Kotche on the Modern Drummer Festival 2006 DVD playing a cocktail kick drum, I had the idea that this would be a good thing to have in my bag of tricks. I’m currently mainly playing an 18” kick drum and getting a nice big sound out of it so I was pretty sure I could get a usable sound out of a floor tom. The challenge in my mind was to tune the drum so that it had a usable ‘kick’ sound while still maintaining a playable top head.

I bought a used Yamaha cocktail kick pedal from a shop in Boulder Colorado, and so I had the kick pedal covered. Both of my floor toms are 14” in diameter. The Gretsch floor tom has legs so I figured it would be easier with legs to position. I put a 14” Remo coated Powerstroke on the bottom, replacing the clear ambassador, and tuned it really low, almost, but not quite flappy. The batter head was a Remo ambassador weight renaissance which I kept.

It didn’t take very long to get a decent kick sound that was quite usable, especially when miked up in my studio. The top head was harder to deal with however. if I tuned the batter where I would normally tune a floor tom, it sounded like a kick, if I tuned it higher it sounded like a muffled timbale. I ended up bringing the resonant bottom head up a little bit from flappy, and then bringing the batter head somewhere between floor tom and timbale.

Bottom line is, this is a compromise. I see this configuration as a way to do some low volume acoustic gigs, like small coffee shops and such, where I might be accompanying acoustic instruments with no amplification at all. I think with the cocktail kick, a snare, one cymbal and high hat, I’d be well equipped for that kind of venue. Of course I’d need my box of do-dads, shakers, and sound makers to round things out.

The other place I could see myself using this setup would be in the studio for tight break beats or loops.

I’ll try to post some loops with this configuration.