Trick Drums P1VBF1 Pro 1-V Bigfoot Single Bass Drum Pedal

Name: Trick Drums P1VBF1 Pro 1-V Bigfoot Single Bass Drum Pedal
Brand: Trick Drums
Rating: 4.5 (5 reviews)

Single Bass Drum Pedal with Split-cam Design, 13" Footboard, Internal Compression-spring Mechanism, and On-the-fly Tension Adjustment Knob

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Item ID: P1VBF1

Trick Drums P1VBF1 Pro 1-V Bigfoot Single Bass Drum Pedal

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Trick Drums is currently experiencing manufacturing delays on all products, and Sweetwater is shipping customer backorders for this product in the order they are received. Please contact us to either secure your place in line for the earliest possible future shipment or discuss product alternatives.

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Trick Drums P1VBF1 Pro 1-V Bigfoot Single Bass Drum Pedal

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Your Kick Pedal, Reinvented

With their Pro 1-V Bigfoot, Trick Drums has reinvented the bass drum pedal. Boasting precision-machined parts and aerospace-grade bearings, the Bigfoot gives you cutting-edge features. It sports an internal compression-spring mechanism that's smoother, faster, and quieter than expansion-spring pedals; a split-cam that allows independent adjustment of beater and pedal angles; a tension adjustment knob that lets you adjust pedal tension while you're playing; and much more. If you demand buttery-smooth action, infinite adjustability, and dead-silent operation from your kick pedal, then you need Trick Drums' Pro 1-V Bigfoot.

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Trick Drums Pro 1-V Bigfoot Kick Drum Pedal Review by Sweetwater

Feb 11, 2015

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Tech Specs

Single/Double: Single
Drive System: Direct Drive
Manufacturer Part Number: P1VBF1

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Reviews

4.6

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Smooth, certain, silent, responsive. Even though it was my first time with my new pedal, it felt like a comfortable pair of jeans. Highly recommend it.

There is Sweetwater and then there is everybody else...great products and service every time!

- Shawn

I purchased this pedal a few years ago. It is by far the best feeling pedal, the most responsive and the most adjustable. You can make this pedal feel any way you want. Once you get used to it, playing becomes easier. Multiple stroke techniques shine. I have used many pedals. I also use Axis pedals which are great too but nothing is like this pedal. It is expensive but if you can afford it, it is well worth every penny. I also purchased the laser triggers and they are great too. I had a difficult time dialing in the triggers with my particular brain unit and corresponded with Trick. Their C/S was responsive and great. They actually let me send in the triggers and they juiced them up for me. The triggers worked great after that. They responded to my email right away and did everything they could to help me. I am very impressed with this company and the level of dedication with every staff member I came in contact with. I think Trick is on the cutting edge when it comes to all things drums.

I have been toying with the idea of buying this for years now. I have owned a DW 5000 and most recently a Speed Cobra with the vic kick wood beater. I have a sonor delite 24" kick drum so it takes quite a lot of force to get the full sound you want. Ive always felt that my bass drum sound was lacking and my pedal, (speed cobra) would always fight me back. If my mind thought to play a double or triple stroke, the pedal would sometimes let me, sometimes the spring/chain system would cause lag and fight back against me. No matter how much I adjusted it, it just never felt seamless or like it was an extension of my body. It was between this pedal, the dw machined direct drive, dw 9000 or the sonor perfect balance. I loved the DW's, especially the direct drive, but they still both felt a bit sluggish and heavy. The perfect balance was the winner, but i feel like it was a little flimsy feeling, I wasn't confident that it could keep up on the road and what not. So without trying this pedal, because no one has one to try, i purchased it. And I am so happy I did. It is the perfect combo of heavy, hard hitting weight, with light speed and finesse. No longer did my pedal fight back when I instantly thought of doing a tricky pattern, it just did. It is like the pedal disappeared and became an extension of my foot. What I was most amazed with was the sound quality improvement. I knew the ease of use would be much improved over the speed cobra, but I didn't even think of how it would affect the sound. I have tried many beaters, the vic kick, the dw hard hitter, the slug kick. The beater on this thing is genius. You can angle it to hit the head perfectly flat independently of the beater shaft. My bass drum had balls! I could finally hear my kick drum over my cymbals and snare. It was well mixed now. So overall I am very happy with this pedal, very hard hitting, very fast, and the sound is just incredible. I would highly, highly recommend this pedal. And I never played it before I bought it, I just had a feeling it would be that good. Next purchase is their hi-hat stand!

SUMMARY: I put a lot of time/effort into setting up this expensive pedal, experimenting with its various parameters, and in the end I don't feel like it's that much of a better tool for me (if it's better at all) for singles and heel-toe-doubles than my Tama and DW pedals are. And they were cheaper, and easy and pleasant to set up.

MORE DETAILS. I watched a heap of videos, and read a bunch of text, about setting up the Pro 1-V. It's good content, and helpful. But there are some things that aren't covered. There were certain interactions between the settings that I discovered, and I found counter-intuitive.

Those interactions may be logical, mechanically inevitable, they may even be desirable. I'm not saying they're not those things. I'm just saying that, for this user, they were counter-intuitive. Consequently, I spend an inordinate amount of time experimenting with them and figuring out what was going on. And for me that subtracted from the value of the pedal.

For example, when you tighten the compression spring, the beater moves away from the head (even though, mind you, the beater throw has its own setting). When you loosen the spring, the beater moves toward the head. Those things don't happen with a regular pedal, so it took me a while to notice that it was happening.

If you approach setup by wanting to first set the beater throw, then you can run into interactions like this: first, set the beater throw where you want it (via the drive ring), so that it travels the distance that suits you. Say you set a good amount; perhaps reasoning that you'll have plenty of travel in which to catch the beater rebound, and so prevent unwanted ghosts. Now, as you set the spring tension, you see the beater move. That's undoing the setting you just made. Maybe you tighten up to the high-ish tension you want, and now the beater is a long way from the head even with the weight of your leg on the footboard. It takes so much force to get the beater to the head that heel-toe doubles become unfeasible. So you now have to loop back and reset the beater throw (which means getting off the stool, bending down, unscrewing, adjusting, re-screwing, getting back up, sitting down, testing again). All of which seems to defeat the purpose of having that convenient compression spring screw: a setting that changes two different parameters, in unpredictable ways.

What I've just described is actually more effort than getting down and adjusting just the spring on my other pedals, which is all I had to do to get the right tension for heel-toe-doubles. With the Pro 1-V it took me hours of trial and error to figure out what was going on.

I think that what the Pro 1-V is telling us by moving the beater for you when you change the spring, is that (for that type of spring mechanism) there's a certain beater throw (or range of throws) that works best with a particular tension. For example, with a very short beater throw, no matter the footboard angle/height, the spring knob tension will screw all the way in before you're anywhere near a decent tension. So, to a degree, a lot of the range of adjustability that the Pro 1-V appears to offer is actually not real.

Another thing about the compression spring is that, as the tension lightens significantly, turning the knob feels like it has a disproportionately large effect. That may well be a fact of physics (I don't know), but on the other hand one could imagine that the designers could have compensated for that with some kind of gearing.

Adjustment cluster. The setting that I liked best turned out to be a non-starter. With it set that way (which felt wonderful to play), the bottom of the adjustment cluster cracked noisily against the top of the hoop clamp (about every other stroke doing doubles). I didn't want to change the footboard height, so I cured the noise by moving the beater back a little. But that meant that I'd moved the beater throw out of the suitable range for the spring tension. So that was another round of back-and-forth, trial-and-error adjustments of the spring and beater, and ultimately I think I had to raise the footboard anyway before I was happy.

Drive ring. Another case where you can get one part of the pedal fouling another part of the pedal (like the previous case) is caused by the fact that the Drive Ring (the thing you rotate to adjust the footboard angle/height) will inadvertently move laterally (horizontally) along its shaft as well as rotating around that shaft. So, if you're not paying attention, it can move out to the right, and then it'll foul against the side of the footboard as it tries to pass. Once you notice it, it's very easy to remedy: just loosen, shove it home to the left, and tighten. But if it'd been designed to rotate within some kind of groove, or rail, then that'd have obviated that little wrinkle/annoyance.

Slide-Trac hoop clamp. Very minor point here, but I tried replacing the Trick beater with a much bigger plastic DW beater and with the "Slide-Trac" as far forward as it'd go, the beater shaft didn't quite reach vertical. The setup video tells you to position the clamp so that the beater hardly gets past vertical before hitting the head; here, of course, it didn't quite reach vertical. Minor point, as I say, but maybe a bit more of a range of motion would've been nice.

The price. This is an expensive pedal. I would prefer that either a) the price is lower so that the setup annoyance doesn't sting as much, or b) keep the price, but design away the setup annoyance.

I'll continue to use the Pro 1-V now that I'm over the (inordinately difficult) hump of understanding how it works. It's a perfectly decent, smooth, usable pedal once it's set up. But I really don't think it's that much (if any) of an improvement over the state of the art that my other pedals represent (I may well go back to my DW at some point in the future).

See also: Kick Pedals, Trick Drums, Trick Drums Drum Pedals & Beaters