holding drumsticks

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monster

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hey- it's your favorite new novice......

I'm getting kick-back in my lessons regarding how I hold my sticks- not necessarily "grip" (i.e. german, traditional, etc.), but what my hands are doing while playing. My instructor wants my fingers to act on the stick as if it is a lever- minimizing arm movement and I believe also reducing wrist motion. I'm struggling with this concept- especially put to practice. Does anyone know of a detailed discussion of this sort of thing (preferably with pics) on the web or in a book or magazine? thanks......

monster
 
I haven't taken any lessons whatsoever, I should, lol, but I've been very productive for the past few years. Try to play relaxed and have your elbows pointing outwards. As for holding the drum sticks, try holding the sticks at about 1/4 of the way from the bottom. Try to hold the sticks lose enough to bounce yet firm enough to be held. You want to try and have your palm and other fingers be a pocket for the bottom end of the sticks. Your instructor wants you to reduce wrist movement along with arm movement? Drumming is basically all in the wrists. You always try search engines for tips on holding drumsticks.
 
I've always used a combination of wrist and finger control of the stick. I really started to think more about it after I attended a clinic with Will Kennedy from the Yellow Jackets, a couple of years back, and he is really big on getting the last 3 fingers involved in your stroke. He even did an exercise where he basically practices playing without moving the wrist at all, just using the fingers to lever the stick. Then when he plays it's a combo of both, but he gets extra speed out of being able to use the fingers too. The man can do a seemless tom roll (not like 16 notes fast, but an actual roll) like no other I've heard, so there must be something to it. I still practice the excercize sometimes for finger strength. My experience is that you can't get as much power from your fingers, think about a snare hit on a hard rock beat. Then again, I don't think you can get the same speed using only wrists- play a buzz roll on the snare, and see if you don't use some fingers to make that happen. If you don't, then maybe that's what your teacher is trying to add- that extra finger speed.

Another thing I've found is that you can use the fingers for is after a double stroke to get a fairly accurate one handed triplet. I usually do that on the snare, rather than a triple stroke of even or mildly decrescendoing notes, you can do things like accent 1 and 3, or just 3 of the triplet.

d=doublestroke f=fingers ^=accent

^ ^
ddf

or

. . ^
ddf


...if that makes any sense. I suppose you can do it with your wrist too, but I've found that since the wrist is already busy pushing down, commanding the double stroke to be on time, the fingers get the 3rd hit more accurately and allow different options for accents.

Will Kennedy's got a couple of instructional videos out, you might want to scope em if you are really interested in finger technique. I'd bet he covers it in at least one of them.

http://www.willkennedy.com/content/practice/index.html
 
Last edited:
monster said:
hey- it's your favorite new novice......

minimizing arm movement and I believe also reducing wrist motion.


monster
Click to expand...

um...there's two parts of your body that move when you hit a drum. Wrist and arm. If you are going to minimize arm and reduce wrist, how in the hell do you plan on getting the stick to strike the skin?
 
Re: Re: holding drumsticks

fenix said:
um...there's two parts of your body that move when you hit a drum. Wrist and arm. If you are going to minimize arm and reduce wrist, how in the hell do you plan on getting the stick to strike the skin?
Click to expand...

Originally posted by coloradojay about Will Kennedy
He even did an exercise where he basically practices playing without moving the wrist at all, just using the fingers to lever the stick.
Click to expand...

OK, fenix. Humor me this. Try playing without moving your fingers... Can ya? I'm thinking only if you've got a death-grip on the stick, in which case, you can't play double strokes, and you are going to use exponentially more effort to play fast. Plus if you look at the physics of it (like the stuff Bozio mentions on the other link) you are muffling the instrument, and recieving a bunch of shock back into your limb. Very similar to learning to punch with snap in martial arts. Based on this, I'd say that there are 3 parts of your body that move when you play, wrist, arm, AND fingers, whether you are concious of it or not (for me it's actually 4, because I do some Micheal Jordan-like tounge movements too)

<(c;
 
After considering responses here and doing some research on the web I've decided that the point of my teacher is that I'm not using my fingers at all......I think he's trying to get me to "overcompensate" so that with practice I'll begin to develop some finger control. I think almost all of my playing is from the wrist- which is fine- but as pointed out I think you can do different things with good finger control- emphasizing speed over power.
 
"Speed over Power" I think I know what you mean here, but I just wanted to add, I know 120 lb. martial artists, that can do more damage and create more force with a punch (or a stick, as it were) than an average 300 lb. meathead- the reason is _technique_. The meathead has Power, large powerful slow twitch muscle fiber, but not efficiency, or much fast-twitch muscle. Speed is just velocity, acceleration is really where it's at...

Force=Mass X Acceleration, not Mass X Velocity :cool:

Just wanted to plant another seed for thought.
 
yeah I think I know what you're going for jay- here's my take...

speed as I think about it on a drum is # of hits per unit time. For the muscles involed that means coordinating a downstroke with an upstroke and back again and all of the complicated small events that make this happen. Because the muscle fibers of the fingers are smaller and more agile they can "adapt" to the necessary constant changes faster- the wrist slower and the arm slower still. But when considering power mass does come to bear along with acceleration. I agree that the fingers can accelerate faster than the wrist but the wrist (and much more so the arm) have much greater mass.

Now for your analogy.....if we compared my wrist stroke to yours you may have more force even though I have more mass (assumed) because your technique is better (i.e. you accelerate your wrist faster). But when I compare my wrist stroke to my finger stroke (and you do the same) the wrist wins out in each case because of much greater mass......

do i make any sense?
 
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