Drumming Practice Techniques

Notes:

This document assumes the use of a small standard right handed drumkit setup.

Approach

Being a right handed player, one approach I have found most useful of late is changing my right hand hi-hat to left hand or playing ‘open’. At first it may feel odd or alien if you have been playing the traditional cross handed technique for years previously. I was perhaps unaware that my right hand was stronger and faster than the left and that the weaker hand was preventing me from achieving certain goals, in particular noticing a flaw in my paradiddles it was the left side that was letting me down.

A method I found useful in bringing my left hand up to speed was to play through simple songs open handed, left hand on hi-hat at a comfortable speed but making sure to play the whole song/track. It would be quite simple to do a bar or two, but I noticed when playing longer sections that I could not keep up. This is a problem many have when performing live, along with all the other pressures of gigging their stamina would wane and compromise the performance.

Open Handed Method

Notable players of the open handed technique are Mike Mangini and Simon Phillips. After developing a more balanced strength in the left hand and being able to play with more confidence you find you have more options open to you to play complex patterns which would be much harder when crossing the hands. I recently had to learn to tune Sing by Ed Sheeran and this technique lent itself nicely to the song which essentially has a simple beat with electronic tom tom sounds on top of it.

Often drummers will have an alternative snare or drum on the left hand side of the hi-hat, which effectively creates the open handed device. Of course this is another way to achieve the same result if adding drums to the drum set, but it does not, perhaps, help in achieving ambidexterity.

Conclusion

Although this article only describes the use of mirroring what the hands may do it could also be applied to the feet or indeed playing cross handed but with a left handed kit setup. It all depends on what type of drummer you are and what you wish to aim for. After adopting an open handing technique I still prefer to play cross handed and this may always be the case having played this way for so long previously.

https://youtu.be/UHPymFGDqdc