Posted on 04/19/2024 9:07:14 PM PDT by kawhill
“I recommend to learn playing Matched Grip instead of Traditional Grip.”
I agree, it is pretty hard to use a traditional grip on a kit. And there is no real need if you are not marching with a drum hanging against your thigh at an angle.
“I play the bass, so I can’t help with drums and percussion.”
I think that is a question of perspective. Drums are nothing in a song without the help of a bass to compliment the bottom end “heartbeat” of scores.
Bass and drums are a team that holds everything else together! In this way you are ARE helping the drums and percussion greatly! :)
She’s good.
Here’s my favorite drummer. I saw her perform live just a few days after someone else took this video of her.
My parents bought me a double ride tom set for Christmas back in the 60s. We were very remote so there were no teachers available close and I had to teach myself. Mom had a huge album collection and I just started playing the same song over and over for sometimes a month before I could get it down pat. It was a gruelling slow process one song at a time until my play list started to grow and my skills got better. And I really could not start to play fast complex songs until my arms got longer around the age of seven.
But it can be monotonous and take a lot of patience to learn one song at a time like that. And back in the day you had to try and figure out “how did he do that?” because you only had audio as a clue, no video unless you happened to get lucky and watch that drummer perform live on a TV show and catch how he “did that”. But now days we have Youtube. So if you set yourself up with a nice stereo and a screen you can watch while playing you can just keep looping the song over and over and actually watch how they are catching those changes and fills.
Pick a few fairly easy songs and play them over and over until you hit the groove. And even with my years and years of experience this is what I do now as I learn new songs and add them to my play list. And as you get better figuring out how they reach for things gets easier and easier. I have to be honest and suggest jumping right to this process. I went through all the formal rudimentary training for years later in school and other than the song “Fifty ways to leave your lover” none of it really helped me much when playing rock and roll or country on a full drum kit.
Concert band/orchestra, yes... Marching band, yes... Jazz scores on a kit, a little bit... Rock and roll drum kit not much. So unless you plan to play just a snare in an orchestra or marching band I would jump right to playing along with simpler songs you like and enjoy on a kit then challenge yourself to harder ones as you slowly get better. The traditional rudimentary strokes will naturally fall in as you go along anyhow. But you will advance much much faster. :)
“Irish Bohran.
Scottish snare.”
I love the traditional Irish/Scottish music and reproduce it as close as I can on a kit. I have a couple toms that do a pretty good job of reproducing the Bodhran “sound”.
There are several groups that play rock on these traditional Celtic instruments. It is fun!
You left out rocketman
https://knoxvillesymphony.com/about-kso/meet-the-orchestra/
What’s the harp doing in the percussion section?
I played guitar in a bunch of rock bands for 30 years. For the last 15 of those I had a drum kit in my practice room, where the band played.
I bought them so the drummer would not have to move stuff every week.
It was a nice and pretty generic kit. If you set it up normally you will be playing crossed. One advantage to that is that still most drumms are set up that way, so if you are going to be playing at jam sessions, open mic might!, etc. The drums will be set up the way you use them.
So to go to open hand I could just set the kit up like I’m a lefty?
But most drummers played with traditional grip since the 1920s. So it can’t be that hard, eh?
This includes all the jazz greats up until Billy Cobham like Gene Krupa, Buddy Rich, Art Blakey, Max Roach and Elvin Jones.
And most of the original great rock drummers like Mitch Mitchel and Ginger Baker.
“But most drummers played with traditional grip since the 1920s. So it can’t be that hard, eh?
This includes all the jazz greats up until Billy Cobham like Gene Krupa, Buddy Rich, Art Blakey, Max Roach and Elvin Jones.”
Absolutely, all the jazz greats did play like this. But they had smaller kits and parked everything horizontal, flat, where they could stick work over the top of them. It does fit and work in this situation for jazz because it is more stick work that it is multiple piece work like rock is. But when you start getting into bigger rock sets with more toms and cymbals the toms and cymbals start to become oriented and tipped at an angle for convenience and faster interaction.
Using a traditional grip becomes a “bind” on your wrist in this situation when trying to reach across from one side to the other very quickly for fast crashes and tom work. The tilt of the drums makes you work harder because you have to drop your elbow on that side to adapt for that tilt. You can just reach out and catch faster on rock songs with a matched grip. I use either depending on what I am playing.
The difference is this. The rock greats like Mitch Mitchel and Ginger Baker were actually fairly simple and uncomplicated styles. They were just not crammed full of constant machine gun back and forth reaching all over the set like Neil Peart and other modern drummers with huge multi-piece sets.
It becomes self explanatory if you play a song like Temples of Syrinx. I have played it many times trying with both grips and it will destroy your wrist and elbow trying to play this song on so many different pieces with a traditional grip. Let alone almost impossible to reach out and catch it all perfectly timed without any flubs.
But I fully agree one should become proficient in both, because traditional does indeed work out much better for any type of jazz work. Just don’t get stuck and set on one grip alone. Depending on song sometimes one grip can be better than the other. Always switch it up on each song and play it to see which works better for it. :)
Don’t get me wrong, I understand. I grew up with and learned to play from all the great jazz drummers because they were the thing at the time and always did use a traditional grip just like they did.
Then I added more pieces and got into power rock. This is when I found out for power rock on a lot of pieces and cymbals a matched grip just works much better for a lot of pieces with fast changes and fills.
Things like trying to crash a cymbal and then choke it fast with that same hand is extremely hard with a traditional grip compared to matched grip.
Anway fast-forward to last week. We're down here in Texas now and my kid is finishing 5th grade. Like a lot of schools 6th grade is "start band year" and they had this nice event where you could go try out different instuments. His mom took him, and sure enough he came home insisting: "I'm going to learn percussion". Oh geeze! His mom has no idea.
So, I went to talk to the drum teacher and basically the class is to learn to play in a drum line. Which I suppose is good, because you will learn rudiments and read music which is all good.
But I have this nice Gretsch kit just sitting in the closet ... so that's the full context.
I'm leaning towards trying to find someone to teach him to play the kit, and wondering about the traditional grip vs. match grip and didn't even know about the open vs closed thing until now.
Intrinsically it seems to make more sense. It's probably not up to me in the end anyway. But it's always amazing to find out you don't know something basic about something you think you know the basics about.
Pearl is a good drum set. Ludwig is better.
Upbeat and downbeat.
Learn the rudiments first.
You could go Open Handed with the kit set up as it is. You'll play the high-hat with the left hand instead of the right and the snare with the right instead of the left.
As a guitarist, you'll find it easy to adapt since guitarists use both hands independent of each other already.
If lefties can play a "righty" kit, a righty can play the same kit like a lefty. It's very doable although much easier if you start that way from the beginning.
” Anway fast-forward to last week. We’re down here in Texas now and my kid is finishing 5th grade. Like a lot of schools 6th grade is “start band year” and they had this nice event where you could go try out different instuments. His mom took him, and sure enough he came home insisting: “I’m going to learn percussion”. Oh geeze! His mom has no idea.
So, I went to talk to the drum teacher and basically the class is to learn to play in a drum line. Which I suppose is good, because you will learn rudiments and read music which is all good.”
Fantastic he is interested! True musicianship is almost a lost art! And of course it is good, any and ALL practice of any kind is good! Wait till Mom gets a load of this! My Mom got me into it but my Dad ended up being much more patient with it. lol
Please let him have both avenues of advancement. There is no law against playing a drumline at school with traditional rudiments and having a set to play on at home too!!!
So here is what happened to me growing up. We were so remote we could not even get TV so it was reading or music for entertainment. I started teaching myself the drum kit by playing with songs and a lot of it was 50s stuff, jazz and country like Roy Obison etc. Then Dad hooked up an antenna to the multi-band radio to see if we could get more AM channels. Searching around after dark one night I found pirate rock radio! That was it... I was stuck and addicted to 60s hard rock that wasn’t even legal to broadcast in the states at the time.
So I got pretty good on the drum set at home first because I was dedicated. Then like your son I jumped into the school program when it was available. But back then our school band program was huge. Even when I started classes in school we had a lot of members, there was ten drummers in my first school class drum section. But what you might find is there are “Seasons”. We had marching band season during sports seasons, and concert band season when there was no sports in season. But we had a drum set available during concert band season and two of us were good enough to trade off on songs and contribute with the drum set. This opened up the ability as a band to play more songs that had rock drums. Like the music scores from “Rocky” and “Live or let die” from the Bond movie along with others.
But as soon as I was in junior high they had several categories of music classes. Band, which was both marching and concert depending on season, Jazz band, and of course choir. I took them all every year from junior high all the way through the rest of school. It was always an couple easy “A” grades in cultural arts... lol But Jazz band was my favorite of course, it was all drum kit work. Same with Jazz band, that same other drummer and myself traded off and competed our skills against each other and we both got very good.
But on top of that I would come home and put in several hours a day everyday at home. Every time a new album came out from one of my favorite bands like Rush I was on top of learning these new songs stroke by stroke until I had them nailed. Drums were just my obsession and lifestyle. I was pretty much married to it. On top of all this dedication at school and home I started to play with bands in dives on the weekends. Minors were allowed in bars if the bar served food.
So even underage I was already making a living playing in dives for extra money. When I got out of school I did this for a living for about four years along with some studio work here and there. I still go and play an hour or two a day to stay limber and in shape. And any genre that fits my mood at the time because all those years of playing dives with different clientele interests gave me a full spectrum of music styles. No two crowds are the same so your play list has to be extensive and have many different genres.
That country bar scene in the Blue Brothers movie is real, “Oops, time for a different play list”, been there many times. lol
“You could go Open Handed with the kit set up as it is. You’ll play the high-hat with the left hand instead of the right and the snare with the right instead of the left.”
Yep, but here is the trick, cycle through both styles so that as you get better you can just switch out as you like on the fly. I goof around with switching out between the two as I play songs. You will get so you are not stuck in either style and can switch out on the fly without even thinking about it.
“If lefties can play a “righty” kit, a righty can play the same kit like a lefty. It’s very doable although much easier if you start that way from the beginning.”
I agree. Except... Tom runs are backwards and can be extremely awkward because you are twisting your torso backwards from what it wants to do by auto-reflex.
Honestly, I have always had trouble playing a lefty set except for simpler basic beat songs. If they start getting complicated with tom runs and my body wants to automatically go backwards. Fast tom runs become a mess for me... And if the kick drum is under the left foot, forget it I am done I can’t play it that way... lol
In fact, learning to switch out on the fly will GREATLY help later for complicated solos. I can play accents with my Timbales over on the far right while working the snare, cymbals, and highhat with my left hand then drop right back to cross armed. Being able to go back and forth on the fly is well worth the extra work to master.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.