Left hand: uneven strikes & poor grip. Advice needed

aspernator

Junior Member
Hello everyone. I've played the drums for years and took lessons a while ago, but I've never been able to get my left hand rolling. When I use the American grip, my left hand strokes have a different inclination than my right hand strokes- in fact, they have a different pitch on my practice pad as well as my ride cymbal.
Also, I can only use my fingers as long as I'm playing slowly and exaggerating the movement: as soon as I speed up a bit, my fingers stop working entirely and the strikes are only controlled by wrist, which is awkward and makes double strokes impossible.
I've tried using a French grip to emphasize the fingers, but it's no use. I've spent hours in front of the mirror, setting up my hands in the exact same way, and the left hand strokes are all oblique, uneven and unaccurate at all speeds. It makes me made since I definitely know how it's done- my right hand has been doing it just fine for years.
I've tried both playing open handed and reversing my drumset, and while I feel my left hand is more reactive, the grip is still poor. I've tried rudiments, but the strikes just come out wrong no matter how slow I go.
Suggestions would be welcome. Thanks in advance
 
Aspernator:
Welcome to the forum.

I'm going to take a wild guess here. You are probably a carpenter or a mechanic. And for years you have been using your right hand to do most of your life's work.

One thing you can do is start using your left hand for your life's work, no matter what it is, including eating with your left hand. (Put your fork in your left hand.)
If you start using a hammer in your left hand, for instance, it will be difficult to do. But you need to keep doing it. Become left handed.

Another thing you can do is carry ONE drumstick with you wherever you go. Whatever you are doing constantly drum on your leg with the stick in your left hand.

By the way, when I play the drum set, my left hand has always been weaker than my right hand. But my left hand is doing a different job when I play the drums. So the fact that it sounds a little different than my right is OK.


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Many of us are in the same boat. People who come to drums from guitar/bass have two completely heterogeneous hands. The strumming hand (usually the right) is so overbearingly dominant/independent and the fretting hand (usually the left) is completely useless.

When I first began, I thought I was going to have to put hours into my left hand. Hours became days became weeks became months.... While my left is better than it was, it's still not the equivalent of my right. I still work on it every night and have my own personal 'left handed stick control' time.

While I'm sorry I don't have any solutions, know that you're not alone, and that many sympathize with you.
 
I'm afraid I don't have a solution for you either. I'm not going to frustrate you by saying "keep practicing" or "get a good teacher" to watch you.

Maybe the second suggestion is the best I can come up with, but like KamaK said, you're not at all alone.

The great Tony Williams once said that he didn't want both hands exactly the same, that he had two different hands for a reason.

But really, to get back to your question, I can think of no answer for you other than a good teacher watching what's going on. I think you'd get better help from someone right in front of you. Sorry, but that's about all I can suggest.

Don't give up; it sounds like you love the drums.
 
I am going to suggest something else. Try steadfastly using nothing but traditional grip for a bit (minimum of a week). The reason being I had a sililar issue (still do). I found that it is easier to be consistant with traditional grip. Also, when I went back to american I had more control than before. Perhaps it is because I first learned traditional for school band. From that I have determined to go traditional only (at least for awhile).

Had a thought just now. Perhaps the difficulty lies in getting your muscles to "forget" how not to do something. By using a whole different set of muscles you are getting a different "muscle memory" imprint.
 
From everything I'm hearing lately it's better to use more wrist than fingers. You should use wrists as much as possible until you get to a speed where you're forced to use fingers, that's the way I understand it. This is coming from Bill Bachman, Virgil Donati and a forum user here (Kroy) who has given me a couple of webcam lessons. So perhaps it's your wrist strokes that need development. That's the case with me anyhow.

I have the same problem with different sounding left and right on both my hands and feet... I don't know what to say but keep working on it and you'll (we'll) get there. I wonder if anyone sounds perfectly even when put under the microscope.
 
Keep practicing in front of a mirror, get out your copy of Stick Control, and play the LH-lead exercises slowly enough that you can maintain the form you want. I've found that a lot of students are unwilling to go as slow as they need to to do something perfectly-- they are really attracted to tempos where they're going to screw up. So go as slow as you need to. If you truly can't do it at any tempo, as you say, then just play one note. If you can't play one normal-velocity note, then do one note in slow motion until you can make the stick go straight up and down.

It also sounds like you're all over the map with your technique. The thing they're now calling "German" grip has long been the standard grip for concert snare drum; the motion is straightforward, and it should be easy for you to self-correct. I would learn how to play basic stuff (like Stone up to p. 11, initial goal of qtr. note=120) with German grip, with >90% wrist. Including the doubles. It will help if you practice not downstroking after every note, the way a lot of people do-- bring the stick back up to where it was at the beginning of the stroke, so every stroke is a fast down-up motion, not up-down. It normally takes some actual time with a teacher to get the finer points of this squared away, so good luck.
 
If you play matched, one of the things that helped me was to observe how I moved the stick with my "good" hand compared to my "weak" hand. I noticed that I was using 2 different techniques for each hand. When I realized that, I studied my strong hand and then changed my weak hand technique to the technique I used with my strong hand.

For many years I used 2 different techniques, and my left hand never felt like my right. I finally realized this about 2-3 years ago and have been working to use the same muscle groups in both hands. Particularly it was how I was using my thumb that needed changing. The thumb is the weakest muscle in the hand, and on the weak hand it's even more underdeveloped. Now my hands are using the same technique, but they are not exactly even yet. But they are damn close. I started working on "hand equality" in 2003. Eleven years later and I am so close I can smell it. It really takes some time and dedication. It probably can be accomplished in half that time if you really focus, I kind of took my time.
 
Hi,

i've only been drumming for a few months and started with exactly what you described. Right hand good from the start, nice repeatable vertical arcs. Can hit the same spot on the snare every time.
Left hand more of a slanted arc. Like lightning, as in never hitting the same spot twice. The stick would bounce side to side. Total crap. Slow as well.
This is using the American grip, sort of a bet each way between the French and German. Should be called the Belgian grip (Geographical joke).

Anyhow, I watched the following youtube video by Bonzoleum (Funny guy):-
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=watC99-mPLI

It made a lot of sense. So, I started slow on the practice pad. VERY slow. 40BPM 4/4 on the metronome slow.
I just go R L L L R L L L ......Rinse and repeat for 5 minutes. Then up the BPM by 10 for another 5 minutes. So on and so forth for half an hour, or until the strokes are erratic. I sometimes also do both hands at the same time at the start, making sure they are both doing exactly the same thing.

Slowly but surely, my left hand now has a repeatable vertical arc, and can hit the within cooee of the same spot on the snare more often than not. It's still slow, but has sped up quite a bit.
I now start at 60 BPM and jump up by 20bpm each time to 200, then in 10's, then 5's near lefty's limit, until the lefty cannot keep up. The BPM where lefty gives up has slowly been increasing. Then I do rudiments using both hands.

Now i'm not Dr. Drums, but this is working FOR ME. Your mileage may vary.

Wayne
 
I have not seen this exercise talked about in a while. Perhaps I was just not looking hard enough. So, please forgive me if this has been talked about already and is already well known.

Set the metronome to a slow speed, 60 beats per minute/ once per second is a good place to start. Use a drum pad, and mark the center of the drum pad by taking a coin like a quarter at the center and making a circle using a pen or pencil. Take both sticks in your hands with your normally most comfortable grip and place the beads of the sticks at the center of the mark. Using the metronome, lift your dominant hand slowly, while counting to four, the speed you are lifting your hand so that the stick reaches the highest point at the end of four counts. Repeat the process using the weaker hand.

This may seem easy, but when you do this and have not done it before, you will notice all kinds of things that need to be worked on. Some would do this in front of a mirror to see how the hands work from a different angle.

This is a very old lesson, I would be very surprised if no one had mentioned this technique before.
 
There's no trick to it or special exercise that will fix this. Observe what is different from your right hand, and copy it exactly, don't stop until they are even. Go really slow, exaggerate the movements and really listen to how the two hands sound on the pad or drum. You want both strikes L and R to sound exactly the same, and if you're doing it differently, they will sound different.

It will feel odd at first, since you're used to things feeling a certain way. Get passed that at focus. That's really the best and only thing you can do to even up your hands.

Of course, if you are using crap technique with your right hand, then don't copy it until you've seen a teacher to sort it out.
 
I'll try out your suggestions. Marking the pad in the center looks like a good idea: I've already tried aiming for the center, but using a visual clue might be useful. I could also try the French grip as it's a completely different movement- although I'll need someone to teach me as I've never used it at all.

I'll let you know how things turn out. Thank you all for the suggestion! You look like a friendly and helpful crowd :)
 
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