S
SickRick
Guest
When we play improvised stuff or just grooving with the band it's a whole body experience. Everything affects everything. It's not only the emotions in your mind that affect how you feel when playing. It's a completely different feeling when playing open handed when playing cross handed. It's really hard to describe for me. I'll just say it's a really different experience and you get very different ideas. Remeber that different parts of your brain control the different muscles so of course you will see difference in musical ideas.
For this reason alone I have been thinking about switching to traditional grip. Not because it's a superior technique-wise. It isn't. But because I'm starting to think that there might be more interesting musical ideas to be had. I don't know why, propably because of the "different parts of the brain are involved"-thing. But it doesn't matter why it happens, because it happens. =P
I don't want to start any sort of argument here because I think that would be pointless - there will always be guys who promote open handed playing because they spent years on developing it and there will be others that don't feel the need to do that. Just that much: As a drummer who actually has done all these things like switching to trad back and forth, playing open handed, playing left hand lead, even playing a lefty kit for a while I can say this: Yes, you have different ideas and play different stuff. It also feels different.
It's just that at least for me, it doesn't feel as good, the ideas that I have that way are not as good musically speaking and the different stuff that I come up with that way just sucks.
To me this really is a simple matter. You can intellectualize it as much as you want, but for me the fact remains that anything I play open-handed just doesn't feel and sound as good as things that I play crossed. As a sidenote I have also noticed that effect when I see other drummers who switch back and forth between open and crossed.
I do see some benefits though, so I don't think it's a bad thing in itself. It just doesn't apply musically to me. It might be different for others, but look at Jeffs post (who is quite obviously one of the better players on this board) - I'm not alone with my standpoint.