Open handed redux

This but just me looking like an A-hole

This is a long one. This is what happens every time the subject of “open handed” drumming is raised online— a kind of church revival of drumming wrongness forms. 

It's why I have a blog, so I can correct rafts of grossly wrong things said about drumming, without having to fight every single person I see. Remember the “Crazy 88s” fight in Kill Bill? It'd be like that, except the end result is that I just look like kind of an A-hole. 

So here we have a forum question from someone experiencing problems playing open-handed— they're playing left handed on a right handed drum set— greatly edited for length:

Been playing off and on for four years— open-handed, which felt natural. I hit random hard brick walls with my playing and thought it was due to the following:

Left hand = weaker/slower/less endurance. Fingers don't have finesse. 

My body wants to lead with the right and I'd struggle with getting back to the groove unless I lead with my left. [Unclear to me what this means. -tb]

I felt I should be further along, so I got a teacher this year, who let me continue playing open. Then I was struggling with some parts to songs I'm learning, and he suggested trying playing crossed. [That's what open-handed people call playing right handed on a right handed set. -tb] and I have been. 

I suck at it. It feels like I'm starting over. I feel clumsy, sticks are clashing, dropping sticks, etc. My teacher advised me to take it SLOW and basically build myself back up. It has been humbling.

I'm getting bummed out. Feels like I ran 7 miles down the wrong path. Part of me is like, "if you keep strengthening that left hand and working on left hand leads you can do it" and the other part is like "if you just learn to play cross you'll probably blow past those barriers that were originally giving you issues in the first place".

Clearly, he's struggling with some fundamentals— his cymbal hand, which should be his most practiced hand by now, is weak. That his teacher, who wasn't against him playing open-handed, suggested that he switch to playing normal right handed drums, suggests to me that his playing is in such a rough state that making such a big change doesn't matter— he was going to have to rebuild the student's playing from scratch anyway. That was the situation when I made the same recommendation to a couple of students.     

He unknowingly created a difficult situation for himself, playing open handed and trying to copy things played by people who weren't playing that way. He'll have to make up a lot of one-off solutions to play things that were part of a natural flow for the person he's copying. We've replaced a naturalistic approach with a contrived one.  

On the forum where the question was posted, people were quick to give a lot of beliefs framed as definitive answers. Most of them should have been phrased as questions, like is my thinking about this right? Here I'm going to treat them as questions. I have seen all the major points below again and again, suggesting they're sources of confusion for a lot people. 

Let's put all of that below a page break— it really does go on awhile...

Hand dominance: still bull

Advertising a belief.

Yes, hand dominance is still bull. At least with regard to drumming. It happened again this week: a new student, right handed, who had never hit a drum before, automatically led everything with her left hand. I've seen it happen many times, maybe even a majority of the time. I pretty much expect it now. 

Why would they do that? My primitive drummer's brain believes that if hand dominance were a big deal, people would automatically lead with their preferred hand. Don't you think?  

Handedness people like to point out that, doing one-handed activities, the dominant hand does the work, and the other hand helps. We're to believe that that is the universal dynamic for all activities. But if that were the case, I would expect more students to attempt to play an entire rhythm with one hand. I've seen that rarely, and only with very slow rhythms. 

Drumming is a two-handed activity, and as with other activities requiring equal dexterity— and high dexterity— from both hands, people are able to do it. Like playing the piano or typing— both of which are regularly mastered to a reasonable degree of skill by large numbers of humans. For the most part there are no backwards keyboards and typewriters available, and no endless complaints from users about “weaker” hands.   

Where we get people with really weak left hands, it's a acquired thing— they've been playing the drums awhile, mostly playing basic rock stuff, with the right hand playing 8th notes and the left hand playing backbeats. Often they've settled on a left hand technique and movement that locks them into just slamming the 2 and 4. Plus they're used to having the right hand on the hihat all the time, so their left hand is chronically restricted that way. They don't practice a whole lot, and don't really know what to practice if they did. 

And to an extent it's a natural thing with more advanced players— the drum set, and the common vocabulary for playing it, are right hand oriented. So the right hand leads more, and usually plays more.  Unlike with piano, we're mostly not playing a literature that demands we develop the left hand equally, so it's easy to get away with slacking on it.  

It's endless.

But it's acquired— we're practicing to be that way. There's no reason both hands can't be equally able, and no reason anyone can't make any playing orientation work— right handed, left handed, “open” handed— regardless of which hand or foot they believe is dominant. There are other reasons to choose one of those orientations over the others, but that's another conversation.

Dominance and weakness are compelling, comforting words for enthusiasts, and the topic is heavily marketed to them by YouTubers, who are happy to have their viewers be disability oriented. The enthusiasts like talking about their “weak” hand, and having that be their main practice issue— not learning vocabulary, or other things they don't understand.  

Improving a “weaker” hand that has become less able through practice is extremely simple: open up your copy of Stick Control, maybe Accents & Rebounds, and practice it in front of a mirror, checking carefully for, and correcting, uneven stick heights and undesirable hand motion. Play left hand lead exercises about twice as long as right hand lead ones. That's it. You do have to do it.    

Izquierdadiddles

Tenue des baguettes

I've got 6 hours of driving to do a 90 minute gig today, gang, so I'm going to leave you with this:

I spend a good part of my life singing stickings in rhythm, for students. We're very lucky in the English-speaking world that we have nice one-syllable words for left and right, and for many of the other possible four-way stickings— bass, kick, hats, hands, feet, both. Others— Spanish-speaking people, for example— are not so lucky. To tell someone the sticking for a paradiddle, you have to say: 

derecha izquierda derecha derecha
izquierda derecha izquierda izquierda

It's only possible to do it at baby speed, with a giant space in between words. Derecha. [Whack]. 

Italian is almost as bad, they shaved off a syllable:
 

destra sinistra destra destra
sinistra destra sinistra sinistra

If you say it fast you have a Bulgarian rhythm.

German is acceptable, with rechts (or rechte?) and links. French droite and gauche are a mouthful, but sound cool, especially the word gauche has a good sound for percussion, like a Pinstripe on a snare drum. Goosh. Drummers speaking most other languages are burdened with extra syllables. I don't know what they do, call stickings by their letter name? Assuming the letters themselves are only one syllable?

Sidebar, step into my office: Where the hell did the Danish get venstre for left? It's similar to das Fenster in German, meaning window. We can only speculate on that etymology, remembering that usually words meaning left are derived from weird, dirty, evil, weak, clumsy, suspect. The left hand is out the window, like the rotten herring seems the likely word source.  

[...] 

Fellow drumming blogger Ted Warren suggested you could have a whole new rudiment if you played a note for all the syllables in that Spanish version. We have the choice of keeping the beat the same, or keeping the rate of notes the same: 

That first one will give you a little left hand workout. I imagine in a parallel Star Trek universe where I speak Spanish, I say izquierda in a lesson, and the student says so I hit it four times, IZ-QUI-ER-DA? [whack whack whack whack] and I say NO! It's quite simple! etc endlessly.

Lots to think about.   

Lead hand

From Mike Clark's Twitter feed, a graphic illustration of what I mean when I talk about a lead hand, or mention the drums being a predominantly right-handed instrument: 

This is how I played before I heard Elvin and Tony pic.twitter.com/I3a3qu6y1J

— Mike Clark (@mikeclarkdrums) July 16, 2021 

A quick rant and etymological aside

La mano dall'inferno

OK, I want everybody stop saying “dominant” hand, “weaker” hand— anything like that, as if it's a thing. It's not a thing.

None of your drumming abilities are dictated by the hand you sign your name with or open doors with or throw a ball with.

In playing the drums there is usually a lead hand, which may or may not be the same hand you write with. That hand starts most things, plays the strong side of the rhythm, and generally gets the most practice. It also plays the cymbal rhythm, and coordinates most closely with the feet, so it can be a challenge to do that exact same things with the other hand.

That doesn't mean the other hand is “weak”, and using it is not a Sisyphean struggle against biology, as some purport. It simply is not as practiced. I have encountered exactly no players of any age with left hand problems that couldn't be addressed in a few weeks or months of the right kind of practice.

So everybody stop building failure into your language— and excusing your lack of practice— by calling it your weak hand. I have had it with that.

This isn't only our fault, or the fault of people marketing drumming systems based on you believing one of your hands is weak. This good hand/suck hand thing is baked into most languages from the beginning. Fairly benignly in English— the names right and left suggest the correct hand and the other hand or the left-over hand. German is similar, with rechts suggesting correct... and links somewhat ambiguous. It has the same ancestor as the English slink, but I don't know if it has that kind of slinking/scurrilous connotation to modern Germans.

Romance languages have the very old association of clean (or able) and dirty built into them, most plainly the Italian destra and sinistra— dextrous and sinister. In French the words seem to reference manners with droit and gauche, but the implied meaning is the same. Spanish has the screwball izquierda for left, which is borrowed from Basque, and I suspect it sounds as random to Spanish speakers as it does to us. Esperanto, which was supposed to be the language of universal peace and brotherhood has dekstra and maldekstra— basically, able and badly-able.

Other Indo-European languages mostly have the same working/dextrous/able and dirty/crappy/evil/weak thing going. One Old English thing I wish had survived was to use a euphemism for the left hand, and call it the friendly hand. It was embarrassing and indiscreet to speak openly of that dirty hand you clean yourself with, so they went the opposite way and called it the happy hand. That also happens in Greek.

I don't know the history of referring to one hand as “dominant.” A lot of Americans seem to be attracted to the word, and like thinking in those terms. I can't find any egalitarian names for the hands. I thought there might be an Asian language that gives them a Yin and Yang connotation, but there doesn't appear to be.

Drummers could call them the cymbal hand and the snare hand... a drumset-centric thing that would really irk those snare drum guys. The way the hands function practically in drumming, often we're dealing with a leading hand and an opposing or opposite hand. People who think we're supposed to aspire to perfect ambidexterity could call them hands A/B, 1/2, 0/1. If those are still too hierarchical, we could assign them any two random Greek letters. I suggest omicron (O) and chi (X).

Handedness is dubious

Granted, we may have gone
overboard in the past...

There's a long blog post called Teaching Lefty Drummers, written by Illinois percussionist, drummer, and teacher Don Skoog, about the importance of handedness in drumming. I've seen it linked to more than once, which elevates it somewhat as a piece of internet drumming literature, so I think it's worth putting my contrary opinion out there. I've shared most of the article below, interspersed with my comments, written in my usual style— let's call it “irreverent.” No disrespect is intended; I don't know Skoog, and I have no reason to believe he is not a very skilled and experienced professional. But I disagree strongly with some of his ideas as he has presented them.

It begins:

I remember the very first time I ever hit a drum. It was in my first lesson, I went tap on the snare drum and my teacher’s eyebrows popped up, “Are you left-handed?” he asked. When I said yes, he stopped the lesson and turned the drumset around. “Let’s try it this way.”

My first instinct is to burst in with  fire that teacher, but I'm just being prematurely cranky. We haven't even started with this thing. A lot of good teachers will suggest left-handed students play the drums left-handed— setting up the drums backwards, riding with the left hand. I happen to think it's unnecessary, but it's not wrong. I get bothered when it's taken to the extremes we'll see further on.

Here, I'll make my case quickly: modern drumming in the North American/European mode is based on highly developed technique and roughly equal facility with both hands. We spend a lot of time working on that, to the point that natural handedness becomes of minor importance in comparison. As a teacher and as a right-handed drummer/left-handed person, my experience has been that success with a particular drum set orientation is not significantly connected to handedness in things other than drumming. For that reason, and since any player with interest in marching percussion, mallets, or timpani will have to learn to play right handed, and given the realities of sharing drumsets when sitting in, attending jam sessions, and playing gigs with a backline, I think it's best for most students to just play right handed on a normal right handed drum set. That's my view.

Continuing with the article:

     Thirty years of playing and teaching later, not a practice goes by when I don’t silently thank him for starting me out with a setup that allows me to make the best use of my natural hardwiring. 

You can't argue with hardwiring... or can you? People use that word when they want to claim handedness is very important in drumming, but they don't want to have to prove it. “Don't you get it? This is hard wiring! This is the way it is and you can't do anything about it!” is the message of that choice of words.

Countless times, as both instructor and spectator, I have seen the unfortunate results when teachers, and I include myself here, weren’t so foresighted. Many young lefties have been through the frustration of trying to play as a right-hander, adapting to an approach that negates their strengths and intensifies their weaknesses. Others develop lefty solutions for playing a right-handed kit, bushwhacking through the undergrowth and making tough decisions while their righty competition cruise along a well-worn path. 

Because drumming is so easy for people whose drum configuration is named after the hand they write with? Where are all these natural right-handers cruising effortlessly to total mastery of the instrument? How is it that I, a lefty who plays righty, play better than 99% of them?

Much more after the break: