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...

Looking at The New Breed

Let's talk about the book with the funny looking Ludwig drums with the Silver Dot heads on the cover— and all the ugly Paiste ColorSound cymbals, and Simmons SDS-5 hexagonal drum pads. 

Yes, I'm talking about The New Breed, by Gary Chester. It's one of the big hard books the drumming community likes to talk about. While it hasn't been universally adopted— lot's of people, like me, don't use it, have never used it— it has been very influential in developments in drumming since the 90s. It's a coherent grand system for playing the drums created in a time when there weren't a lot of coherent grand systems for that.  

The book became a thing coinciding with Dave Weckl— who studied with Chester— becoming an extremely hot drumming item in the mid 1980s.  

“Every time I'd walk into a lesson, he'd come up with a different system, and I'd feel r___ded. Then I'd go home, practice it, and get it down to where it was cooking. When I'd go back, he'd tell me something else to do with it, and I'd feel r___ded all over again. It was great though; his lessons are such a challenge.”

- Dave Weckl on studying with Chester 

Visit Scott K. Fish's site to read the entire interview. 

After Weckl, there were a series of smaller drumming sensations— e.g. Joel Rosenblatt— who came out of Chester's studio, that cemented this as a thing to do. In more recent years the open handed drumming thing has really taken off, and this is one of the first books that advocated that in a serious way.  

So let's look closely at what's in it. If you don't own it, you can certainly find pirated pdfs online to look at while you read this. But buy it. It's $18, nothing. 

In the Concepts part of the book, pp. 4-7, Chester lays out his doctrine: 

• Learn everything on the drum set both right hand and left hand lead. 
• Use a funny set up, with hihats, ride cymbals, and floor toms on both sides. 
• Each hand stays on “its” side of the drum set. 
• Singing and counting— do it, sing each of the parts while playing. 

Everything that follows is in aid of those first three points, as the best vehicle for creative reading and groove making on the drums. If you agree with those priorities, you can commence working your way through the book in order. If not, you might want to be more selective in how you use it.

There are 39 systems— combinations of repeating rhythms for three limbs— to be played while reading an independent melody part played with the fourth limb. The reading is not unlike what is in Syncopation, first with 8th note based rhythms, then 16th notes. The advanced reading pages are built on repeating two measure phrases.  

The systems mostly follow standard pop timekeeping conventions of backbeats on the snare drum / ride rhythm on a cymbal. All systems have a right hand lead form, and a left hand lead form— 50% of the materials are dedicated to learning to play time “open handed.”

Here is what is generally happening with them: 

• System 1: A warm up, with the hands playing unison 16ths on the hihats. 
• Systems 2-13: Conventional forms of timekeeping, combinations of simple cymbal and left foot rhythms, bass drum plays melody.   
• Systems 14-15 and 18-19: One hand covers the cymbal and snare drum with the bass drum playing the melody, then the other hand playing the melody. 
• Systems 16-17: Hands play alternating 8th notes between a floor tom and cymbal, with the bass drum playing the melody. 
• Systems 20-25: Simple, unusual, coordination problems. 
• Systems 26-29: Advanced, but conventional, timekeeping combinations.
• Systems 30-39: Conventional timekeeping combinations with the left foot independent. 

Summarizing which limbs handle the independent parts— mostly bass drum, a lot of left foot, a little bit with each hand. 

• Systems 1-17 and 22-29: bass drum
• Systems 18-21: a hand on a floor tom
• Systems 30-39: left foot 
  
  

Getting into the advanced systems starting on p. 24: 

• Systems 1-4: bass drum independence vs. particular, unusual linear pattern in the hands. 
• Systems 5-6: bass drum independence vs. a basic fusion cymbal rhythm with backbeats. 
• Systems 7-8: hand independence vs. basic fusion cymbal rhythm plus alternating 8ths in the feet. 
• Systems 9-10: bass drum independence vs. the linear pattern above, played with an alternating sticking. 

That linear pattern, which is used on several systems, is a little strange, I don't understand the logic for for having that be the one thing of its type: 

Things get vastly more complicated with the composite systems starting on p. 38. There you basically extract one measure from all the playing you did in the first part of the book, and replace one of the system parts— playing all the reading pages with that part. 

That's an order of magnitude more difficult than anything done so far, and virtually endless. This is the spot in the book I would like to see much more fully developed, finding a middle state between the simple (but very demanding and time consuming) first part, and the vast, extremely difficult second part. Suggest some more practical rhythms for the new complex part of the ostinato.

Which we kind of get here, with a standard pop or bossa rhythm in the bass drum, that is only slightly more complex than everything in the basic systems: 

 After that the composite system examples are kind of random. Personally, I would want to pick and choose the new part for practicality, and would like to have seen that reflected in the book.  

My brief experience with it: 

After writing most of this post I decided to sit down and actually play some of it, so I went through the first five systems— including the “open handed” ones— with all eight pages of reading, counting quarter notes out loud. I've never worked on learning to play open handed, but it was basically easy after doing the harmonic coordination stuff from Dahlgren & Fine, and my own related system. It became kind of an endurance exercise. As after doing any kind of serious endurance exercise... things move a lot easier when you're done, even things not covered in the exercise. It was cool. 

It had that result for me, I think, because I've been playing for a long time, and have a lot of real playing content under my belt, and a developed musical ear. This is not an ideas book; if you don't have any ideas in your ear, it won't provide them. 

I also ran all eight pages of reading for left hand independence in a songo feel, and I do like the reading pages for that, and for the intended purpose running Chester's systems. They're well constructed to be progressive in difficulty and challenging, but not ridiculous— the ridiculous part is in how they combine with the systems.  

Thoughts: 
The playing theory here is actually rather primitive, dealing with “pure” independence, based on layering unrelated rhythms, rather than interdependence, with the parts connected and based on each other. Certainly that will be learned in some form while learning the systems, but it's not addressed directly in the method itself. 

The singing element seems to be a key part of this method, and you can actually do that with anything you practice— sing quarter notes, then offbeat 8th notes, then each of the parts of the pattern. Certainly that's possible with all the Syncopation systems. 

Making any kind of serious effort with this book would be a big deal. Certainly there will be hidden benefits beyond just learning the resulting patterns as vocabulary, as I observed above. Your concentration will certainly be improved— Chester mentions that, and Dave Weckl in his interview. I've noticed the same thing with other hard materials. It would be a massive journey, and there will be results you don't expect. 

Some perspective: 

I suggest reading Scott K. Fish's 1983 interview with Gary Chester. At that time, as this book was being written, Chester's studio career had ended about ten years earlier, and he had been teaching drums about six years— a very compressed timeline for developing this method. He's a forceful communicator and talks very intensely about his 20+ year studio career, and it's clear that that is his main orientation as a musician and a teacher. He states that his motivation with the book is for players to be able to do the impossible when it's asked of them on a recording date, or other demanding professional situations. 

It's also clear that he wasn't teaching it to all levels* of drummers— his students were highly ambitious, motivated players. He mentions firing students who weren't performing the way he wanted, who he felt would not represent him well as a teacher. 

[* - Update: Or was he? checking out some videos from his former students, a couple of them started with him when they were kids, and actually doing a very simplified form of the method here— the same principles, anyway— applied to Haskell Harr.]

So, I think the book serves a narrower purpose than is often assigned to it today, as it's a popular item with enthusiasts, who are fascinated with ambidexterity, and have fixated on it as a manual for reinventing the drum set. To me it looks like less of a grand theory of drumming, or a system for initially acquiring vocabulary, and more like a very large, brutal— and somewhat arbitrary— conditioning regimen for professionally-bound drummers. 

You don't start by crawling up Everest. The way most drummers develop is, they learn a lot in a few years. I started playing when I was 12, and played my first paying gig when I was 18, and I was a slow starter. You learn a lot very fast, and then spend the next ten years cleaning up after yourself, which I think is what this brutal slog of a book is for. 

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.    

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:

Bob Moses on "dependent" drumming

Or as he called it a little later in Drum Wisdom, "non-independent" drumming. This is relevant to some of the things I brought up both in the ECM feel post and the open-handed post:

"I have a philosophy of playing which involves not working too hard. It's not a technical thing as much as it is a conceptual thing. My playing gives the illusion of independence. But, I don't use much independence. My playing is what I call the dependent style of drumming. This means that I don't separate limbs and play "gangdig-a-dang-dig-a-dang" with my right hand and then my left hand will do whatever it can do against it. I would never play with just one hand. I'd never play a rhythm with just one hand or one foot. I use all four of my limbs constantly, in a melodic fashion. Consequently, I can play fast tempos easily without, but it's not because of any technical innovation. It's a conceptual thing. I play the flow, between my hands. If it's an eighth note flow I play eighth notes between two hands. Not just one hand. I get the same effect because what I'll do instead of putting both hands on the drum is put the right hand on the ride cymbal. So, I get the feeling of a ride beat. I play the flow whether it's eighth notes or triplets. I realize that the whole right side of your body wants to work together. So, I put the right foot exactly with the right hand, which also is a great sound. It gives the cymbal sound a bottom and it's also very easy. Your right hand and right foot want to hit together. Your body works that way. If I play it at a really fast tempo I don't catch every single beat with my right hand and right foot. I pick key ones that I want to bring out. My right foot and my left hand never stop when I play. I'm not one of those drummers who can swing a band with just their right hand. I need all four of my limbs, that's why I call myself a dependent drummer. But it makes it very easy to play. If you play very fast tempos using just that one limb, either you're going to tighten up or the tempo is going to go down."

From the Dec./Jan. 1979 issue of Modern Drummer. Get yourself their digital archive- it's quite an incredible resource.

On “open-handed” drumming

Fine, now spend another hundred
years learning to do it almost
as well with your left hand.

This is a discussion I have to re-litigate on the internet every six months or so: the “open handed” thing. That is, playing the hihat with your left hand to avoid the crossover that happens when you play it normally, with the right. I have some reservations about the efficacy of that as a primary technique for most drummers.

It's a question that comes up with many students in the first five minutes of playing the drums: Why not play the hihat with your left hand? If all you have to do is tap-tap-tap the hihat and occasionally tap the snare drum thingy, wouldn't it make more sense? I generally put the subject to rest with a 1-minute explanation, and never hear about it again. The student understands that it's the normal way of playing, and adapts.

 But for some people it's just intolerably compromised and irrational-seeming, and they make egregious-sounding complaints about having to “cross your arms”, about the left hand being “trapped”, and the impossibility of hitting a lot of crap with your left while in that posture. There seems to be some kind of engineer's mentality at work; the people drawn to this way of playing seem to be the types more into tinkering around, devising and “perfecting” systems and theories than into actually playing. The instrument is conceived as a contraption to be fiddled with.

So, I have several big problems with “open handed” technique:

• Lateral coordination = easy, cross-lateral coordination = hard Your body likes to play your right side together— your right hand and right foot— and the language of drumming is built around the coordination of the leading/"ride" hand and the bass drum. It's not as apparent in the early stages of development, when the roles of the limbs can seem arbitrary, but much of the more advanced improviser's language relies on right hand/right foot coordination.
   
• Your lead is your voice
  Jazz drummers know this— we spend years or decades developing our touch on the cymbal with the right hand. But it applies to everyone. Your lead hand is your primary conduit for musical ideas— you develop a certain refinement and ease of expression with it, and largely orchestrate the rest of your playing around it.
  
  
• The drumset is designed to favor a right hand lead.
  If you use a conventional set up, everything is weighted to the right. There is more stuff on the right, and your right hand can reach everything easily (even the hihat). There is less stuff on the left, and your left hand is more restricted, due mainly to having that tall hihat thing over there, topped with a long protruding metal stick. It's not a problem, because the most effective, efficient methods for learning to play creatively on the drumset favor a right hand lead. The instrument and the technique actually developed in tandem.
  
  I think part of the theory for “OH” people is that you can just park your left hand on the hihat while your right hand goes wild hitting all that crap on the right. This is a fundamentally different approach, based on off-hand independence. Maybe it's beyond the scope of this little little rant to fully explain why.
  
  
• It's a pointless duplication of effort.
  Are we really going to learn an entirely different beat physically just to switch from the ride cymbal to the hihat?  

You could avoid this ridiculous duplication of effort by using a permanent left hand lead, with no ride cymbal on the right, and never riding on any available sound on the right. For me that would b a much greater creative limitation than just playing normally, and it also defeats part of the advertised purpose for using the technique in the first place. It's supposed to make you wondrously free to hit any crap in your set up at any time. 

More after the break: