Wes Crawford: Hello, I’m Wes Crawford, and we are going to talk about my favorite subject, the drum set. But first a little bit about me. I toured for 11 years with the Jazz, Rhythm and Blues singer, Jane L. Powell, before settling into the Washington D.C., Baltimore region, where I now freelance and perform and record with a lot of different groups, including Shahin & Sepehr on the Higher Octave Narada Label. I also teach drum set at Goucher College in Baltimore and privately in my home studio.
First, let’s talk about holding the sticks now. Of course anybody can come up to a drum and hit this drum, make a sound, and there is this great immediate gratification aspect about the drum set. But we do want to do things properly. By properly, I really mean most efficiently so that you can make the most progress in the least amount of time and not develop bad habits that will hold you back and maybe keep you from ever learning something.
So, with that in mind, I like to teach people to use the matched grip. We call it the matched grip because each hand holds the sticks similarly. You’ve also seen the traditional grip that looks something like this, and I’ll turn around. I also learned that grip -- and in fact I learned it first, but I found I can get more power, more reach, and just more even sound out of doing match grip, so I highly recommend it, it’s also a lot easier to learn.
So, let’s begin. First, grip the stick about this far up on the stick, so, what's that, a third of the way up. And grip it between the first joint on the first finger and the fat part of your thumb. So, if you’re holding it like this, you can see how my thumb is really just going straight into the stick and it’s pressing the stick up into this joint, which -- isn’t it nice to have a little corner to back something around into and to keep it there. This is where most of the tension should occur when you hold the stick; this is your anti-gravitational device to keep it from dropping.
After you do this easy step and you’re conscious and you’re feeling it and you’re thinking about what you’re doing, then just simply curl the rest of the fingers around the stick, such that the stick lays across the base of the fingers, just inside it, and the fingertips can be felt on the bottom of the stick. Now, as we play faster and louder, we might drop our fingers a little bit, so there is more room for the stick to give and to bounce back off of the drum. As we play slower and softer, we might want to grip the fingers in a little bit more firmly, not tightly, we’re not tensing our hand, but more firmly so that the stick has less play in it, and we can be more precise. This occurs as we play, in the middle of passages, as we’re playing something.
So, again, as I put my fingers around the stick, do not loosen up here, because you want to keep this part very firm, this is called our fulcrum, both hands will follow the same procedure. As you can see, my wrist is coming straight off my arm and my hand is straight, but the stick goes out at an angle. Don’t get confused by this. The stick is coming out of your hand at approximately 45-degrees so that when you put both hands ready to hit the drum, you’re pretty close to a 90-degree angle. This is for the basic match grip, there are different variations. This comes from a German timpani grip, a French grip. You put the thumb on the top of the finger and it's more like a handshake, but the easiest to learn, to get the most solid sound, is going to be this grip with the palm facing the floor.
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