Drums For One and All - Tutorial page

At a casual glance, our bodies are symmetrical. Without looking too closely, a line drawn down the middle appears to divide two mirror images on our left and right sides. But on the inside, our bodies are far from being symmetrical, particularly in the ways that our brains are wired to carry out the operations of thinking, learning and controlling the rest of the body.

We've all heard about the "left brain" and "right brain", and how the dominance of one side over the other can influence so much about who we are, from the lower level functions of manual dexterity to the higher levels of our personality type. It should come as no surprise that the left brain/right brain balancing act plays a major role in how we approach hand drumming.

We could ask the big picture questions of whether to deal with drumming as an analytical exercise (left brain) or an emotional expression (right brain), but in this workshop, I'd like to strip things down to the basics of finding out by trial and error which of the sides of your body is better suited to carrying out the different tasks of playing a hand drum.

If you are one of the lucky people who is truly ambidextrous (equally balanced on left and right sides), then the affects of the exercises in this workshop will be less obvious than for most people who have clearly dominant and non-dominant sides. By that I mean that one hand may be able to move more quickly than the other, or it may be able to respond to more intricate muscular commands. And it's not just the hands that are in question; this involves the feet as well.

Drummers who play a traditional drum "kit" spend much of their practice time developing limb independence. This means that they should be able to assign a unique task to each hand and each foot and put all four tasks in motion simultaneously. If the tasks are all related by a common rhythmic thread, then this is something most intermediate drummers can do well.

Only more advanced drummers are capable of assigning a task to each limb that has a different rhythmic thread from the other limbs. Such a pattern is known as a polyrhythm. In order to achieve this level of playing, a person must overcome any natural left/right dominance and make all limbs equally capable of playing with consistent speed and dexterity. The real advantage of this skill is that you can readily swap any one of the tasks between any one of the limbs and carry on playing without losing the overall rhythmic pattern.

But since we are focused more on hand drumming, we can cut that complexity in half and just concern ourselves with two hands (although, to be honest, I strongly suggest keeping at least one foot tapping along while your hands do the actual playing).

So which is our dominant and which is our non-dominant side? Perhaps the quickest test that could give you a clue is this:

Start by tapping one hand on your knee with a fairly quick beat. Speed the beat up to the point where it takes some effort to maintain. See how long you can keep tapping at that rate before your hand gets tired. Now try the same thing with the other hand. Which ever side was able to play longer at high speed is most likely your dominant side. The non-dominant side may seem a bit more clumsy by comparison, or it will simply begin to ache more quickly. (See note 1 below)

After each of these exercises, I suggest shaking out your hands and arms as a means of releasing any stress that may accumulate from using muscles that are not well developed. This will help you avoid any injury such as carpal tunnel syndrome. In the end, it's more important to be a healthy person than a talented but suffering drummer.

As you might expect, most people are right hand dominant. This behavior begins at childhood with an emphasis on left brained activity (remember, hands and brain are cross wired). Someone who starts using their right hand for drawing and writing will probably spend the rest of their life training their right hand to be quicker, stronger, and more dextrous.

So what good does it do you to know that you have one hand that is more adept at movement than the other? Well, there are two things you can gain from this knowledge:

you can work to achieve ambidexterity between your hands so that they are equally capable of playing whatever part of a rhythmic pattern you assign to each hand, or
you can accept that one side is more developed and adapt your playing technique to take this into account.

If you choose to follow the second route, you will know that if a teacher starts telling you to play such and such a beat using the right hand for this and the left hand for that, you may need to reverse all those directions if your dominant hand is the opposite of what you are being told to play. Teachers may automatically assume that their students are right handed and will base all their instruction on that assumption, but you need to look out for what works best with your natural abilities.

The remaining exercises in this workshop will serve the dual purposes of making it clear to you which of your hands is dominant, and also helping to develop at least a sense of what it means to have equally balanced left and right hands.

If you have a metronome handy, I suggest you start out by setting it to a moderate tempo (say 120 beats per minute) and use it to provide a guiding beat to keep your hands moving at a steady rate while playing the exercises. Once you've tried the exercises several times, increase the metronome's tempo and try them again. If you don't have a metronome, do your best to keep the basic pulse of your playing as steady as possible. Tapping your foot or even swaying your body from side to side will definitely help.

Each of the exercise uses a series of patterns of progressively more beats, from 2 to 6. There are multiple benefits from doing these exercises, but in order for you to receive these benefits, you must try to make the transition from pattern to pattern as smoothly as possible without stopping or breaking your stride.

All three exercises use the following notation to describe the patterns:

L = left hand bass tone

R = right hand bass tone

L = left hand slap tone

R = right hand slap tone

(x4) = repeat pattern 4 times

(You'll remember from your basic hand drumming technique that a bass tone is played by the palm in the center of the head, and a slap tone is played by the fingers on the rim of the head.)

We'll start simple and work our way up in complexity. This exercise lets you focus on leading with one hand for a while before leading with the other. By "leading", I mean that one hand will play a bass tone on the first beat, and the other hand will follow with slap tones for the remaining beats in the pattern.

Start by leading just with your left hand. Play the 2 beat pattern 4 times, then immediately follow that by playing the 3 beat pattern 4 times and so on until you've played the 6 beat pattern 4 times. Then reverse things and work your way back down to the 2 beat pattern. Repeat this up and down progression for several minutes until you can make the transitions completely seamless.

2 beat pattern Count: 1 2
Hands: L R (x4)

3 beat pattern Count: 1 2 3
Hands: L R R (x4)

4 beat pattern Count: 1 2 3 4
Hands: L R R R (x4)

5 beat pattern Count: 1 2 3 4 5
Hands: L R R R R (x4)

6 beat pattern Count: 1 2 3 4 5 6
Hands: L R R R R R (x4)

Now try the same exercise all over again, but now lead only with your right hand.

2 beat pattern Count: 1 2
Hands: R L (x4)

3 beat pattern Count: 1 2 3
Hands: R L L (x4)

4 beat pattern Count: 1 2 3 4
Hands: R L L L (x4)

5 beat pattern Count: 1 2 3 4 5
Hands: R L L L L (x4)

6 beat pattern Count: 1 2 3 4 5 6
Hands: R L L L L L (x4)

Once you become comfortable with how the exercise works, increase the tempo of your metronome (or your mental "clock" if you don't have a metronome), and repeat everything again, leading first with the left and then with the right. As you speed things up, you will begin to see that one hand is more likely to be adept at leading and the other at following. Your dominant and non-dominant sides are becoming more obvious.

The final exercise is the most challenging because it requires you to change your leading hand twice with each pattern. The format is very much the same, but this time you will play the 2 beat pattern leading with the left and immediately follow that by playing the 2 beat pattern leading with the right. You'll repeat that sequence 4 times before moving on to the 3 beat pattern. You may need to slow your metronome down a little bit the first time you try this.

2 beat pattern Count: 1 2 1 2
Hands: L R / R L (x4)

3 beat pattern Count: 1 2 3 1 2 3
Hands: L R L / R L R (x4)

4 beat pattern Count: 1 2 3 4 1 2 3 4
Hands: L R L R / R L R L (x4)

5 beat pattern Count: 1 2 3 4 5 1 2 3 4 5
Hands: L R L R L / R L R L R (x4)

6 beat pattern Count: 1 2 3 4 5 6 1 2 3 4 5 6
Hands: L R L R L R / R L R L R L (x4)

What makes this exercise a little bit confusing is that the transition from pattern to pattern is different, depending on whether you've just finished an even pattern (2, 4, 6) or an odd pattern (3 or 5). Finishing an even pattern makes you lead with the same hand on the following odd pattern, while finishing an odd pattern makes you lead with the opposite hand on the following even pattern. If you survive this exercise with your wits intact, you may have made some progress towards balancing out your left and right sides so that they are both comfortable with leading a rhythmic pattern.

But there are other benefits to these exercises as well:

They get you counting along with the beats of a pattern
They help to emphasize where the down beat is (beat #1 in each pattern)
They help you to compare the distinctly different feel between patterns based on an even number of beats versus those with an odd number

An important thing to note is that if you are serious about developing limb independence, you won't get far by trying these exercises once and never coming back to them again. You are literally trying to overcome years of conditioning and training your body to function in ways that aren't comfortable because they aren't familiar. It will seem awkard and clunky at first, but in time, it will flow more naturally. Eventually, you will reach a point where you won't even think about which side is leading, it will just happen, and you will be able to switch sides at will without missing a beat.

NOTE 1:
A similar test can be applied to your feet, but with a slightly different twist. Even an intermediate drummer will have trouble tapping just one foot very fast. So instead, try tapping out a beat by alternating your feet: L R L R L R, etc. Increase the speed as much as you can while still maintaining steady time. You will quickly feel one of your legs start to ache in the ankle or calf area. Since we don't spend as much time developing dexterity in one leg over the other, what we may be observing here is not so much a dominant and non-dominant foot, but rather one leg that is simply stronger than the other.

As with your hands, you may want to shake out or stretch your legs after doing an exercise that causes fatigue. Our legs are less prone to injury than our arms, but it is best to relieve stress whenever possible to stay healthy.