Choosing Drum Sticks

Video Transcript

" Hi! My name is Ken Marcou and right now we’re going to talk about drum sticks. There are two widely accepted ways of holding the drum sticks. The first way is this way…holding the drum sticks like this…your palms are up and relatively flat, this is how you should be playing the drum when you’re playing one drum, now when you’re playing the drum kit your motions will vary based on what you’re trying to do and in how but for the most part when you’re playing one drum this is called matched grip but your left hand is the one that varies, you hold the stick in the military style like this…put it in between your thumb and fore finger kind of like a chop stick and wrap your fore finger slightly kind of half way around and rest it in between your middle finger and ring finger and then kind of tighten up the grip with your thumb and fore finger like that, so you’re holding the stick like this… Now I this is I think the very cumbersome way to play drums however, many great drummers have played like this, so you may notice this in the 50’s style they’ll play like this…so that’s the difference between matched grip and military style grip. Now I’m going to play a little bit of each way just to give you an example, matched grip…and military style grip, you’ll get the same result just different method…playing the drum kit is the same thing…that’ was military style. Now we’ll play a simple beat using matched grip…you may have noticed there’s a slight difference in the way it sounds mostly because the matched grip is a little bit more definitive, it’s a little bit more strong sounding, the military style was typically used for drum and Moeller chords you know war drumming, it kind of originated from I believe, and also very widely used by jazz drummers so it’s a little bit more settled, so that’s the difference between military style and matched grip."