Holding Drum Sticks for A Bossa Nova Beat

Video Transcript

"Hi, I'm Shaun Schaefer on behalf of Expert Village and today we are going to be learning how to play a bossa nova drum beat. So the first thing we need to learn how to do before we learn how to do anything regarding playing the drums is learning how to hold up the drum sticks properly. So the first thing we want to do is grab a drum stick and extend your right hand like you where going to shake someones hand. So then what you do is put the drum stick just right in the palm of the hand. Leave a inch of the stick hanging below right here, about a inch or so. It is called the butt of the stick and what you are going to do is you are going to go ahead and wrap your fingers around. Then you are going to put your thumb on the side. Now you don't want to put your thumb on top and you don't want to put your thumb on the bottom you put it right on the side. I like to leave a little space, a little gap in here that is called your forum that is where all the power comes from. I like to leave it real open like that so it is really loose. The looser you hold the sticks the less tired you are going to get, not as quickly. So you do that and then you do the exact same thing in the left hand. About a inch of the butt of the stick out and then you wrap your fingers around. Thumb on the side. This is called a match grip. Now there is another type of grip that is called traditional which is like this. We are not going to get into that today but that is a traditional grip. This is a match grip and in case of the bossa nova drum beat we are actually going to flip the stick around in your left hand. You want to hold it like you would normally would you are just going to have the butt end of the stick. That is what you are going to be playing with and the tip is going to be hanging out. I would get to that while we are going to do that a little bit later but this is how we are going to hold the sticks for our boassa nova drum beat. So let's go ahead and take a look at what our next step is going to be. "