How Do I Hold My Drumsticks?
Almost every time I start teaching a new student this is the first question they ask me. It seems like a fairly straightforward question, right? All you’re doing is holding two sticks in your hand. But, like so many things in music it isn’t always that simple. Here’s the first thing you need to think about:
Traditional vs. Matched
The first thing you need to consider when holding your drumsticks is whether you want to hold them “traditional grip” or “matched grip”. What’s the difference between these?
To hold your drumsticks traditionally you want your cymbal hand, probably your right hand, to hold the stick normally, between your fingers and thumb (we’ll get more in depth with that when we talk about matched grip), but where it really gets tricky is how you hold your snare hand, which is usually your left hand. You want to hold your palm away from the drum, let your stick rest on the side of your hand at the base of the thumb, and rest in on your ring finger as you grip it with your middle finger. You strike the drum by twisting your wrist inward. Here, it might be easier if I show you some pictures of me holding my sticks using the traditional technique:
For matched grip you want to hold the sticks between the first joint in your finger and your thumb. That hold is going to be the fulcrum. From there you are going to use a combination of your wrist and your middle and index finger to whip your stick toward the drum head. Here’s a picture of me holding my sticks matched grip:
A word of advice: Try as hard as you can to get good technique right off the bat. If you don’t you could get in the habit of using your elbow joints to hit the drum which is something you really don’t want! You simply won’t be able to move your arms fast enough when you eventually get good enough to play that quickly. You’ll also look kinda dumb when you play and people will know you don’t have good technique. You really want to get in the habit of playing from your wrists, and then eventually just from your fingers for the super fast strokes.
This is confusing. Why are there two different ways?
Many people are confused as to why there are two different ways to hold your sticks. You see, early drummers started playing the drumset traditional grip because, well, that’s the only way they could! Before the drumkit was invented the only thing people played with drumsticks was the marching snare drum, which was held with a sling and sort of swung over the hip. This worked for marching while drumming, but the angle of the drum to the left hand was so great that it would’ve been impossible to play matched grip for any sustained length of time. Holding the drumstick with the palm facing up in the left hand, traditional-grip, was the only way to feasibly play.
However in the 60’s everything changed. Drumkits were a thing, and they’d been a thing for fifty years. The marching snare wasn’t relevant, and neither was the way you held your sticks. What’s more is that music was changing. In the 60’s drumming went from the soft, finessed taps of jazz and latin to the disorientingly thunderous strikes of hard rock. We went from Jo Jones to John Bonham. (do yourself a favour and click that link. Jo Jones is the drumming world’s most wholesome treasure.)
Which Grip Should I Use?
Well, that sort of depends on what type of drumming you want to do.
If you are interested in playing jazz or latin, traditional grip could be a good route to take. For myself, since I can’t play the left hand as forcefully with traditional grip as I can with matched grip I find myself playing with a lot more dynamics (having a large range of different volume in my playing), which often creates more interesting ideas. This has definitely shown to be useful when the band steps back and I get deep into a drum solo.
Matched grip on the other hand (pun intended) is the king of rock and pop music. You simply have more power on your snare hand which makes it way easier to blast out those full volume beats and fills. Also, when you get farther along in playing the drums, matched grip makes it a lot easier to “play open”, but that’s another post.
Of course there are always exceptions. I don’t want to say matched grip wasn’t a thing in Jazz either. Phil Seaman was a famous British jazz drummer who exclusively used matched grip. Likewise, there were many drummers like Mitch Mitchel from The Jimmy Hendrix Experience who used traditional grip to play hard rock in the 60’s.
Also, if you’ve gathered so much from my own playing habits, you don’t necessarily have to choose one grip or the other. I often flip flop between them—even mid-song! It’s okay to spend as long as you want deciding which grip is better for you—or finally decide to use both. However, be aware that traditional grip is going to be a lot harder to play at first, so you might need to put a little more effort into it at the beginning.
The Fall of Traditional Grip and Why I Like To Play Traditional.
A sad fact, to me anyway, is that basically every drum beat that has been played on the top forties in the last few decades has been played palm-down on the snare drum. (However not all of them! I’ve seen Ronnie Vannucci, the drummer from The Killers, break out traditional grip more than once!) But despite this I still believe traditional grip is an important skill to master.
Personally, I play both grips. I usually play matched when I play in my rock band and then I play traditional when I’m playing jazz. I like knowing both. Both of the grips may suffer slightly since I only work the muscles I need half as much as my other hand, but whatever. I drum so I can do what I want to do.
I mentioned this briefly before, but I feel like it’s much easier to play with better dynamics. Where your comfortable stroke with matched grip would be around 85% volume, a comfortable strike with traditional grip would be closer to 60% volume. This means that you’re being much more conscious about what stokes are going to be accented or ghosted. Not only this, but you can do this thing where you twist your wrist inward and hold your stick more like a pencil, and it can create a slightly different sound which can be cool in some contexts.
And yes, there may not be much technical superiority to playing traditional—in certain cases it could even hinder you, like if you wanted to “playing open”— but there is certainly an aesthetic nostalgia to playing this way. It just looks so dang cool playing all these crazy rhythms on the drums with a wonky, asymmetric grip. And the weird thing is, when you start feeling like a jazzy wizard you actually start playing like a jazzy wizard! It’s weird, but I find it works!
I’m also proud of my drum teacher who was an older jazz guy and played traditional. He had learned how to play Jazz and Latin in the 70’s when many of the original masters, who all played traditional grip, were still active and performing, and he passed his wisdom onto me. Although he did teach me to play matched because he thought it was the future of drumming, I still like to pay homage to him by playing traditional sometimes. Oh man, does that sounds pretentious? Probably. Oh well.
Lastly, and perhaps it’s not that strong of an argument, but I really do hate to see traditional grip die out like an endangered rhino, especially since matched grip is relatively so young on the timeline of drumming history.
One more thing to be aware of before we move on to matched grip stuff. If you choose traditional grip know this: Other drummers may expect you to have the jazz chops to back up the grip. You’re going to want to make sure you practice your rudiments and get all the way through your John Riley book so they don’t call you a poser. (Though if they actually call you a poser they’re being a jerk and you shouldn’t listen to them.)
So after all that you’ve still chosen traditional, great! Take out your practice pad and start working those single strokes. However, if you’ve chosen matched grip you still have a few more things to consider. (Well, if you chose traditional I guess you’ll have to consider these things for your cymbal hand too…)
French or German grip?
What? Nationalities are getting into it now? I just wanted to learn how to hold a stick! Don’t worry, it’s not really that complicated. To be honest, I’m not sure why these different styles of holding the stick are named after these countries. Even after some googling I’m still not sure why. Something to do with playing the timpani. Anyway,
The first way that you can hold your sticks is called French grip. This is where you hold your sticks with your palms facing inward and your thumbs facing up. Holding your sticks this way makes it so that you’re fingers are doing most of the stick movement. This gives you more finesse and speed, but often at the expense of power and stability.
Personally I find French grip a little too unstable, making it easier to drop a stick—something I really don’t want mid-performance. Though if what you’re looking for are those blazing fast fills you should know that almost all the single-stroke speed champions use french grip.
The second way you can play is German grip. This is where you hold your palms basically facing straight down to your drum head. Your thumbs will be perpendicular to the drum head too. To me German grip feels the most powerful and stable grip, and it still allows really good speed.
The last way to play is American grip. This is just a sort-of halfway in between of German and French grip. From a purely aesthetic viewpoint I feel that American grip looks the best. Where French can look a little limp in the hand and German can look a little too robotic and unnatural, American is a really nice blend of the two. (Of course the way things look isn’t a super important part of drumming, but I’m a showman.) The drawback to American is that I find is it’s really easy to get blisters if you’re playing hard.
With all the different grip styles it’s important to mention that it’s not all that important to pick only one type of grip. It’s still good to get practice with all the different grips, and eventually you’ll probably settle on the one you like the most—or you won’t! And that’s okay. Also, it’s fairly common to switch styles in the middle of playing. When I start playing the ride I find myself using French grip more often than not just because it feels more natural to me.
The Important Thing People Never Tell You About:
There’s one really important thing that people never tell you about holding your drumsticks. It’s all well and fine to be able to hold your sticks properly, but you can’t play if you don’t know how to move them! Understanding how to extend your grip so that you get maximum movement with your wrists and fingers is probably more than half the battle to good sticking technique.
So here’s how you get a good extension on your grip. You are going to use that index finger to cradle the stick and your thumb to keep it in place. That is your fulcrum—just like the middle of a teeter totter. Now, you’re going to use your ring and index finger underneath combined with just a little wrist action to flick the stick down into the drum.
These next two are how it looks like when you extend the traditional grip:
To bring your stick back up two things are going to help you. The first thing is going to be simply the bounce of the stick off the drumhead. Often that’s enough to reset that stick up against your bottom fingers so that you can flick it back down into the drum. But sometimes you’re not playing fast or hard enough for the bounce to get your stick back in position. If you need to “reset” the stick in your hand, flick your wrist up in a way that the stick is levered back by blocking the butt-end of the stick with your wrist.
There you go! Once you practice that you should be well on your way to hitting things like a seasoned vet! (Get it? Cause it’s the name of my website!?? Yeah it’s bad…)
A Few Last Things To Remember:
While you’re playing, what you want to go for is looseness in your wrists and relaxation in your hands and arms. Tensing your muscles at all will slow you down and take you off the beat. Being able to play from your fingers and wrists, as we talked about above, as opposed to from your shoulders and elbows is going to really help with this.
Last last thing, pretend there’s a one inch diameter circle in the middle of your snare drum. That’s what you want to hit. Also, make sure you’re holding your sticks at a symmetrical angle.
Are there any different way to hold your drumsticks?
Yes there are! There is something called a cross-stick where you flip your snare stick around and hit the rim of your snare and you palm the drum head for a muted wood-block sound. The other thing you do sometimes in latin drumming is flip your cymbal stick around and hit the side of your floor tom. I think I’ll explain those in another post though cause this one’s getting kinda long.
Also, surprise! There’s another secret modern technique that not a lot of people know about for holding your drumsticks while playing super aggressive rock and punk songs. It’s very non-traditional but super effective for playing those super fast songs in a way where you don’t run out of steam before the end, or get crazy blisters. Again, I think that’s another post.
So that’s it! Thanks so much for reading my post 🙂