Drum Lesson: Improve Weak Hand
Hey, Brendan Jones here from H91 Drum School in Galway City, providing both online and private drum coaching. For me, one of the most frustrating and slowest progression areas of practice is my weaker hand. Not only are all the exercises that we practice leading from our weaker hand more difficult, the muscle memory is a lot slower than our good hand, so it needs regular attention to keep it fighting fit. Consistently working on the weaker hand is a must, if you’re lucky enough, you’ll be able to keep up with your leading hand and in terms of speed, remember, a drummer is only as fast as her/his weaker hand. That’s just the way it is. So below is a free drum lesson that will help you improve your weaker hand, by pushing it to do things in places it hasn’t it hasn’t done before.
Remember to lead from your leading hand. It is vital that you play the exercise with a sixteenth note value in mind but at the beginning just play it with the sticking pattern to get a feel for it. (SEE BELOW)
Its when we playing with the note value in mind that this exercise comes alive and is at its most beneficial. As difficult as it is at the beginning to think and and call out the sixteenth notes while you play, it’s a must. Slow it down with the metronome (50 bpm) and take it a bar at a time eventually joining the two bars, making sure you’re keeping the notes even and free from any accent unless intended. Then when its nice and fluid, build up the speed. (SEE BELOW)
To really tighten things up and to make sure the notes are even, an extra exercise you can add would be to play one bar of straight sixteenth notes into this two bar exercise and repeat. This way you can hear exactly what an even bar of sixteenth notes sound like and so you can then hear any discrepancies in this hand development exercise, you can isolate the problem and fix it. (SEE BELOW)
I hope you enjoyed this blog and hope it helped you. Please let me know if it did and if you have any question get in contact with me.
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Look after yourself and be nice to one another.
