Hi guys welcome to the German grip
lesson today we're going to work on our
wrist motion and our German grip in
order to benefit speed and taking
advantage of the rebound only using our
wrist what usually happens is that we
tend to start working with an arm motion
from slow tempos and while we increase
the speed we switch to a wrist motion
only and then as we feel like we
get to the limit of our wrist speed we
start helping ourselves with fingers
this is a very common situation that I
saw and I've been facing for a while and
so the way I worked on this to improve
my wrist motion was basically to force
myself when I will get to the point of
limit of speed of my wrist instead of
helping myself with the fingers I would
figure out a way to always keep the
wrist motion going so instead of
starting opening my hand I would keep
the hand in contact without choking
the stick but only in contact so that I
could still... I was forced actually to use
my wrist motion and in this way I
improved my wrist motion speed and that
benefit everything else because of
course if my limit of wrist motion is
200 BPM or 220 BPM and then with the
help of my finger let's say I get 20
BPMs more that will take me to 240 and
that means that that's the maximum speed
that I can play at if instead I will
work on my wrist motion and bring it to
let's say 240 then with the help of my
fingers I'm going to still have that 20
BPM smore
so that's going to be 240 plus 20 which
means 260 that's why I wanted to work on
my wrist motion so much and while I was
working it I figured out
little details that really made a
difference for me and so now we're going
to go through all these little details
so the first thing I worked on was how
to actually hold the stick in my hand so
the grip itself and we're talking about
the German grip right now so this part
of the hand looks upwards and not
laterally as in the French grip so one
of the common mistakes that I see and
that I used to do is that I was holding
and my main fulcrum point was between the
index and thumb fingers and while I
would bounce a stick I would start to
feel a lot of stress here and sometimes
I would also findd by myself working
with like the pinky finger raised this
way which means it's not working at all
and this gave a lot of work on this area
of my hand and that was causing stress
and as I would stress my hand I would
choke or get stiff and that would
prevent me to move my wrist to have a
wrist motion because I had like
all these muscles contract so it was
impossible for me to do a relaxed wrist
motion so I started from literally
holding the stick with only these three
fingers and then laying these two on the
stick why did this benefit my German
grip basically if we think of the fact
that we have five fingers that we can
take advantage of in holding the stick
and we only use two that means that all
the work is divided 50% on thumb and 50%
on the index finger and these three
fingers are barely doing anything which
is a waste instead if I hold the stick
with these fingers and then I lay these two,
it means that the work is divided
between five fingers so each finger has
20 percent of work and that of course
takes a lot of pressure
away from only one part of the hand in
this way I found myself way more relaxed
than what I was doing before and this
was very helpful also to understand if I
was only using the wrist motion or if I
was helping myself with fingers too
because holding the stick in this way
will prevent you from using the fingers
and helping yourself with the fingers so
if I always keep these three fingers in
contact there's no way that I can
actually help myself with the fingers
also or if you find a way it's better
for you not to do it because you want to
work to improve your wrist motion speed
and not to cheat on yourself and help
yourself with other parts of your hand
or of your body to make this happen okay
so once we do this we will be forced to
isolate the wrist from the rest of our
arm so we really want to make sure that
the forearm is not involved in this
motion and neither the fingers so only wrist motion
at this point we have to
understand that we can also take
advantage of the rebound to improve our
speed with the wrist motion and this is
very important because if we think of
raising the stick every time it's going
to give us hard times it's going to slow
us down because of course it's more
difficult to keep lifting and then
pushing down the stick rather than just
following the stick back because the
rebound pushes the stick up and then
pushing a stick back down ok so learning
how to follow and how to accept the
rebound with the wrist only is very
important a lot of times this happens
where after the stroke we stop the
rebound of the stick which means that
then we have to raise the stick again
where this happens
where we open the hand and so the
wrist is not really moving we see the
stick coming back up but then it's
actually the opening of the hand that
allows the stick to go back up and we're
not following up to stick with our wrist
so let's pay attention that what we do
it's actually this thing and we don't
stop the stick or open the hand so the
rebound it's a very important thing at
this point because it will help us to
make this wrist motion happen because it
will pull the stick back up and we will
only have to focus on pushing down and
then coming back up as fast as possible
so working on our reaction of the
reaction of the wrist so as the stick
it's the surface it wants to immediately
come back and we have to just work on
the up motion as fast as we can
the faster we are in doing this the
faster we will play because the earlier
we will be ready for another stroke so
the more strokes we play in a certain
amount of time the faster we're playing
basically so when I do is I focus all
my concentration on coming back another
factor that really made a difference was
the dynamic at which I play when I use
the wrist motion so of course the slower we
go the more space we have to do this
motion but then faster we start to play
time and space being connected we want to
have less space between the tip of the
stick and the pad to have less time
between each stroke so more speed okay
so if let's say we can play at this high at
150 BPM won't be able to do the same at
250 of course unless we're not machines
but unfortunately we're not so we have
to deal with the dynamic so the faster
we will go the lower our dynamic will
have to be we have to deal with the
dynamic we have to find a compromise and
that's a choice that you will make in
time based on the way you want to play
if you want to be a hard hitter you
won't maybe be able to go too fast but
you will always have a very high volume a
very high dynamic of your playing
instead if you want to play a little bit
faster and maybe more of a speed drummer
that means that you have to learn to
control the dynamic and not just go all
the way back as much as you can but you
will have to choose the dynamic base on
the speed that you want
to play at ok let's see two workouts
that we can do to improve our wrist
motion the first one we will work more on
the first four strokes of the hand which
will allow us to learn how to
play the first stroke with a arm
motion because the arm motion it's
always better to start with an arm
motion injection rather than with the
wrist straight away the arm motion is a
little bit easier and we just have to
leave our arm fall and once the stick
it's the surface we have to learn to
follow the rebound
so the first stroke with the wrist
motion and not just let the stick bounce back on its own but
actually follow it with with our body so
this is the first workout and we're
going to play four strokes per hand in
this way
so again in this way we will work on the
first part so the injection part of our
wrist motion so for example if we have
to do a single stroke roll we will be
able to just start the single stroke
accepting the rebound and then
maintaining the rebound for as long as
we will need to or if we have to start a
Blast Beat or whatever we will have to
play it's just to educate our brain to
have this type of approach every time it
faces this situation so we start a Blast
Beat, a single stroke roll or whatever
involves the wrist motion and it is
educated to just accept the rebound
following the stick back instead of you
having to think about doing that while
you're playing which is going to be
impossible when you will be in a
situation where you have so many things
to think about like playing in a band
playing a live show
having the click tracks all the
situation... being the studio all the
situation that's surrounding you will
make it harder for you to think on only
concentrate on your wrist or that
fraction of movement every time you have
to use the wrist motion so in this way
it will just become natural and just
become a muscular memory that every time
that this happens the wrist will follow
the stick back up the second workout
will be more focused on the dynamics so
on educating ourselves to play at different
dynamics based on the speed that we're
playing at so we will play one hand
at time quarter notes triplets and eighth
notes and we will use a different
dynamic for each speed so quarter notes
who will go all the way back up with the
stick triplets it will be a little bit
lower and eighth notes will be even
lower then we will do the same thing
with our handd unison and then with
our hands alternated which of course
will become eighth notes
sextuplets sixteen notes so let's see
how this would work
we can also play the same type of
exercises and do the same workouts with
heavier sticks like for example these
ones which are in aluminium which are
way heavier than regular wood sticks or
marching band stick so whatever type
of stick that it's heavy and you can
really feel the difference from the one
that you usually use and we don't want
to work this to become more powerful or
stronger but we want to just learn how
to deal with the rebound better than
what we do with our regular wood
sticks so if we will feel the weight of
these sticks we will understand that we're
doing something wrong like lifting the
sticks for example because it means that
we're not taking advantage of the
rebound instead if the rebound pushes
the stick back up we won't ever feel the
weight of the stick so let's see how
these two workouts work with heavier
sticks
so as we can see I used almost the same
speeds actually for the second workout
it was always 220 BPM for the first
time and the second time and nothing
really changes actually I felt a little
bit more comfortable with the heavier
sticks because being heavier there's more
rebound so it kind of works the opposite
way of what I usually hear where people
tend to use lighter sticks to go faster
but then everybody will have a different
feeling on this so you will see how it
works and it's actually good to try and
use lighter sticks and heavier sticks
because maybe you will change your
approach and you will find a new way a
new approach for you to play drums
another little suggestion that I give
you or another feeling that I have when
I play this the wrist motion is that
whenever I feel that the stick is in
contact with my thumb and pinky finger
and all the other fingers are laying on
the stick I automatically feel that
my hand relaxes so try to concentrate
on this and try to see if this happens
for you also the reason why this
happen is because you're having the
stick in contact with these two fingers
really allows you or really forces you
to take advantage of all the hand and
all the fingers and so in this way you
redistribute all the work between all
the fingers instead of stopping at the
ring finger or middle finger or index
finger so in this way we will benefit
the wrist motion and we will
automatically benefit control speed
power and endurance and for me this was
a very helpful approach and very helpful
way to improve my speed I sometimes play
Blast Beats with my wrist only which in my
opinion gives a little bit more of power
in the Blast Beat and I have a little bit
more volume while playing the Blast
Beats and for this reason I really like
it but also of course in fills on the
Toms for example where if you tune your
Toms a little bit low they won't
have the same rebound as a snare does or
usually still the floor toms never have
the same rebound of a snare and so
having a good wrist motion helps me on
playing on any kit so whenever I'm on
tour or whenever I play in festivals I
don't have any problems adapting myself
to the kit that I find there and
also to keep very high dynamic and
volume also on the surfaces that don't
have a lot of rebound so have a good
practice and I'll see you next week with
another lesson
