If you want your left hand to get better, train it like 90% of all time u ever training. Thats the advice for all the People came here with this trouble. Transform ur training into routine, into something u dont afraid or get lazy of, so with time itll become a lil better. Take ur time, and If you really really want it to improve - it will. Remember that theres no magical exercise, thats all. Im personally right now on a level then Im doing one same exercise every time my left hand has a free time to move freely, i take my stick and just punch air, and if i feel something wrong, i take my right hand as an example and comparise my right hand stroke/double stroke/any other stroke with my left hand. This is the hardest but the rightest way to get ur techic, speed, control and power on ur weak hand
Man thank you for this video. I've been wanting to learn blast beats ND stuff like that. No one's videos made it click..then I watched your...dude thank you. Within 10 min I figured it out....now just have to practice
My left hand is the same. I finally got things lined up in the left by practising the jazz ride with the left at quarter note 40 playing all downbeats the same dynamic and the skip beat a half inch drop. your right hand is killer!
A good pair of marching sticks will help you with that left hand. Try the Vic Firth Corpsmasters Ralph Hardimon edition. Sounds crazy but they helped me alot.
Im currently practicing and i can only.. “blast” (its just a fast one handed single stroke) but i cant garner enough strength or speed to use finger movement, is there a certain way to do it at all?
Absolutely wicked speed and control man. Thanks so much for this! Question. What’s the best way to climb the tempos? Do you push your ceiling constantly and incrementally? Or do you spend time strengthening the slower tempos? Also, with this type of practice, how often would you practice as well as take breaks? Cheers from Australia. 🇦🇺
Hey man! Its a little bit of everything for climbing the tempos. I practice the technique very slow using different fingers as the video shows, also practice endurance with the comfort range (moderate) tempos, and then really push top speed as well. I do it about 2-3 times a week to maintain it now, but when I was learning it was everyday for about 45 minutes total (lunch breaks well spent haha) I think honing the technique and talking to the right muscles slow, working on endurance, and redlining speed are all part of a good practice routine. For getting really fast speeds I do notice my thumb goes further forward than my index finger, which creates a free floating pivot point instead of a fixed fulcrum between the thumb/index. There's another video on my channel showing this in slow motion where you can see the thumb positioning. Cheers from NZ
Super helpful video and wow you've got some killer speed with a lot of power too! Definitely going to try this out. If I could ask, what is the angle of your thumb with relation to the stick? It kind of looks like it's almost parallel -- any more info?
Thanks for the kind words man, and my thumb is mostly between parallel and 45 degrees but offset a bit, so its just the outer corner of my thumb on the stick instead of the whole thumb pad. Thats tricky to describe in text, but the idea is less skin on the stick = less friction, and I can put more pressure on it without killing rebound. Hope this is what you were after, cheers.
I find I can only do a good hammer blast at high tempo for like 3 seconds then I just start to mess up on the snare like the rebound slows down and the stick ends up stopping, any tips?
@@FerretPercussion I like your technique. Is it possible to have a your video where you explain each part step by step, very slowly? Starting with the fingers but with the closest shot, show the left hand as well? Thanks
So I was practicing like this for a while, (just using the fingers to push back the rebound), until recently when I found some info on using the push/pull technique. And now I noticed basically everyone that I've been paying attention to is using push pull during blast beats. I started to think that's the way it is, and now I see this and think maybe I can do blast beats without mastering push pull. Is this the case?
I believe you can yeah, each technique has its advantages and hurdles, so context is everything, but at the very top end of the metronome both are viable. It depends what you wanna do musically. In general, push/pull is more ergonomic as it is a 2 stroke motion that splits the work between different muscle groups. However, having different movements for each of the 2 strokes can create an uneven sound on acoustic drums like an accented moeller stroke. This can make a blast feel slower because you feel the quarter note instead of the 8th note pulse you get without the accent in there. French I find its a lot easier for me to get an even sound and more power, but harder to sustain for long periods of time past about 280bpm. Which is fine because most songs are slower than this, and usually have fills/different blasts to break up the technique past this speed. However, if someone handed me a 300bpm black metal tune and said blast over these chords for 5 minutes straight, I would probably need to think about push/pull to avoid my hands exploding. Of course there's outliers, like Wanja gets a very even push pull sound, and Lord Marco sustains unbroken French singles for 5 minutes at a time.... and both are doing that well above 300bpm. Its worth experimenting with both and seeing which one works best for you. Hope this helps!
its hard to explain whats not working in text really, but if you upload a video of what youre doing now I'd be happy to take a look at it and give you some more specific things to try with it.
I made some progress. I can now get the stick to bounce using just my thumb and index finger. Still cant get it to work with only thumb and middle finger. My right hand is good. I've been analyzing my left hand, and painstakingly comparing it to my right, and Its crazy that I still cant figure out what I'm doing different with the left. The stick presses sideways against my hand, and never feel like I have a good hold on the stick like I do with my right. I might take you up on that offer.
you can yeah, it depends how fast you wanna go. A bunch of different techniques can go to 200, fewer to 240 when it moves to the fingers, and past that up to 300+ pretty much everyone is using a handful of variations on French. I bet theres some guy out there who CAN push American past 300 but most people find French easier to hit those high speeds.
They're cheap knockoffs of the Evans Real Feel pads that the school I worked for bought in bulk. Truthfully any pad will do, but you can't go wrong with either the real feel or the red Vater ones if you're picky.
couple reasons for that could be: -too much pressure on the index/thumb fulcrum -youre coming it at an angle where the stick wants to bounce in random directions -too much elbow/wrist movement causing the same problem as #2
its more relaxed than it looks, but by driving the grip from the middle finger it gets rid of a lot of the muscle tension from the index finger that would cause RSI along the forearm.
