How To Develop Finger Control

foreign ER control is one of the three important pillars in the mechanics of drumming and it's important that you do exercises that help isolate your fingers so you can improve control and dexterity and raise overall awareness of how they move in coordination with your wrists and your arms there are three primary origins of movement and drumming the first is arm full arm stroke full arm stroke the loudest most powerful stroke you can have also the slowest you cannot go very fast when you're doing an arm stroke the second is wrist movement the wrist stroke are full but not as powerful as the arm stroke but it is faster then the third is fingers finger Strokes are going to be faster than wrist and arm but they're also going to be a little bit lighter and power out of it of it as much as to get started on some exercises that will help you develop better finger technique we're going to talk about this grip right here now this is French grip and it's what's often taught with timpani technique with tympani technique it incorporates a wrist rotation along with finger control we're not going to be using the wrist rotation because we're going to want to isolate the fingers and be incorporating those control exercises so with the timpani technique you have your fulcrum right here and we're going to use this to develop our finger control exercises so what you want to do is you want to practice holding the stick like this and keeping it upward and you want to pretend that there's a spring that holds it upward for instance if you were to pull it down and let go it Springs back up if you push it down it Springs back up it doesn't just stay down now an easy way to do that is simply be moving your thumb forward and back like that when you pull your thumb back it's going to spring up that rebound spring is very important in these exercises the first exercise we're going to do is we're going to practice switching fingers on this fulcrum so instead of first finger and thumb we're doing middle finger and thumb and we're just going to practice moving the stick down and having it snap back up so if you move it down and it flops you're not snapping it back up remember this is the key right here and this is what a lot of people miss when they're doing this exercise have that stick spring up so you switch from first finger to middle finger then you switch and do ring finger now this may be really difficult at first and it may be flopping all around that's okay do it slowly and if nothing else just practice holding it upright and using your finger your thumb particularly the up and down and the weirdest of all pinky and First Finger notice I am not doing this my students have a hard time with this because right away they're moving their wrist one thing you could do to help prevent that put a stick right there and make sure that you're not doing that okay so you're trading off fingers switching fingers and you could do exercises like four in a row one two three four one two three four Etc going all the way down and then reversing coming all the way up okay that's the first one switching fingers the second one will be adding fingers you start with the first finger now remember the idea is that the stick is staying upright like a spring it's holding it up and you push it down and it Springs back up you don't have that you might find yourself having trouble and doing this floppy thing here so we're gonna add fingers now so now we add the middle finger so now we have two fingers helping to push it down and then ring finger and then Pinky and you want to take your time with this notice how my fingers are being fully engaged they aren't tight they're loose and fully extended now remove a finger remove a finger remove a finger and just like before you can do any number of repetitions you can do eights or fours you could do eight four two one we'll just demonstrate four for Speed add a finger okay again make sure you are not moving your wrist up and down you're using just fingers so here's another technique to help practicing engaging your fingers so what you do is you turn your sticks around and you hold your arms out and you play on your forearms now notice when I'm doing this my fingers are being extended right there so that's kind of what we're practicing here is we're practicing awareness of extending your fingers Loosely and pulling it back I think that's where people struggle when they're trying to do finger technique is they're remaining tight and they're not really allowing their fingers to flow freely so if you look the side view notice I'm not doing this so again if you take your stick and do this the idea is that you are extending your fingers and playing that way and you can just do repetitions or work on some patterns you do it too much your arms will get sore but again making sure you aren't pronating your wrist you're extending your fingers and pulling them up again it's just another way to sense what it feels like to engage your fingers here's another one that's kind of odd and that is switching fulcrums so fulcrum being the control point we usually have right here so what you're going to do is you're going to switch right here and then play you've got your stick being held by that now notice my fingers are extending and pulling back I'm not doing not doing that so my fingers are stretching out and pulling back anything we're doing here you want to practice with the other hand now I tend to do a majority of my playing with traditional grip so in general my match left hand is often behind speaking of that I will be doing a video on traditional grip balancing and finger technique when that is up I will put a link in the description so back to this you just practice doing this technique you can try to do rhythms so then move the fulcrum over here so what this does now you're forced to do your control with these two fingers kind of weird but again you are practicing isolation and engagement you're kind of teaching your brain what it feels like when you're practicing relaxing then weirdest of all this Pinky again notice the only thing that's moving is my pinky and not my wrist last one then is to just Practice What I Call this rapid fire trigger where your hand just locks down there's not tension but it locks into place and again stick is bouncing up your fingers are pushing it down it naturally goes up fingers are pushing it down and I just do that trigger whatever you want to call that okay now that's something you can just do mindlessly while you're listening to music you're talking to other people watching TV whatnot you want to do that with both both hands there so now let's talk about application a lot of times I will see people practicing finger technique like this yet when they play the drum set in snare drum they're playing with their wrists over like this so they either work on this and then it never happens over here or they're playing over here and when they want to do fingers you can only do a French grip they'll be playing and then simply fingers fingers fingers and that's not really ideal to have to change back and forth so what you want to do is you want to then figure out how do you take these isolation exercises using my fingers but then moving it over here now when I was first learning this in college I was very diligent with practicing but then I would start to play and I honestly couldn't tell if I was really isolating my fingers I would have to have someone watch and say is this even is this finger technique it's hard to know and then I realized something that when I'm playing kind of in the standard position like this with my wrists out it's hard to extend my fingers so I noticed if I let my wrist kind of dangle like this you see how naturally your fingers can extend versus you can do it a little bit like that but it's much easier like that so when I started doing that I suddenly gained much more awareness and I realized that I was able to extend my fingers like that like that so keep that in mind if you practice just letting your wrist dangle a little bit that will help you get used to this now there's a warning for this you don't want to crank your wrist down because if you're doing anything that pinches your tendons you can do some serious harm so I'm not saying doing that so here's here's one thing you can try doing this French grip rotating around getting used to that I'll just do it with one hand here so practice that make sure when you do this you don't go into that see that French bread so you want to get used to that you can practice things like I like to do stick control page 10 short roll combinations where it does eighth notes to sixteenths a Tempo that's fast enough that's a good way to practice switching there's a rudiment the four stroke roll [Music] do it to a certain Tempo you almost have no choice but to do fingers foreign just doing two doubles you see that so another form of application the way you're going to really use finger technique when you're doing the double stroke roll that nudge on the second one keep in mind it's not a raised accent because that would be ridiculous to try to do a roll like that but if you do a nudge that's actually finger control there so there's a direct application right there where finger control can improve other parts of your drumming the other thing I use finger control for all the time is right symbol especially in jazz when I rotate my hand over I'm playing fast writable and notice when I'm going faster the stick is nestled a little bit closer to my palm and the motion is very subtle I'm not trying to do this I'm literally just nudging about like that okay I hope you found these exercises useful go through them and really work on the isolation and the control and then definitely work on the application make sure you're not stuck with only doing it in French grip that you're able to relax your fingers when you turn your hands over and be watching for my traditional grip video and I'm going to be making a practice video that goes through all these exercises but in an organized longer session all right have fun

Channel: Maria Wulf Music

Views: 730,048

Keywords: Maria Wulf, Maria Wulf Music, Maria Wulf Drummer, Girl Drummer, Chick Drummer, Woman Drummer, Drumming Women, Women Band Directors, Snare Drum, Snare Drum Lessons, Stick Control, Finger Control, Finger Technique, Snare Drum Finger Technique, Snare Drum Finger Control, Drum Rudiments, Snare Rudiments, Drum Solo, Snare Solo, Ride Cymbal Technique, Rebound Stroke, Finger Bounce, How To Play Finger Technique, Hit Like A Girl, Drum Studio, Practice Pad Exercises

Id: upJNKwWJR8k

Length: 14min 34sec (874 seconds)

Published: Sun Apr 09 2023