– Hey everybody, this is Robert Mathijs from the Quest for Groove
and in today's video I wanna talk about three commonly used finger drumming methods or
techniques, if you will. The first one is the
alternating hands method (upbeat drums) and then we have the
independent hands method, (upbeat drums) and finally the
alternating fingers method. (upbeat drums) Now let's dive in and look
at the pros and pitfalls of each of these methods. (upbeat drums) So that was the first method,
the alternating hands method, I talk a lot about it on this channel and I also talk about it in the courses on my website questforgroove.com and the reason for that
is that I recommend beginners to start out with
this way of finger drumming.
Why? Well, it's basically the method that gets you results the fastest because what you're
doing is you're playing the backbone of each
beat that you're playing, you're playing it with your dominant hand. And obviously you're better at
utilizing your dominant hand than you are at utilizing
your non-dominant hand, that's why it's called your dominant hand, except if you're ambidextrous
which not a lot of people are and when you're utilizing
your dominant hand to play the backbone of a beat, the beat will sound solid pretty early on in your process as a finger drummer, and what you're doing is you're playing the backbone of the beat or the main beat with your dominant hand
and then in between the hits of your dominant
hand, you're filling in the gaps with your non-dominant hand.
(rhythmic drums) It's a great way to
play, I use this a lot, I use it even for advanced beats. It's not like it's an
"inferior" way of playing. No, it's actually the best way of playing for a lot of beats but
there is one pitfall if you're using this method to play everything you play and
that is, that you have to watch out that you're not overtraining your dominant hand and undertraining your non-dominant hand
because what can happen is that because you play most of the stuff with your dominant hand
and you just, sort of, use your non-dominant
hand as a side thingy, you're gonna, you know, underdevelop your non-dominant hand and the truth is that when you wanna play a
great groove, in the end obviously everything matters,
also the in between hits, also the soft hits, you
know, it's not just about that backbone, it's about everything – a great groove is perfect
from start to finish and after a while if you wanna progress, you wanna take it to the next level, you're gonna notice that
you're non-dominant hand just sucks and you really have to work on getting that thing up to speed.
A great way to start training both hands is actually the second
method, the second technique that we're gonna talk about, which is the independent hand method. So, let's look at that for a moment. (rhythmic drums) Yeah, so this is the
independent hand method, it means that we're not
just alternating our hands. No, we can also do other stuff, we can also play two pats at the same time with our hands or alternate
that a little bit, right, sometimes we're playing
it at the same time, sometimes we're alternating,
it can go all kinds of ways.
And this method is a
little bit more advanced, because obviously
independence between hands takes a lot longer to train but it is also something that I think at some
point you have to develop. Why? Well for certain
beats this is actually the easiest way to play them. For example, there are a lot of beats that have some distinct patterns going on, different distinct patterns and whenever you're playing a beat that has two very distinct patterns, it might actually just
be the best approach to actually divide these two patterns up between your two hands. So, your left hand plays one pattern and your right hand plays the other. For example, this groove. (fast-paced upbeat drums) You can see what's going on there, right? There's this cowbell and there's the main beat. And now I'm using this
independent hand method, right because I'm not alternating,
I'm just sometimes hitting them at the same time, sometimes I'm hitting them alternating but obviously this is the best way to approach playing this groove because otherwise I have to figure out, OK, I have to hit the cowbell with left, and then with right, and then..
It's very complex actually, to figure out that alternating hand
dance when you have to play something like this where two hands can just play their own thing. Now, another way the
independent hand method is very very useful is when you wanna have some more flexibility in your timing when playing a basic groove. So when you're playing a basic kick, snare, hi-hat groove with one hand it can sound like this. (rhythmic drums) So, for example, when you're playing this basic beat and you just want the hi-hat to keep going
steady while every snare actually arrives late as
opposed to the hi-hat, dividing that pattern up between two hands also makes a lot of sense because what I can do
is, I can actually just tap out that hi-hat pattern and then make my left hand in this case arrive a little late on the snare drum and this is an example of that. (rhythmic drums) So as you can see in moments
when you need to separate things a little bit more, whether that is two separate patterns or whether that's separating
the hi-hat from the snare a little bit in terms of timing.
In those cases, you might
wanna use the separation between your two hands to
make that easier for yourself. It doesn't mean that the
independent hand method is easy, it takes a lot of time to develop this independence and
it's a lot harder actually than the alternating hands method but I do think that
because of these benefits and because obviously you wanna
be as flexible as possible as a finger drummer, you have to start developing this method as well next to the alternating hand method. So one thing I would like to stress out is that the independent hands method is not necessarily better than the alternating hands method, they both serve a purpose. I play a lot of grooves with the alternating hands
method, the first method, and they just sound the
best when I do that, and I play a lot of other grooves with the independent hands method,
and they will sound the best when I use that one.
So what I think is, you should start out with the alternating hands
method because it gives you musical results soon, you know, and then when you're getting used to finger drumming you
incorporate more and more independence and at some
point you can do both. You can be independent
or you can be alternating and both of them will
serve you very very well in your career as a finger drummer. All right, moving on
to the final technique, the final method, the
alternating fingers method. (quick rhythmic drums) So, this technique, I've looked into it, I've actually looked
into it multiple times and tried to figure out how it could serve me well and, as of today, I haven't really found
a good purpose for it because the obvious reason
you would do this is, for example, speed, right, but if I try and play a fast snare roll, (fast snare roll) I always find that I can
also do it with two hands (fast snare roll) and it sounds just as
good and I actually feel like I have more control
over the dynamics.
What I can imagine is that this method of finger drumming can
start to become more useful when you're playing
more sample-based music and you don't care about
velocity layers that much. For example, if you set everything to fixed velocity and you
use the different sounds to sort of create dynamics, you can set off one bat
with a loud sounding hi-hat and another bat with
a soft sounding hi-hat and then you can walk your two fingers between those two bats and you get that loud, soft, loud, soft (rhythmic drums) that hi-hat sound because you, you know, you switch, you just use
two different samples. I prefer to do that by setting up one hi-hat pat that has
multiple velocity layers and then just hit it
loud, soft, loud, soft. Then you also get (rhythmic drums) And because I want that control
of how loud and how soft I hit the pats, I actually prefer to use hits that revolve around my wrist.
So that the main joint that's involved in finger drumming for me are my arms, but the main joint is the wrist that exercises the most control and I find that I can do very very short, snappy, loud, soft hits and I have a lot of control over what I'm doing. That control sort of gets lost when I start using fingers because then the main joint are my knuckles and somehow it feels as
if I have less control over my dynamics and that's why so far I haven't really found out a reason why I really have to use the alternating fingers that much. If you want, and you wanna be an innovator maybe look into the
alternating fingers method because that's something I
don't know that much about so maybe, you know, you
can surprise the world and show them how it's done.
I wish you good luck with that. Over here is another
video that you might like, I hope to see you again soon
and until then, goodbye..