hey what's up drum technique academy i'm david
and i'm super happy to be doing this drum lesson for you today the topic will be about
the push pull or open close hand technique so thanks for tuning in and most of all
thanks to marthyn for building this great community and this platform i really think
it's something unique and special and yeah let's get started during this drum lesson i want
to cover the most important movements when it comes to push pull or open close hand technique
and i want to give you an insight of how i learned this technique and i also want to show you how
some of the the learning steps may look when you're learning this technique because my right
hand still needs a lot of work and compared to my left hand you can really see the differences
in motion and also hear the differences and yeah so i hope that this will be helpful for
you i also will come up with some exercises and some more or less important tips and tricks
how you can make your life a lot easier not only during learning this technique
but also once you you got it down when it comes to maintain the stamina and and
the ability to to use it whenever needed and yeah i started to learn the push-pull technique
i would say four or five years ago and that was during a time when i didn't have that much
time to practice anymore and i really had a hard time getting back in shape without hurting
myself i guess that's an issue a lot of you have experienced and I was looking for
a hand technique that would allow me to not practice that much anymore but still be able
to play super fast stuff and that was also the time that i really was blown away by drummers like
kevin paradis who were able to play extremely fast and super tight and it always looked effortless
to me and that's when i decided okay i also need to learn the push-pull technique because
otherwise i i would have to to search for a new genre of music to play in because uh i just just
wasn't able to play extreme metal anymore without investing a lot of time and without risking to
to hurt my my wrists especially try to find the pivot point on your stick which would be
somewhere around here maybe yeah and uh i hold the stick a bit behind that
i would say like two inches maybe that's the the spot where the the stick feels
like an extended arm for me let's say and i worked on the push motion by just open my fingers and let the stick bounce all the
way back to the end of my thumb right here like this i always try to over exaggerate the motion
to kind of get used to it you know if you're learning something new i always figured that it
would take some time anyway and i always want to make the best out of it and don't learn anything
wrong so i took the push-pull motion and kind of cut it into parts and focused step by step on each
aspect of the motion so the first one was the push so the second one is obviously the pull and the
pull is really just closing your fingers again so the push and then the pull and i also isolated the pull adjusted this one
so closing my hand and raising my arm a bit so a little summary i started with finding the
right position of the practice pad the right surface of the practice pad i spent some time
trying different sticks and finally choose very heavy and long sticks to have a lot of weight do
the work for me and then i worked on the right motion and you can also practice that without
a stick which would be just the uh pull motion and the push motion without a stick so the natural
movement of your hand if you just apply tension to your fingers and release release the tension try
to use the same motion with the stick in your hand and work your way from doubles to even singles so when i learned the push-pull technique i
learned it one hand at a time so i started with my left hand because that was always my weaker
hand and that was always the one that really got sore and the worst uh time was when i wasn't
able to blade arms for like one or two months because my wrist was hurting that bad um so when
i finally was able to execute a proper push-pull motion with my left hand i also wanted to learn
it with my right hand of course and since i'm a bit lazy lately and i had to work on some other
things as well my right hand kind of is still in the practice mode and uh what i want to show you
right now is that you will probably also get some accent and strokes when you learn the push pull
technique so my left hand is now the stronger one with the push-pull technique and i can get really
even strokes done very easily i will show you so my right hand sounds like this do you want to know how you can watch
this full lesson just sign up at www.drumtechniqueacademy.net drumming as you know is a lot like
gravity all it takes is a little push
