DRUMMER CAFE - Community Forum

What is a good wrist exercise?My left wrist is weaker than my right wrist, I want to develop quality double strokes.thanks

There's a search feature on this forum as there is on most forums. Use it first. There have been many many topics on this issue.

But to summarise, you have to practice. There's no shortcut to practicing. Work on things like George L. Stones Stick Control, do things you would do with your right hand with your left hand, from playing time on the hi-hat to brushing your teeth.

 
Yes, it's very good advice to practise doing just anything with your other hand. When I was fifteen and took up drumming, I forced myself to eat soup with the spoon in my left hand, etc., and I did it for years, and it really helped.
And also, I suggest practising both traditional grip and matched grip with your left hand, and hitting the left side crash with your left hand as many times as possible.

Along with "Stick Control" and living left handed, be sure to play all your practice stuff with a left hand lead--I.e. starting with your left hand ("Stick Control" covers this too, but do it with everything you practice).

Something that may help ...

Building the Weaker Hand (http://www.drummercafe.com/content/view/23/19/)

Stick control is great, along with living left-handed.
Along with that, if you are into metal, then blast beats are very good since they cause you to use both your wrists.

I've been obsessing a lot lately over building my weaker hand.

One thing that I have been doing which is helping TREMENDOUSLY (so much that the band is taking notice) is that, first and foremost, I obsess over it.  hehe  But really, when I'm on the practice pad, I give my left hand twice as much of a workout as my right.  This is a guess, because when I sit down at the pad, I just know that I want my left to be as good as my right, so I work it harder.  I seriously obsess over it.  And it's paying off.  As I said, the band is noticing an improvement and it's making it easier for them to play.

So, this may seem like an obvious thing to do, but that's one thing I do.  I'm basically working left hand way more than my right hand while on the practice pad (for I want my left hand to catch up to my right hand, not stay this far behind, so I basically need to put all right-hand advancements on hold for a while).

I simply realize that my right hand is so much better because it's always doing the "riding" on the hats and the ride cymbal (and it has since the beginning), and my left hand always does far less work than my right.  So I simply put my right stick down and do triplets, eighth notes and 16th notes all with just my left hand for very long periods of time (of course, the definiton of "long periods of time" is different for everyone.  But in general, it's when it feels like my left hand has had enough, or it can be when it feels like I want to compare it to my right.  Or, it's when I want to work my left in the context of my right hand since I don't play my drums with just my left hand).  I want to stress here that I do a LOT of comparing to my right hand.  I literally use my right hand to teach my left so it can get as good as my right.

The OTHER thing I'm doing is, when I'm not at the drums, I use my left hand when I normally use my right.  This is a HUGE cause for my improvement.  For example, when I would normally pick up a heavy pan of water by the handle with my right, I'd pick it up with my left.  But I'd first pick it up with the right hand, study the way it feels and looks, and then I'd pick it up with my left and use that to know if I'm doing it correctly or not.  My right hand is my standard.  If I normally stir with my right, I stir with my left.  I try to basically become left-handed.  But what happens is I sometimes forget which hand is my right hand and which is my left!  I'm dead serious!  Yeah, it is funny. hehe

And finally, another thing that I'm doing is I'll just air drum with only my left hand.  I am also obsessed with improving so much that I'll find other ways to work the wrist.  Like, when I wash my hands, I'll take that opportunity and shake the water off my hands until no more water can be shaken off, and I use the Moeller stroke with very strong wrist strokes.  And just saying this reminds me that I think the biggest thing that I am doing is that I am constantly obsessing over getting my left hand as skilled as my right hand in every day life so that it's easier to have a perfectly matched grip, even though my matched grip is far from perfectly matched. ;D

So, I guess it's all a matter of how badly you want this.  I want my left hand to be as good as my right so badly that it looks like I'll do whatever it takes to improve it.  I think about it every day, and during every waking moment.  Just like while I type, I make sure it is perfectly matched with the way my right hand is typing.

My goal is to be ambidextrous without working my right-hand nearly much so my left hand can catch up to it.

(http://barringtonfinearts.com/illini/clinic/instruction/sanford.JPG)

Play this for a month. I guarantee you'll find your left hand responding better in your double strokes.

Gaddy - Thanks for bringing back some great memories of Fred. So much of what drum corps is today came from him.

I'm facing the same challenge.  I find it quite difficult to do every day activities with my left as mentioned by others. I find it easier to focus on my left hand when I'm practising:

Open handed playing AKA Billy Cobham / Simon Philips style. Works great when you play along with some easy tunes.
Triple stroke rolls (take a look at vicfirth.com. You can find some great examples in their education section)
The pattern LLLR and any variation
Fulcrum exercises. Controlling the stick between thumb and index finger.
Use heavy stick e.g. 2B or marching sticks.

Rene / NLD

He was a genius. That double beat exercise is right in the center of the drum corps mindset -- isolate and perfect. If your doubles are uneven, they pulse, or one hand drags/lags, the double beat fixes the problem. Another great application is to accent the back end of each double stroke. Remember to return your resting stick to the rest position so you maximize the stick heights and get the most out of the wrist strengthening (don't rest the bead on the head ... not only is this a major faux pas around drum corps geeks like me, it limits the control provisions built in to the exercise).

Also, be very conscious of your sticks heights in this exercise. Your first run throughs should focus on playing all the notes at the same stick heights and the same unaccented levels. You DON'T want Rr Rr Rr Rr or Lr Lr Lr Lr. It should sound even and fluid. The second run throughs should focus on accenting the back end of the doubles. This is will really advance your double stroke control

Yeah, that's exactly why I recommend it.  Don't laugh, but I couldn't use my left hand to shave.  I had to do my entire face with my right hand (I use an electric shaver).  But before I knew it, I could do the right-half of my face with my right hand, and the left-half with my left hand.  Granted, I still finish off the last few inches of my left side with my right hand as this is still a work in progress, but still:  that was quite difficult, but now it has become much easier.  The same thing goes with other activities:  where it was once nearly impossible and quite frustrating to perform a task with my left hand, now I can do it almost as well with my right, in some cases.  What this DOES is it actually gives me increased left-side awareness.  And this is important for me as I believe that I have less than most.  But ever since I've been forcing myself to use my left hand more often, I'm literally starting to learn how to use my left hand, and everything I have learned makes figuring out the "how" of the matched grip technique in my left hand much easier.

Thanks to this, I can now play 16th notes (or fast 8th notes) with my left hand as fast as my right.  And I should be crying tears of joy because there was a time when I could only WISH my left hand were that fast.  But, then I did something about it, and now all that has changed.  I hope to have perfectly matched hands on the drumset (as far as speed, power and control) by this time next year.  And y'know what?  At this rate, it will happen.  And it's all thanks to me practicing what I preach.

Now, one thing I've been doing lately that has sped things up a very tiny bit is starting my day off with stretching my left hand very thoroughly.  When I'm done, I stretch it down in the other direction.  After that, I make a very tight and powerful fist making sure to match the way my right hand does it as far as appearance and feel.  Then I open my hand up all the way and, from what I hear, this is also a stretch.  I then go back to the fist and repeat.

My goal is to teach my left hand how to do everything my right hand can do by USING my right hand to teach it.  And along the way, I have to do strength exercises like making fists, opening it up all the way, moving the fingers, and doing other hand things that feel very strong in my right.

Unfortunately, doing more daily activities with the left, or weaker hand, can require a great amount of patience.  But, there are no shortcuts.  So, all I can do is have fun with it, and laugh when I fail.

Excellent suggestion, especially with the LLLR.  Anything that works the left hand MORE than the right to allow the left hand to "catch up" to the right hand is excellent.  I mean, if the right hand is already where you want your left to be, then it doesn't make sense to work the right hand as much as you're working the left, EVEN IF YOU'RE DOING HARDER EXERCISES.

I think of it like a race:  I want to slow my right hand down so that my left hand can catch up.  But, I don't want to stop the progress of my right hand because that wouldn't be as fun.  I mean, when I'm working on the practice pad, I don't have the mental disciplne right now to ignore the right hand (as I would prefer to speed this up).  There are times where I'm like "I HAVE TO PLAY!!!", and then I just grab the right stick and go.  hehe

So, my goal is to basically obsess over my left hand and say "Sorry, right hand, but you have to sit on the bench until my left can be as good as you.  Once my left hand is as good as you, then you can get back in the game.  I would prefer that you not continue getting better while I focus on the left hand, otherwise we won't be able to see any improvement.  The comparison will remain the same."  So, in other words, if I work for the next year on both hands equally, and I work them hard, then there's no doubt going to be a significant improvement in my left hand.  Unfortunately, my right hand will also improve and then my left will not have gotten any closer to my right.  So, if my right hand is 3 times better than my left, then my right hand may still be 3 times better than my left in one year.

One final analogy.  Let's say that I am making two towers of blocks (like children's blocks) and I want them to be equal in height.  But Tower A only has 3 blocks, and Tower B has 9 (I was distracted and focused on Tower B too long).  But now I've noticed that Tower A needs 6 more blocks.  So, I'm no doubt gonna wanna stop building on Tower B so that I can build up Tower A to match the height of Tower B.  Now, once they're equal in height, I can then continue building both equally.

;D