Playing With the American Grip

Video Transcript

Hi! My name is Frank. In this clip we’re going to look at American grip; it’s one of the three grips that we use with matched grip. When both hands are the same, or in matched, depending on what we need to do around the drum set or how we feel like doing it, we’re going to choose either German, French or American. American is kind of the middle of the road. America is kind of the melting pot for most cultures, and the same thing is true for the stick technique: we take a little bit of German, we take a little bit of French and we put them together and that’s our American grip. We’re using fingers and we’re using a lot of wrist: German uses mostly wrist, French uses mostly fingers. This is a very utilitarian grip getting around the drum set; it keeps things level. With German it’s a little bit more cumbersome, because you have to leave things at the right angle. That makes it a little tricky sometimes, but a lot of great players use one or the other. But most players, almost all players, most players use all three in their playing. What you want to do is practice all three grips in all the exercises that you’ll play, and even in all the instruments and all the beats and all the patterns, and find out which grip works best for you when you’re playing, and which grip serves the music you’re playing best. Don’t be a guy that only knows one technique and plays it for all; the music deserves better than that. You decide, of all your bags of tricks, of all the colors in your palette, this is what I want to put here, and this is how I want to do it. Now I’m going to mix these two. Now of those grips, from traditional that we talked about in another clip, and then the different variations on matched German, French and American, what you want to do is just practice all of them, and let your playing and let the music be the judge of what would work best for you.

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