Hand Techniques & Pivoting - Terry Bozzio

BamRam · Little Goldfish Joined: 27 Oct 2003 Posts: 53

In this section Terry Bozzio (www.terrybozzio.com) describes his various hand techniques and the concept of pivoting.

"I use a combination of hand techniques which I find appropriate for doing different things on my drum set.

Firstly, I would say my basic snare hand technique is a matched grip following the G.L. Stone school as taught to me by my teacher Chuck Brown who studied with Stone.

The principles are to hold the stick between the thumb and first joint of the first finger (for light playing) or thumb and second joint of the first finger (for heavy playing), creating a balance or fulcrum point from which the stick is free to pivot.

Then the second, third, and fourth fingers are slightly curved around the stick and line up down the shaft towards the butt end of the stick. The wrist is positioned palm down so that the tip of the stick, the thumb/finger pivot point, the wrist, elbow, and shoulder joint are all in a straight line when the upper arm is allowed to hang naturally at the side.

Up=Closed. Down=Open.

In the up position, the wrist is drawn back, and the fingers in (closed), so the stick points straight up. In the down position, as you strike, the 2nd, 3rd, and 4th finger are relaxed and extended (opened) to release upon impact, allowing the stick to rebound freely and eliminate any shock to the wrist or fingers. The wrist and fingers then "get behind" the rebound and lift and close into the up position.

This pulls the sound out of the drum or cymbal by setting it in vibration and allows it to continue vibrating by getting off of it as quickly as possible. If you don't do this you A) choke the sound, and B) damage your tendons, joints, and ligaments.

Now, if multiple strokes are to be played, the wrist stays down on the first stroke and the fingers remain open and play the next strokes by finger bounce - taking the energy from the wrist stroke and catching the rebound, then by slightly closing the fingers for each additional stroke to literally "dribble" the stick with the fingers.

This uses the smaller muscles of the fingers instead of the larger muscles of the arm and allows less effort to be put out when playing long, fast single stroke rolls.

Pivoting

To get from one drum or cymbal to another, I try to position my hands or arms in between the instruments in order to eliminate moving my arms from the shoulder(which would involve using the larger chest, shoulder and upper arm muscles). This enables me to pivot the stick from the wrist between two toms, for example, in a sort of windshield wiper fashion arcing from side to side. To do this the wrist is bent slightly into the up position and is moved by twisting the wrist at the forearm. The same principle is used to pivot between my high positioned cymbals and lower positioned drums : by raising my upper arm at the shoulder, I can position my wrist at about shoulder height between the drums and cymbals. Then, I can pivot at the wrist to go between them using the smaller muscles of the forearm with less effort than lifting up and down with the shoulder, upper arm and chest. This technique can be expanded to the whole kit. Just place your wrists in the center of a group of toms or cymbals and try to pivot with out having to move your arms too much(for example, if you were to cycle around 4 toms, place your hands in between tom 2 & 3 and see if you can pivot to tom 1, 2, 3 & 4)."