This is conditioning, this is something that you can do away from the drums. This is from Jojo Mayers DVD “Secret weapons for the Modern drummer”, available in most music shops.

Its a very simple hand clap, but done in a special way.

Put your hands in the praying position, palms and fingers together, also bring the elbows together.  Keep the elbows in front of your belly and the hands the same height as your head.

Now just open the hands, keeping the wrists and elbows together and clap. 

Open the hands equally and close them, make sure from the elbow to the fingers is strate. To help with the eveness you could place a drumstick or ruler in between your hands.

Now this is the hard bit, your going to build up the muscles in the forearms.  To start clap up to 400 times, thats the same as play a 8th note pattern or quaver pattern for 25 bars, perhaps around a minute and a halfs’ time.

You must relax while doing this!

You will tense up, start gritting your teeth ! Don’t!!  Smile, slowdown and try again later.  Your aim is to build up speed and duration, I’d say you don’t need to go longer than 50 bars, just work on increasing your speed and maybe even work on how relaxed your feeling (maybe we can turn this into a medition or even warmup before you play??)

Result; Do this over a number of weeks you should feel that your arms are able to complete and perform the task it better.

Try count all the quavers and bars if you can, this will add another bit of mental training to the exercise.

Tags: drumming, playing, speed

This entry was posted on Friday, December 19th, 2008 at 12:16 am and is filed under Monthly Exercises. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.