First things first - grab your free transcription here.
Those of us who follow nutrition stuff may remember the paleo/keto thing from a few years back, and the fact that you’d often hear experts espousing the “calorie balance” approach on podcasts with those from the “good calories/bad calories” camp on podcasts, but rarely-if-ever did anyone ask the question “what does the world look like if both are true”? (Until years later, and he ended up in the Epstein files. If you know you know.)
But have you noticed a similar divide in drum technique?
Look at Zack Grooves’ hands. Or Keith Carlock’s. Or Mike Mangini’s. Compared to Larnell Lewis, Matt Gatstka, Thomas Pridgen, Dennis Chambers, Vinnie, and plenty of other modern players, they seem “choked up” on the stick.
And it’s not hard to find instruction pointing to why. The “balance point”. Just search it and you’ll get hundreds of results. And we’ve all likely heard the rationale: there’s a theoretically-optimal point just behind the stick’s center of mass, where you get the most bounces “for free”. Farther forward, and the tip is “weightless” and doesn’t bounce at all. Farther back, and the stick becomes “top heavy”, and the bounce decays too quickly. This, of course, varies by the stick’s weight-distribution.
What these instructionals don’t explain is why anyone - indeed the majority of modern drummers (from my admittedly-anecdotal survey) - does it differently.
I wanted to find just one video that tried to situate both approaches in the same universe, explaining the tradeoffs.
Finding none, I decided to make that video.
The search for the truth sent me down a historical drum instruction rabbit hole - as you do…
And just when I thought I understood everything, an offhanded comment a student made on a coaching call blew the whole thing wide-open again, and also resolved the contradiction I couldn’t figure out: why some modern players who play with a lot of power still choose the “balance point” technique.
That’s all in the video. And we also had fun creating a “find your hold point” PDF to accompany it, which links out to…basically one video, but different time indices in that video.
Hope you enjoy!