Developing a balance between usage of left and right hands takes time and effort, many cannot and will not stand the course. I challenge myself every few weeks or so by turning my entire drum rig left to right and practicing for long periods using my left as my lead hand and my right for the back-beat. The feet also have perform in opposites using the pedals for the kick-drum and the hi-hat.
Playing open style is another challenge, this one entails placing the various items on the kit in randomly chosen positions that make doing the simplest and most familiar things that much more difficult. But the aim is have a balance between the left and right hands and feet that they can both be played given the song and its arrangement, and within the dynamic range the track needs.
Take this kit type used by Phil Collins, a left handed and left-leading multi-instrumentalist:
As you can see, the hi-hit position is to the extreme left as you look at it and the highest and lowest tom-toms and floor toms veer from left to right.
But if I was to turn it left to right, all of the parts of the kit have now switched places and one has to take a completely different approach to playing the whole set:
Having complete ambidexterity is the goal, but it's very hard to achieve for most people. Many of my own students couldn't hold down two bars of a simple 4/4 in a row without clunking it. But the more time you spend trying, the better you'll become as the mind/brain begins to create a sense of independence for all four limbs to work independently. I try other things around the house like preparing food in the kitchen - I have a professional knife sharpener (professional chef's type) so all of my kitchen knives are like blades. Fucking around with sharp knives is strictly Val Martin type idiocy, so be careful trying that.
As a kid I broke the three different bones my arms on a number of occasions and was quite used to switching from left to right in school for example: but back then you didn't want the christian brothers to see you writing with your left. Back then they still tried to beat it out of you. Thankfully they knew I was naturally right-handed and was only using my left to get the assigned work done. Other kids got battered for using their left hand. Crazy fuckers, those brothers.
Some are born with natural ambidexterity. Others likely can do it too but never bothered to try. We, as musicians, must develop our bodies for the job at hand. For me the negatives are the lower back/lumbar region and the upper spine and neck: decades of working physically while in a seated position causes all sorts of problems, but I had surgery and now have a titanium neck and upper spine, the entire body working better than it was before. Look at Phil Collins these days, the poor cunt's stuck in a wheelchair, the penance for his sins using the set-up in the attached photos. His stool too low, the drums set wide and far apart, and his cymbals (not illustrated) were even higher above the tom-toms that he had a reach of around 300 degrees to get from top to bottom of the scale. Now he can't walk. Fucked up.
Yeah, he wrote gangloads of tripe, but let's be real: of his generation, he's a world class player of amazing ability and even wider imagination. This track is probably his best known self-penned song, but the real diamond here is the 'accident' he had while recording this song. After playing his part on the drums, the crew were heading out for lunch and someone shut down the near-field monitors to let them cool down. As Collins was stepping out the door, he stopped and turned around: the take they just did was still playing on the tape machine and the only speaker that was live was the tiny little speaker in the main console of the desk, and it had only the room mics playing.
He heard how the tiny speaker 'gated' the drums (meaning a device which cuts short the length of the sustained note by snapping shut when you set it to whatever gate size/level you wanted. So he tried to replicate what the tiny speaker sounded like across the entire kit. That's where THIS came from:
And there you have it: one of the drumming world's most precious moments in the history of recorded music. Everyone knows it, you can sit any fool behind the drums and they can take a decent stab at replicating the world's most famous drum fill ever. Like him or loathe him, Collins is a highly talented musician who admittedly did blow it with his lame love songs and particularly his writing that song 'Another Day In Paradise' and keeping the money instead of helping the cunts the was singing about.
But anyway, I'm guessing most people reading this want to know about giving themselves a 'stranger'?
'Fess up if you do.
Your penance will be having to listen to that poxy gated drum-fill non-stop for the rest of your life.
Here's Mike Tyson doing his Phil moment:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wHjieD6CTYs
