Finger Technique Sharing (Single Stroke)

When practising Single Stroke, as the speed increases, the motion of your hands gradually changes from wrist motion to finger motion. That means, you use your fingers rather than wrist for speed.

Fingers involve less muscles than wrist do, so the motion can be faster. Nevertheless, as less muscles are working, the power is lowed.

To practise finger techniques, we have to master the rebounce of stick. This is very important as our fingers can only drive the stick down and hit on the drum surface. The next step is to practise strokes using fingers only (isolate your wrist) for each hand individually. This practice allows our muscles to memorise what to do when we use our fingers.

When you have got sufficient practice for each of your hands individually, you may start to try Single Stroke using finger techniques. This step is the most difficult part for me. My problem is that I cannot coordinate and the two sticks hit on the drum surface at the same time instead of making a Single Stroke.

Just keep hitting the drum surface with both sticks striking on at the same time. That doesn't matter for this stage but try to keep both hands in the same speed. When you get used to it, try to adjust one of the hands to make a little delay. Then for a few seconds you can hear you are playing smooth, speedy Single Stroke, and later on the two sticks are in phase again... I guess this is a good start anyway.

Besides finger techniques, I want to mention other ways to achieve speed as I'm not using only fingers when I play my fastest speed. I don't think that we should only focus on fingers.

My way to play faster and with more power is to keep a balance between fingers and wrist (or even other parts of your hand that can drive your strokes). Unless your stamina is extremely tremendous, you cannot keep your strokes with you fingers only for a long play. It is more practical to coordinate every part of your hands to make a good play.

Another approach to increase the speed is to use the Moeller Technique. This is my favourite drummer's favourite. I have experimented this myself and found that the Moeller Technique is really a good way to do many kinds of things. By using the Moeller Pumping Motion (named by Jojo Mayer), we can actually make some one-handed strokes of fairly fast speed. If we make an effort in coordinating this motion with both hands, the result can be quite surprising that you can get faster speed, higher power and better control in your strokes. In my opinion, this is much more better than using fingers on the strokes only.