Customer Reviews

Secrets of the Hand: Soloing Strategies for Hand Drummers

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This book does not have an accompanying cd and is a little less satisfying than other books by the Dworsky / Sansby team. Some of the chapters make rather obvious points about omitting ghost notes or alternating hands. Still, I expect I will learn valuable tips from working from it.

This book has some valuable techniques and concepts. Having the ability to read well and follow the guidance is another challenge in and of itself. I practice percussion training as a way to capture my short attention span and cultivate orderly frameworks in my conscious and subconscious minds. Some points that are extremely crucial, no matter how seemingly fundamental or primitive at face value must be emphasized with recurring frequency. After inevitably getting carried away with playing to hard and fast, bring it back to simple exercises. Such as loops or phrases/strings of notes that you play over and over for no less than a hundred reps a piece(-use your own discretion, make a meditation of it, kill the chore feeling, it was implanted by corporate ad campaigns that have empowered our weaknesses...). They can be 2 beat patterns through 6,8,12,16,32, however you see fit. Play it slow-hard, slow-soft, hard-fast, and soft-fast, and everything in between. To develop multi-dimensional agility, one must explore every possibility, that is why practices such as these can be illuminating in other arenas too. Try not to let your ego get in the way of admitting that you, like everyone else is a student first, and that to teach is to also learn. No need to ever feel inferior or less desirable to not know something, you'll get further faster admitting ignorance and asking for immediate guidance at every turn.

This art like any other is a form of kung fu. You get out of it what you invest. I compare the analogy of learning how properly to pronounce an unfamiliar word in another language. It requires a little exaggeration on the inflections, tones and rhythm, so that when you smooth it out a bit you're right on.