Drumming · Technique · Rudiments · Gear · Lessons & Learning
Which part of the stick should you hold? Finding the balance point
In the last posting I discussed the details of hand and finger position involved in holding a drumstick. Some drummers concentrate a great deal on this aspect of their technique without also giving due consideration to which part of the stick to actually hold. This will not help them, because in many cases the position of the fulcrum is more important than the quality of the fulcrum.
The whole point of creating a fulcrum with the hand is to allow the fingers to propel the tip of the stick towards the drum easily, but also to allow the rebounding stick to rebound most efficiently. This is a crucial point that is often not understood – a rebounding stick behaves very differently to a stationary stick.
Consider this analogy – my favourite example of a fulcrum and lever system that most of us are familiar with since childhood – a see-saw.
Yep, that thing you sit on and go up while the kid on the other end goes down. The see-saw is designed so that the fulcrum — or pivot point if you like — is right in the middle of the lever. This is what we call the centre of gravity: the point where there is the same amount of weight on both sides of the fulcrum.
If you put a really heavy kid on one end of the see-saw, and a light kid on the other, then it won’t work very well. The centre of gravity is no longer where the fulcrum is. To balance things up, you can either add some weight to the lighter person, OR… move the pivot point closer to the heavy person, giving their weight less leverage.
On a drumstick, the centre of gravity will be just a little closer to the butt than the exact middle – a few millimetres. (The tip end is lighter because it has slightly less wood, so the butt is like the heavier kid!)
If we hold the drumstick at this point, then there will be the least resistance to propelling it with the fingers. The scientific reasoning behind this is that we are converting as much of the stick’s inertia as possible to rotation rather than linear movement, because the work being done is the same on both sides of the fulcrum. The mass on one side of the fulcrum is identical to that on the other side, which is moving with the exact opposite velocity.
The problem with this is that it gives problems when the stick tries to rebound.
The key point is this:
When we begin to propel the stick, it is essentially stationary. If it has arrived in the ‘up’ position from a rebound, it has slowed down gradually due to a combination of gravity and perhaps tension in the fingers. When the energy of the moving stick gets reflected back into the stick by the drum however, it is instantaneous, and the total rotational momentum of the stick is reflected in a linear fashion at the tip only.
The ideal position of the fulcrum on the drumstick is one that creates a balance between having the stick fall down with no finger propulsion, and being able to bounce back. This spot on the stick is called the ‘centre of balance’ — or ‘balance point’.
For a far more detailed treatment of the balance point, the fulcrum and how they work together, check out the book “Stick Technique” at www.sticktechnique.com
Jim McCarthy
(Author of “Stick Technique”)