embrace the traditional grip

I have been a matched grip player and believed it was ergonom­i­cally supe­rior than the out­dated tra­di­tional grip. Not until I tried play­ing tra­di­tional grip out of bore­dom and real­ized I could actu­ally roll faster than I was using matched grip, and that was I couldn’t even hold the stick prop­erly with traditional!OK, that may not be the most objec­tive com­ments there are, but one thing is for cer­tain: Tra­di­tional grip looks so much cooler than the matched grip. As JoJo Mayer put it in Secret Weapons for the Modern Drum­mer, you totally look like you know what you are doing with the tra­di­tional grip. Obvi­ously, when a kid picks up a pair of drum sticks he’s gonna hold it like this:

One thing matched grip play­ers have against the tra­di­tional grip is that it is not the “natural” way the human body is built. Well, that may be true, but then again the human body isn’t built for the pur­pose of sit­ting in front of box machines for more than 6 hours every day, which prob­a­bly covers the major­ity of an urban pop­u­la­tion. Besides, the tra­di­tional grip enables you to do cool tricks like this, try that with matched!