Double strokes… again

This came up on REDDIT. That site. It’s a mixed bag over there, some decent, informed conversation, some very not. With the added game-like element of “upvoting” and “downvoting” things people like, or not. On this occasion, a recent video by chops guy Mike Mangini, clickbaitily entitled Mistake Silently Capping Your Speed (And Destroying Your Hands), was quoted on the topic of double strokes:

“Most drummers think that a double stroke means picking up the stick twice. That’s not what a double stroke is. That’s just two singles. A true double stroke is a throw and then a bounce. A small, deliberate amount of pressure is applied to the stick after the throw.

The stick rebounds from the first hit, you redirect it, and it goes again. You’re not picking it up manually, you’re working with physics – not actively hitting a second time.

Trying to learn this with slow practicing is totally wrong, in fact, it’s not even possible because the second hit has to happen fast, not slow.”

In bold is the main point taken by the person quoting him— basically, fast doubles and slow doubles are different things, and the fast ones can’t be learned by starting slow… although it’s the way people who can do them typically learned, slow to fast. His belief is that they are their own category of stroke, that only exists when done fast, and that they actually have no connection to the slower speed version of the same sticking, and the rest of us are all living a lie.

…I should say up front that, though I’ve seen some videos, I have never listened to Mike Mangini in any signficant way, and, impressive as his abilities are, I have never admired his technique, or his sound, or ever wanted to hit a drum like him, or ever wanted to play anything he played.

As an example, this image, from his video below, seemingly included as proof of concept, shows him winning the World’s Fastest Drummer™ event with a technique totally useless for anything but registering the requisite number of hits on the event’s branded testing device. It’s completely alien to every reason I play, and I find it to be a major turn off, and discrediting for someone advertising instruction on musical technique. I want to know someone has a musical end in what they’re advocating, not this:

None of that matters, just, what he does is not what I do, we have entirely different motivations. There is no conflict, but there’s an appearance that we’re talking about the same things, so I need to comment for musicians who share my purposes.

Following is the video quoted above. It’s 28 minutes long and largely an adverisement for his YouTube channel, so maybe you want to watch it on 1.5x speed. I’ll try to give times for the critical events. The closest we get to any discussion of musical purpose is, he talks about “hitting hard” and reaching “maximum speed potential”, two items totally off my radar of musical values.

A few irrelevent observations:

1. It is funny how Mr. Mangini, if we ignore the hair, looks like any of the random old guy snare drum nerds I’ve seen hanging around drum shops my whole life. I feel like we’re seeing the real guy now. It’s fine, he’s fine, and I know I’m right behind him in terms of age, it’s just funny. This is what we are.
   
2. Suddenly everyone is some kind of human body specialist, pirating graphics from XYZ anatomy textbook. I suspect this is the influence of Dave Elitch, the body guy. The way Mangini makes his case here it sounds like there’s a war going on, some kind of subterranean niche conversation happening in technique-guy circles.
   
3. It seems notable that he’s advertising help for people who messed themselves up following the advice of technique guys— like at 2:53, people who hurt themselves playing “French” grip on a really loud gig. A grip that was never considered to be a correct universal grip for everything before they came along.

The part of the video quoted at the top begins at about 16:30. And the big big problem I have with it is: what he’s doing are definitionally Very Bad Doubles. He’s Mike Mangini, this is Monday, and those are bad doubles. The first note is about 20″ off the drum, and the second note is about 5″, making them very unequal in volume:

Even at more normal heights, in his tension exercise he does immediately after that, advertised as the way we arrive at a double stroke roll, we have the same issue:

That is not good. At every point of my drumming life, the entire reason to develop a technique for double strokes, is for control, and especially power— to make the second note equal in volume to the first. Or as close as we can make it. George Lawrence Stone wrote a whole book on the topic. Doing bad doubles requires no technique at all, you could let go completely with the back fingers, the way little kids do, and do that.

It’s fine if someone wants to do that to demonstrate an exercise, but you have to include the part that, for real playing purposes, we want equal power between the two notes. Very strange for him to move on from that discussion without mentioning it.

I’ll say that that tension exericise is similar to how I teach multiple bounce rolls, buzz rolls— starting from a place of too much pressure, and then relaxing. Usually it’s done the other way around, starting with no pressure, and adding it. That never worked for me. The first practical setting where I learned a real method for buzz rolls was in drum corps, where we would do them with quite tight buzz strokes— tighter than would be correct in other settings. From there it was easy enough to relax them into a more correct orchestral roll. So I think that exercise here is good— for buzz rolls, not for double stroke rolls.

I should tell you my method for teaching double strokes, which is very similar to how I learned them, in drum corps, that was very effective. We start slow as everyone does, doing RRLLs with two deliberate wrist strokes per hand, increasing speed to an easy moderate rate. Moving them into a faster 16th note rate, and into roll speed, we have an exercise framework— running singles with added drags and short rolls, and with the piece Three Camps. Students naturally find the correct motion through repetition, with the piece or exercise giving it structure, and giving a natural impetus to speed up, as they ease into more normal performance tempos. It happens over a period of months, and is not necessarily a real fun process— students complain about it almost up to the time they can actually do it. You can understand why all the self-teaching people fail with it.

Learning double strokes by just focusing on the finished, full speed double is not a new idea. In 1985 I was listening in on a conversation between George Tuthill and Alan Kristensen, now both drum corps hall of famers, and George was suggesting this approach. He also wrote about it in Percussive Notes at about that time. I didn’t really agree with it then either, as I had already learned to play strong doubles by the more traditional method.

Back to the video, much of his approach is to make a fine analysis of a finished technique, and declare that the conventional processes by which people have gotten there are no good. Since it’s the result of a process, it’s usually not necessary to describe the finished technique in specific detail this way; him describing it that way makes it sound like it’s something nobody else ever knew, which is not the case.

He does some things here, like the exercise after 13:50, that you might do with a student, checking the results to make sure it works for them. Not everything works for everybody. Not everybody thinks the same, or has the same control over their hands. Broadcasting it as the correct way to do it, when you’re the one guy doing it… I don’t know.

And his basic discussion of grip, his “training” grip, is also fine— he describes it in kind of a convoluted way, but it’s a basically correct normal orchestral snare drum grip, that many players use as their performance grip their entire careers. Again, it’s a little suspect to take a normal thing and call it “a grip I created” (6:40) and make it a branded part of your system, without mentioning that it’s a normal thing. The aspect that might be unique to him is the emphasis on muscle pressure.

OK. I think that’s enough. I mainly wanted to address the thing about the doubles, but a lot of other stuff comes up. This is one video, and by the nature of it, it’s not going to be a complete picture of someone’s total method, and it’s not going to address every single person’s concerns about an issue. But these are usually primary concerns, and it’s extraordinary for them not to be, so that needs to be pointed out when an account of 100,000+ followers is making statements getting a lot of online agreement.

---

I am happy to help you with any of the materials on the site, and with anything else drumming related— contact me for private lessons, online world wide, or in person in Portland, Oregon. All levels of players, and all people, are welcome.

Email Todd | Call or text +1(503)380-9259 | Chat on WhatsApp