Question: A truly ambidextrous person can do anything equally well with either hand. They have no preference at all. It’s not a learned thing, it’s just a natural thing. How many here are truly ambidextrous?
Answer: Don’t know, don’t care. I write with my left hand, play the drums normal right handed, technically speaking both my hands are about equally skilled, the right a little more than the left. Or not— increasingly I think my left is better at different things.
It’s all playing language, it’s kind of like saying OK Melville, this Moby Dick thing is pretty good, but you’ve been over-reliant on your right hand writing the thing out.
Good going, Hemingway, how come you never did any of that on a backwards typewriter?
It’s kind of senseless. I don’t get it as a preoccupation in drumming.
In terms of music as a language, I’ve got an outlet for hitting a ride cymbal, which is my right hand; when I’m typing, my left hand covers the QWERTY side of the keyboard. There’s no meaningful difference if I use a different hand or appendage to do that, except that I’ll probably do it a less well, because they’re not practiced at it, and the other hand and feet are not practiced at working with it that way to do all the stuff they do. And being practiced at making music with it is the whole thing; it doesn’t matter if my left is as naturally dextrous as my right, because it’s not practiced as the cymbal hand. Regardless of how naturally able somebody’s hands are, they still have to train them to make music.
In terms of practicing, people should do what they want; personally I practice everything leading with both the left and the right— on pad. I try to have equal facility with both hands. That doesn’t mean I’m necessarily capable of doing the same music off of either hand, which is what I’m talking about. No amount of purely technical training is going to make that happen, and the whole idea is kind of meaningless if we’re not talking about that.
It’s like any skill, especially a skilled form of expression— like if somebody is a skilled writer— they have something to say, they’ve read some books, they’ve researched their topic— and they’re skilled at touch typing, and they have their outlet. At that point you just do your work, you don’t say gee, I think I’d be a better writer if my left hand was hitting the U/I/O/P once in awhile. I gotta work on that. See what kind of writing ideas that gives me.
Then they’d have to be training to do that as well as they were just typing before, to no actual creative advantage, because they’re the same jerk they were going in— they didn’t get any new writing ideas as a result of that. It would be crazy to expect that.
Drums have their own set of issues, but I don’t know how this is actually different from that.
This was my side of a conversation on Drum Forum Online, edited to stand on its own. It’s kind of non-responsive to the actual question, but a responsive response would have been simply “no, I’m not that way, none of the many hundreds or thousands of drummers I’ve known in my life have been that way.”
So you answer the relevent question, as it pertains to the many, many more drummers preoccupied with ambidexterity as a drumming pursuit.
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