“But most drummers played with traditional grip since the 1920s. So it can’t be that hard, eh?
This includes all the jazz greats up until Billy Cobham like Gene Krupa, Buddy Rich, Art Blakey, Max Roach and Elvin Jones.”
Absolutely, all the jazz greats did play like this. But they had smaller kits and parked everything horizontal, flat, where they could stick work over the top of them. It does fit and work in this situation for jazz because it is more stick work that it is multiple piece work like rock is. But when you start getting into bigger rock sets with more toms and cymbals the toms and cymbals start to become oriented and tipped at an angle for convenience and faster interaction.
Using a traditional grip becomes a “bind” on your wrist in this situation when trying to reach across from one side to the other very quickly for fast crashes and tom work. The tilt of the drums makes you work harder because you have to drop your elbow on that side to adapt for that tilt. You can just reach out and catch faster on rock songs with a matched grip. I use either depending on what I am playing.
The difference is this. The rock greats like Mitch Mitchel and Ginger Baker were actually fairly simple and uncomplicated styles. They were just not crammed full of constant machine gun back and forth reaching all over the set like Neil Peart and other modern drummers with huge multi-piece sets.
It becomes self explanatory if you play a song like Temples of Syrinx. I have played it many times trying with both grips and it will destroy your wrist and elbow trying to play this song on so many different pieces with a traditional grip. Let alone almost impossible to reach out and catch it all perfectly timed without any flubs.
But I fully agree one should become proficient in both, because traditional does indeed work out much better for any type of jazz work. Just don’t get stuck and set on one grip alone. Depending on song sometimes one grip can be better than the other. Always switch it up on each song and play it to see which works better for it. :)
Anway fast-forward to last week. We're down here in Texas now and my kid is finishing 5th grade. Like a lot of schools 6th grade is "start band year" and they had this nice event where you could go try out different instuments. His mom took him, and sure enough he came home insisting: "I'm going to learn percussion". Oh geeze! His mom has no idea.
So, I went to talk to the drum teacher and basically the class is to learn to play in a drum line. Which I suppose is good, because you will learn rudiments and read music which is all good.
But I have this nice Gretsch kit just sitting in the closet ... so that's the full context.
I'm leaning towards trying to find someone to teach him to play the kit, and wondering about the traditional grip vs. match grip and didn't even know about the open vs closed thing until now.
Intrinsically it seems to make more sense. It's probably not up to me in the end anyway. But it's always amazing to find out you don't know something basic about something you think you know the basics about.