[Joker63]

Hello all,

I live in Australia. My son is eight and decided he wanted to learn drums. He is generally a bit shy, so my wife and I am keen to encourage him to learn a musical instrument. Drums should be fun for him to learn, and give him a good instrument to play in a band later on.

We are lucky enough to have found him a good teacher, quite young but seems to know his stuff and is very good with the kids (he also teaches our daughter violin).
We also bought him a set of drums. Fairly basic beginners set - the kind most music stores sell as a 'first drum kit'. It has bass, three toms (one floor), snare, Hi-hat and rider.
Tom (my son) is going very well, picked up a couple of beats very quickly. We just bumped into a problem - Tom is left-handed and got quite upset when asked to learn a new beat that had him starting with his right hand "I'm left handed". He is adamant he needs to play left-handed. Ironically he learnt a fun drum roll that starts with the right hand.
My first question - should we set his drums up left-handed? just swap hi-hat with rider, teach him 'open handed for a lefty'? Any advice would be welcome. He uses his teachers set when at his lessons - so there may be problems here if he has to rearrange the drums for all Tom's lessons.

I have joined Drum Set Connect as it seems an ideal place to find information to help Tom learn the drums whilst having fun.

[Patknives]

Well, usually with a lefty the drums are set up opposite from a right handed kit, with the hi-hat on the right of the bass drum. Then the sticking is inverted where R becomes L and so on. In my experience, being left handed can be a total advantage. I'm right handed, but one of my instructors was left handed and he played a open handed style. Meaning he did not cross his arms when he played the hi-hat and he played the bass drum with his right foot not his left. He was left handed and built up his right hand and became completely ambidextrous on the drums. He would switch the sticking in patterns, leading with the left or the right hand. If you check out some videos from Simon Phillips and Carter Beauford they play open handed all the time. It also seems that left handed players "take" to open handed playing better that right handed players. So that can be a total advantage, so you might want to talk to his instructor or maybe find a drum teacher in you area that teaches that style. If you google "open handed drumming" or check out Open handed drumming from wikipedia you'll understand what I mean.
Good luck....

[Patknives]

Crap..... after reading you post I remembered something.

"Drums should be fun for him to learn, and give him a good instrument to play in a band later on."

If he plays in high school marching band, He's going to have to play right hand lead because every one on the drum line plays the same sticking. So watch out for that when he gets older. He going to have to get used to that little right handed lead roll
if he wants to play any corps stuff.

[Joker63]

Patknives,

thanks for the replies and advice. I think we will reverse his kit (that is set up for left-handed). I think his teacher is good enough to work with this. Re-arranging his (the teachers) durm kit for lessons may be a hassle.

I don't see him playing in a high school marching band. We live in Australia and we don't seem to have many high school marching bands; so at least he won't have to worry about this. Thanks for taking the time to add the secondn post though, all advice is very welcome.

I have read a little bit about open-handed drumming. Just wasn't sure if that meant reversing the complete kit or not.

thanks again,

Daryl