When I am working with a student It’s important for me to critically watch their mechanics. For drummers that involves almost the entire body, even face. Sometimes when I feel a student is playing something timidly I tell them to make an angry face to play with more weight. A lot of the time I look at a student and I can see something is wrong, or see that their stick path is incorrect. I know something is wrong but I’m not sure what or how to put it into words. It is at this point that I stare intently at my students playing to the point where they say its intimidating. I usually laugh because they are right then explain that I see something wrong and am trying to figure it out!
The way that I solve the problem is with what I call Drum By Example. I look at the student, then I look at myself playing it and try to spot the difference. The best way to diagnose an issue that a student has is to use your own experience and be extremely critical of your own playing. What muscles am I using to play this? How much arm vs wrist? What are my back fingers doing? When I start to criticize my own playing I am able to better verbalize how to implement these skills on my students. Then I use some exciting analogies or visualizers to put it into a nemonic device for them to remember. My most famous being the “loop it and glue it” method to remember how to hold a left stick traditional. I’m hoping to trademark it.
Hilary