Open-handed drumming has been on my mind since writing about Simon Phillips for the second time last week. Simon makes frequent use of open-handed playing; in fact, he’s probably one of the most famous open-handed drummers in more general terms. He details the development of his open-handed technique in this video:

If you didn’t know, open-handed playing bucks the traditional way of playing the hi-hat, where instead of crossing your arms, you keep time with the left hand and hit the snare with the right (in a kit that’s otherwise set up for a righty). Discussions of open-handed drumming are usually in the context of playing grooves driven by the left hand, and not fills/paradiddle mischief, which might involve both hands moving between the snare and hi-hats. 

Simon explains that cramming more and more toms onto his kit led him down the open-handed drumming rabbit hole. His hats got in the way of the 10" tom on the far left side of his kit, and after pushing his hi-hat down out of the way, he started playing it with his left hand, realizing this was a viable approach after seeing Billy Cobham in concert. 

While it’s long been stated that Cobham is left-handed (a common motivator of open handed drummers), Billy says in this interview (around the 50-minute mark) that, aside from wanting to develop ambidexterity, he thought it made the most sense for the hats, ride, and snare to be next to one another since they are the centerpieces of the kit. He’s also apparently been quoted as saying “Cross sticking is one of the biggest bugaboos of playing drums.”

The hi-hat has a pretty fascinating part in the drum set’s somewhat cobbled-together origins, and it was probably the last component of the drum kit to be introduced. Here’s a great video series detailing the history, starting with kick pedal clangers before moving on to the Charleston pedal, the low boy, and then finally, the modern hi-hat of the 1930s (who exactly invented the hi-hat remains a bit of a mystery).

So while playing a cymbal with the foot was commonplace since at least the late 1800s, it wasn’t until decades later that drummers would combine this foot cymbal with the hands. Crossing hands might seem odd, but the hi-hat started with the left foot before the right hand got involved, not the other way around. 

Now, aside from philosophical issues, problems with enormous drum kits, and the struggles of being a lefty in a righty’s world, why bother with open-handed drumming? 

The biggest advantage seems to come from the ability to whack the toms as you’re keeping time on the hi-hat. And to that end, fair enough. Whether or not that’s enough to learn open-handed drumming is up to you. However, there are probably easier ways to get around this issue, and any other benefits are nebulous. 

I often see the case that open handed playing will make you more creative, which is difficult to explain and even more challenging to quantify. I have no doubt it will introduce some different skills to your left hand, but you should work on technique to make your music better — you don’t play music to make your technique better.

There’s also the supposed advantage of hitting your snare harder, but if cross-handed playing is inhibiting your volume in a way that rimshots and sound reinforcement can’t fix… you might need to reconsider your priorities. And then visit a hearing doctor. 

There’s also the argument that open-handed is the natural way, which is highly dubious. 

Now, I’m not prepared to blast off into a dissertation-style defense of why crossing your arms is fine. Moreover, I really don’t remember what it was like when I was starting out. Still, I suspect the standard way felt the most comfortable.

Nevertheless, here are some basic facts: most of us are right-handed, most righties also prefer their right foot, and most of us are often hitting cymbals in unison with kick drum notes. As such, the kick and hi-hat are played with the same side of your body. It could be just a case of “that’s always how it’s been done,” but all this apparent spookiness about crossing hands to maintain timekeeping with your dominant side of the body was probably never a thing until the modern hi-hat got involved.*

Many internet endorsers of open-handed drumming claim there’s something more intuitive about the approach, but again, this is difficult to evaluate. Drumming is often classified as “easy to pick up, difficult to master,” so I get the appeal of intuition, but how far can we take this? Pick any other instrument: saxophone, guitar, harp, oboe, trumpet, violin, accordion… is any one of them intuitive? Maybe consider one of these monsters:

Less-than-intuitive should not be confused with something that’s outright counterintuitive. Could we say that it’s counterintuitive to drive a groove with the hand that lines up with your dominant foot? Because that’s how most of us do it.

It should also be noted that many open-handed drummers clearly feel a need to explain themselves, which seems to subvert the idea that it’s the “natural way.”

For those fleeting moments when you want to hit some toms during a hi-hat groove, one easy (albeit expensive) solution is to just get a remote pedal and set up a second pair of hi-hats on the right side of the kit.

This works for many, but it might make you wonder why remote hi-hats haven’t become standard, which would prevent the need for crossing arms or learning open-handed drumming. 

Well, like I said earlier, price is a problem (the cheapest remote pedals out there are usually $300–$400), and while a remote pedal opens your ability to play toms, they’re not as easy to use as a standard hi-hat setup; for one, it’s a lot harder to play disco/funk grooves involving singles on the hats. The normal hi-hat approach just doesn’t introduce enough problems for the typical drummer to make this changeup.

I’ve also realized that there is another sonic problem with remote hats: with only a remote hat by the ride, all of your timekeeping will be built on one side of the kit. Likewise, you have the same dilemma with the typical open-handed getup, where the hats and ride are placed next to each other on the left side of the kit. 

This is most apparent when the drums are miked up, since the hats and ride are now on the same side of the stereo image instead of being panned apart, which is a familiar sound many people like, including myself (it can be amusing to exploit this when you play both hats and ride at the same time, which I’ve been known to do).

These mixing issues could be overcome by close miking both cymbals and hard panning them apart from one another, although this is a contrived solution that doesn’t really capture the organic balance of the kit, not to mention potential conflict with overheads.

Alternatively, you could keep the hats and ride away from each other and just learn how to keep time equally well with both your right and left hands. That degree of ambidexterity is an admirable goal, but it’s an arduous one that, in all honesty, is probably not worth the effort. (You still need double effort in some capacity if you want to keep time with the left hand and lead fills with the right.)

Nonetheless, many people have thought (at one time or another) that remote hats are the way of the future. Bill Bachman (who’s more of a drum corps guy) was part of a project called the “remote speedy hi-hat stand,” a remote stand meant to push the hats rightward while still keeping them near the snare:

The product has been out of production for a while now, but as far as I know, Bill still uses one at his home studio, although he does have an unusual setup with hi-hats in the center, which obviously introduces its own compromises:

All in all, I think the conversation is similar to the traditional grip debate. If open-handed drumming really works for you, then go for it, as many talented players have. But again, the vast majority of drummers don’t need to mess with playing open-handed, and they’ll be fine not to. I certainly wouldn’t encourage someone to relearn the instrument for the tenuous benefits of open-handed drumming. For every problem it solves, it seems to introduce just as many. 

* ^ I also reckon the prior ubiquity of traditional grip had some influence — keeping time on a cymbal with traditional grip is quite a pain, which is what you would need to do to play open-handed with traditional.