Welcome, Klaus Hessler here talking to you about MOLLE technique beginning level. Okay, MOLLE technique for those of you who have not heard anything about that and also for those of you who have heard something about that already, at first it's kind of important to know where this way of playing received its name from. MOLLE technique is called MOLLE technique because of a famous drummer slash drum instructor by the name of Sanford Augustus Moeller. Back then they would mostly say Gus, so when Jim Chapin, who was the master student of Sanford Moeller, when he was talking about Moeller, he would always say Gus, or he would say the old man. Those were his synonyms for Sanford Augustus Moeller, who is looked at as the person where Moeller technique received its name from.
Now, also it's pretty important to realize that Mohler himself did not invent this technique. It was something that he pretty much discovered by observations with army veterans that he visited and observed in say the mid 1920s. And by that time Mohler was the drummer in a famous vaudeville act by the name of George M. Cohan. And there's also a movie out about George Cohan which is called Yankee Doodle Dandy. So if you want to know more about that, maybe check out the movie Yankee Doodle Dandy.
You won't learn anything about Mohler technique, but you probably see something about the surrounding in which Mohler was working by that time. as a traveling drummer. So Moeller visited homes of army veterans in the mid-20s and when I say army veterans I'm mostly referring to people who were playing the drums, I mean field drums, something like this one over here, field drums in the Civil War.
Now the Civil War was over 1865 and if you imagine many of these drummers were not full grown men but many of them were boys actually. So imagine if somebody was 15 by 1865 and Moeller would visit that person in 1925. Those were old men, right? They were somewhere 70, 75, up to 80 depending on how old they were when the war was over. So Moeller was kind of impressed by the speed and by the facility.
that these old guys still had. And he observed their movements, he analyzed it, and he made a system out of it, which his students then later referred to as Möhler's technique, or the system of Sanford Möhler, or the Möhler system, or as we call it today, Möhler technique. So that's important to notice.
The most famous students of Sanford Moller, by the way, were Gene Krupa for sure, who was definitely one of the revolutions in modern drum set playing, and for sure also Jim Chapin, who was my teacher and I had the pleasure of knowing Jim a little bit more than the last 20 years of his life and to be the honor and the pleasure to be studying with him, traveling with him, and calling him not only a mentor but a friend. So what I'm teaching you here is MOLA technique really through the eyes of Jim Chapin, who was, according to the words of Sanford MOLA himself, his master student, who understood best the systems and the techniques that MOLA was teaching. So what I'm showing you here is not my invention. It's as close as possible.
to what Jim Chapin showed me. And you will notice quite some of what I might be showing you may be conflicting with what you saw and heard before in different places. But I'm not talking about right or wrong, I'm not thinking in those categories, I'm just teaching you what Chapin showed me.
And again it's pretty much crucial to understand that Moller technique is understanding the motion of the hand with the reference towards the direction the hand is traveling at the time of the hit. So when Moeller was watching these guys he would find out Okay, or he would ask them, what is it that you really play? And they would say, the veterans would say, well, Gus, that's a whip and two taps. So by saying whip, they were relating to that.
wave-like whipping motion and two taps they meant to say strokes in which the hand does not move up or move down. When those guys were referring to taps they did not have in mind a certain fixed distance between the stick and the drum head which has a slightly different understanding. When we talk about taps today, so for Möhler and Chapin a tap was any stroke in which the wrist would not move up or down. Anything in between. This could be a tap in the Möhler nomenclature what through the eyes of stone would possibly be a full stroke already.
So it's important to have those differences in mind. And well, what else? The famous takeaway or the important takeaway that Mola had when he saw the guys play that was that he noticed it's not just the whip and two taps but he noticed on the last tap there's a stroke that goes away from the drum so he really discovered some sort of upstroke with the wrist moving up. So from now on it was...
down, up, down, up, down, up, down, up, down, and no longer just whip, whip, whip, tap, tap, whip, tap, tap, whip, tap, tap, whip, tap, tap, but down, up, down, up, down, up, down, or as Jim would say, down, tap, up, down, tap, up, down, tap, up, down, tap, up, down, tap, up, down, tap, up, down, down. So practicing that. From both of your hands would be of course the classic exercise to look into. We'll be doing that at a later point in the course.
If you want to know more about molar technique and its history and more related exercises you may want to look into Camp Duty Update which covers quite a lot of say rudimental and technical history related to drumming as well. And you may also want to look into Drumming Kairos because this one really was created because I thought a lot of Jim's say teachings had room for say more clarification. This was why Drumming Kairos came into life. Okay? So anyhow...
So much about the history and some little background on the technique itself. And I look forward to teaching you the next lessons, okay? Thank you, bye bye.