Moeller Method, My Two Cents
Your elbows… This is definitely not a descriptive post about the details of the Moeller method, but one of the most important things I realized about it, is that (although this is a bit controversial) the elbow movement is what creates the effect.
If you move your elbows in the proper way, you can cause your wrists to produce the sounds by hitting the sticks on the drum head. I took Jeff Queen for his word and practiced the techniques in his book and now started to feel a difference in the stroke. Snapping the shoulders in the right way away from your body causes the beginning of the “whipping” motion, the first stroke causes the stick to naturally jump away from the head, so the second bounce is a natural result, and raising the arm again to start a new whip will result in the third hit.
The wrist and fingers play a crucial role of course in terms of the subtle effect they produce on making sure the sticks don’t fly back in the air, and ensuring that the sticks touch the head at the right angle in order to produce the maximum bounce and resonance for the sticks.
A list of very interesting and descriptive videos can be found on Wikipedia’s Moeller Method article.
