MoGrip Series

Over the past few years, a new way of holding the tipper has found its way into the bodhrán scene: the “baby grip”. While the best-known player using this style is Martin O´Neill, other well-known players like J.J. Kelly and Cormac Byrne also use this or a similar style of holding the tipper.

Inspired by this innovation, and because I started using the “baby grip” myself, I designed a tipper handle that is optimized specifically for this playing style: The MoGrip!

I also found it very important to make the MoGrip suitable for the other playing styles as well. To achieve this, I changed the originally slightly round shape of the handle to a cylindrical form, which allows you to hold it in any desired way.

What’s special about the MoGrip compared to the other models?

What makes the MoGrip series special is that the player gets the same shape of handle for all types of tippers! Regardless of whether you use a hot rod, a click tipper, a brush or simply a classic stick, the grip will al-ways feel the same.

A ball-shaped part in just the right position – the MoBall – makes sure the tipper doesn’t slip, which is particularly handy for beginners using this playing style. The MoBall allows you to hold the tipper loosely and therefore makes it easy to control, which is very important for this way of playing.

I then determined the optimum weight and length of each type of tipper in relation to this fixed point. For weight distribution reasons, the MoGrip handles have a small hollow space at the back. This is necessary to balance the total weight in relation to the weight of the head. To give this hole another useful purpose, it is tuned to concert pitch (A = 440 Hz). ;-)

Thanks to the stability of the wooden handle and the resulting smaller length of the individual dowels of the MoGrip hot rod tippers, only one single O-ring is required to adjust the click behaviour. To obtain a slightly less sharp clicking sound for the JazzMo and the RockMo, I decided to use dowels made from walnut wood for these tippers. The stability and elasticity of these dowels is tested individually with a specially designed test method. Only absolutely flawless dowels have what it takes to become a MoGrip tipper! All dowels are treated with a hard oil wax finish. Bamboo dowels are an exception, because this type of finishing would not result in any improvement of these dowels.

In spite of all these complex tests, I recommend you only transport your MoGrip hot rods with the O-ring placed at the front (so that the tipper is closed) to avoid damage. The same applies to the ClickMo!