African Hand Drumming

I started taking African Hand Drumming classes at Brittannia Community Centre about a year ago. The drum I play is called the Djembe and involves three basic tones, the bass, the slap and the open tone. Learning simple beats and developing your tones and handing is the basis for the level one class. I am now taking the level two class (which I have already taken) where we learn harder beats, with multiple parts including the dununs (which you can see a picture of if you link through the drumming site).

As many of you may know, coordination and musical ability aren't exactly my strongest traits, which is why I choose Djembe in the first place. I figured if I could play a musical instrument at all, it would certainly be a simple one such as banging a drum with your hands.

After a summer hiatus, I went back to class last night. I often have difficulty learning a beat in class, as I get lost in the sounds of the people around me and it is difficult for me to find my own beat. So I merely try to remember the basics and practice at home for the next week. Fortunately, this week we started with my favourite beat called Yankadi. It is a little bit complex (although still slow), but I had learned it previously which made my return to drumming a little bit less intimidating.

I also tried the dununs for the first time, they are round drums that are played horizontally using drum sticks. A simple beat is played using your weak hand on a piece of 2x4 wood placed on top of the drum, then your strong hand is used to hit the head of the drum on certain beats. This results in an amazing sound of deep drum beats and simple clicking or almost pinging sounds of the drumstick on the wood.

When it was finally time to try the dununs, my first instinct was to mirror Russell (the teacher). Which of course resulted in me using the wrong hands for each part the first two times, and thus I pretty much sucked. But once I figured out I was doing it wrong and started using the proper hands I got much better (I guess it does affect the coordination). Although scary, the dunun was also very fun, and it sounds amazing when you get all three dununs parts and both djembe parts playing at the same time. It's a beautiful melody, and during one round, Russell played about 8 solo pieces over all of the other parts, it was absolutely amazing.

I can't wait for next week, so I can learn something new.