Ritmos Cubanos

Osvaldo Carvajal, percussionist with the Bay Area AfroCuban band Pellejo Seco stopped in Ashland, Oregon for a workshop covering various aspects of Cuban percussion and dance styles. Demonstrating the building blocks of traditional and newer Cuban music styles on cowbell, bongo, claves, and timbales, Carvajal presented the rhythms in a casual yet engaging style.

The Sounds In My Head

The Sounds in My Head? One of my favorite podcasts, a "biweekly music podcast featuring songs and bands you might have missed." But it's not the subject of this post. The head sounds I mean is tinnitus. Ringing of the ears. I've got it bad, and that ain't good. Too many years playing the drums in too many loud bands.
Though it's incurable, though there are things one can do that help, (See the American Tinnitus Association site for possible therapeutic strategies), or at least keep it manageable. Lately there's been news about possible treatments on the horizon for hearing loss using stem-cell technology , as mentioned recently in the blog Musical-machines. Apparently listening to your iPod headphones/earbuds is another tinnitus/deafness culprit. So keep that volume down. Once you have it, you may never know true silence again.
Certain environmental sounds (crickets, seashore, road noise) effectively mask the noise, though.
To some extent your brain adjusts and attenuates the ringing. Getting enough sleep and avoiding stress helps. Some people find caffeine and aspirin aggravates tinnitus. When in loud environments, by all means use ear protection, and take a break from the noise by finding a quiet place to let your ears recover.

Percussion Discussion: Steve Smith, on Buddy Rich, from the Musician's Friend Interview: "He was one of the greatest drummers that ever lived, and if you were lucky enough to see him, it was a mind-blowing experience, each and every time."

Tokyo Drum Museum

During a trip to Japan last summer I stopped in at the Tokyo Drum Museum in the old Tokyo district of Taito-Ku. They have an awesome display of drums from Japan and around the world, and what's really cool is that you can play them! (Well, most of them . . . drums that are too rare or old to take a beating are marked with red dot that means hands off). They also have some drums for sale, and I picked up a couple of beautiful little drums traditionally used in Japan's noh, gagaku, and kabuki ensembles. I also scored a couple of CDs of Taiko (Japanese for drum) drumming, the relatively recent art form of ensemble drumming that has quickly grown in popularity and has spread far beyond Japan. Taiko drums range in size from small tom-sized to massive (6' and up in diameter.)
One of the more famous Taiko drumming ensembles is called Kodo, from Sado island, located between Japan and Korea. The Kodo community on Sado is dedicated to exploring and extending the traditional Japanese drumming arts.

Sonor's Force Series '07 - Special Forces

I recently had the chance to try out a couple of Sonor’s new Force Series drum sets, the 2007 and 3007. The Force Series debuted in the ‘90s as a budget-minded alternative to the pricier top-shelf Sonor kits. The series has improved through the years, but these newest sets are something else—the force appears to be with Force like never before.
Substantially redesigned and overhauled, these sets are the pride of Sonor's Chinese manufacturing facility, harnessing the German-engineering expertise of the German production center that turns out Sonor's high-end sets.
The 3007 and 2007 kits are both beautiful to behold and a joy to play. The drums come in a range of drop-dead gorgeous new waxed/gloss finishes. The 3007s have the classic, warm, resonant tone that maple is well-known for while the 2007s employ birch construction for a harder-edged, slightlier punchier sound.
The toms use the so-called “FAST” tom shell sizes, slighty shallower than. This gives the drums quicker attack, more versatile tone, and a wider tuning range, allowing them to adapt to virtually any style of music. These are entry-to-intermediate priced kits that have a top-of-the-line look and sound. Check 'em out!

Percussion Discussion: "The one thing I try and work on is staying relaxed and making stuff feel good. That's the main thing—having your body feel good as you're playing. You're using your whole body to play this instrument" Matt Chamberlain in Music Connection magazine.

Drum Track of the week: "Crooked Creek" from Perceptual by the Brian Blade Fellowship featuring Brian Blade on drums. On this 2000 date Blade gooses and kicks this 5/4 meter tune along with great dynamics and volcanic energy. While at times recalling Elvin Jones' polyrhythmic assault, Blade has one of the most original and identifiable styles in jazz drumming.

Life is a Carnaval

The holiday has been traced back to the ancient Greek traditions of Dionysus and Dionysia. If you live in New Orleans or Rio it’s impossible not to get swept up in it. Most large cities around the world gyrate to its frenetic rhythms, driven by drumming and dancing to a fever pitch.
Today marks the final fling of Fat Tuesday (known in N’awlins as Mardi Gras), before the coming of Ash Wednesday, which traditionally marks the beginning of a 40-day period of the austerity and self-denial of Lent.
If you’re a drummer or percussionist and lucky enough to live in a city that pulls out all the stops for this blow-out, you’ll likely find yourself in the streets, beating on something—be it a drum, a bell, or maybe the guy who’s trying to pick your pocket while you’re distracted by the dancing girls.
In Brazilian cities such as Rio de Janeiro, Sao Paulo, Salvador, and Recife, people save for months to buy elaborate fantasias, or carnaval costumes. Samba schools, neighborhood carnaval organizations, compete to put on the most impressive displays of drumming and dancing during competitions that take place in different areas of the city. The most well-known of these competitions takes place in Rio's Sambadrome, a large venue built especially for the samba parades. The samba schools each consist of thousands of members, dressed in elaborate costumes and dancing routines they have rehearsed all year to original music. Each schools presentation is based around a central theme, typically a historical event or a Brazilian Indian legend.
While Brasil is an endlessly fascinating country and Rio is indeed a marvelous city, the poverty and crime cannon that besets the people of Brazil's urban centers should not be glossed over. The same favelas, or shantytowns, that spawn the greatest carnaval celebrations are rife with violence, drug crime, and police corruption. An excellent documentary film called Favela Rising documents one man's struggle to uplift his crime-ridden neighborhood via AfroReggae music. City of God is another great film that presents both an unblinking look at Rio's dark side while also giving a sense of the basic joyfullness that's characteristic of the Brazilian people.
To get a sense of what carnaval in Rio is like, check out the 1959 movie Orfeu Negro, or Black Orpheus, in which the ancient Greek Orpheus myth is played out against the background of carnaval. The 1999 remake by Carlos Diegues, entitled simply Orpheu, while a lesser film than the original, nonetheless stands on its own in presenting an evocative picture of 21st century Rio.
The massive processions are powered by percussion sections, or batarias, that number several hundred strong. With the growing popularity of world music in general and Brazilian music in particular, many of the percussion instruments used by these giant rhythm sections are available for contemporary drummers and percussionists.
Agogo bells are duo-toned bells that keep the samba schools on beat with their characteristic high-pitched rhythms. Various shakers help propel the percolating batucada drum grooves. The Pandeiro is the Brazilian version of the one-headed drum with jingles that we know as the tambourine. Remo makes a handy strap, the Dual Slider Percussion Strap, that allows you to play your African-style djembe drum in the style of the hand-drum sections of the carnaval processions (desfiles) of northern Brazil. Samba whistles are used to signal changes in rhythm and tempo.
Companies like Latin Percussion, Meinl, Remo, and Toca carry a huge range of Brazilian and world percussion. Short of catching a flight to Rio, the best way to learn how to play Brazilian rhythms is by listening to and studying them. Musician's Friend carries some books and CDs on the subject such as Brazilian Rhythms and the Åpuro Brazilian PVG Songbook.

Drum Track of the Week: "The Only Moment We Were Alone" on The Earth is Not a Cold Dead Place by Explosions in the Sky with Christopher Hrasky on Drums. This rock quartet out of Austin has an evocative, elemental sound that seldom fails to give me chills. Hrasky sounds like he's spent some time in the Drum Corps, often using martial cadences to great effect. Powerful stuff.

Get informed, get electrified

Sequestered away on the Musician's Friend website are many articles and tech tips about various drumming topics, about everything from tuning your drums to how to replace conga heads. There's also a section with hands-on product reviews of drum and percussion gear. For example, a review was recently posted that tells you about everything you would want to know about the new Yamaha DTX IV Electronic Drum Set, which, as I mentioned in an earlier post, made its public debut at last month's Winter NAMM show.
Also new from Yamaha is the DD-65 Digital Drum Kit, (with a USB output!) For those who aren't hip to the DD Series, they're compact pad sets that are built into a handy portable console that you can carry around under your arm. I've got a couple of earlier versions of these and have used them a lot for both gigs (as an adjunct to my regular kit) and recording. The onboard sounds are respectable, but for me their usefullness lies in that they have MIDI out. This allows them to plug into dedicated percussion modules like the EMU Procussion (now extinct) and the Alesis DM5 (still alive). Being able to play percussion with sticks is infinitely better than tapping out parts on a keyboard. The upper-level DD units even have rudimentary foot pedals so you can play them almost like a real kit, and they sell for a fraction of what it costs to get into a full-fledged electronic set.

Percussion Discussion: "The U.S. is the greatest country in the world, but unfortunately it's not open musically. Music is very formatted here. It has become a form of sound pollution, with loud sampled drums being pumped into every public place. And people get used to it: when kids see a live drummer playing a kit now it sounds weird to them—they expect a big, heavy drum machine thud. So touring in the U.S. with my music is rough." - Bassist Richard Bona, in Bass Player magazine.

NAMM 2007 Part Deux - Cajons, Warlords, and Spiral Trash

With the hum and throb of NAMM now fallen silent, all the over-caffeinated babble is fading away. What stays with me are the images and sounds of those handmade instruments simple in concept and elegant in their execution.

Musical instruments don’t come much more basic than the cajon – the Spanish word for box. This cajon is indeed a simple wooden box, yet can produce a range of drum set-like tones perfect for playing dynamically at a lower volume levels. The instrument has been used for decades in traditional music from Cuban to Afro-Peruvian to Spanish flamenco. It’s easy to see why the cajon has caught fire and sells like cold beer at a chili-eating contest—they’re inexpensive, beautiful, and they're great for acoustic gigs (and electric as well when they're miked up).

The player sits on the cajon and strikes the front surface. Playing toward the center of the cajon with the palm produces deep kick drum-like sounds. The top edges are attached with screws that can be loosened to allow hard-cutting slap tones. In the hands of a master drummer like Alex Acuna or Luis Conte, the cajon really speaks. To the right is a picture of Leon Mobley, percussionist with Ben Harper and the Innocent Criminals, getting down on the cajon.

It’s said that if you take conga lessons from the legendary congero Poncho Sanchez, you must pay your dues by first playing the hand-toughening cajon for weeks before you're allowed to touch a conga.

Innovative percussion manufacturers like Meinl have taken the humble cajon to new heights, with models that feature foot pedal-adjustable internal snare wires, an electronic pickup, exotic woods, synthetic front plates, padded seats, and a variety of natural and painted finishes.TAMA’s Warlord Limited Exotix Drum Set is made of bubinga wood, with an outer ply of quilted bubinga in African twilight that gives these drums striking eye appeal. The Warlords sound big and warm, with a sonic character somewhere between maple and birch.

Special effects cymbals were another hot item at NAMM. Zildjian brought it with their A Custom EFX and Spiral Trash cymbals. The A Custom EFX looks rather UFO-like with it's laser cut-outs, and has a Chinese cymbal-like vocabulary of dark, trashy sounds. The Zildjian Spiral Trash looks like the offspring of a cymbal and a slinky, and produces an intriguing spectrum of metallic effects.

NAMM 2007 - Straight Outta Anaheim

Welcome to On the Beat, a drum and percussion blog. In my drumming career I've played music ranging from ska versions of bar mitzvah favorites to samba reggae to free jazz. As well as being player I'm also a compulsive percussion collector and in my day job as a writer for Musician's Friend, I get to check out a range of both new and traditional tools of the drumming trade. This drum blog is intended to further explore the boundry country where words, drums, and percussion come together.

On this first flight we’ll check out a few of the new drum and percussion products of the Winter NAMM (National Association of Music Merchants) Show held in Anaheim last month.

The Buddy Rich Drum Company, in collaboration with Buddy’s daughter Cathy Rich, exhibited a series of drum sets that recall those played by the jazz legend, but with the strength and durability demanded by contemporary players. Their top-of-the-line Buddy Rich Signature Set is a drool-worthy kit designed after Buddy’s personal specs, including all-maple shells, dual 16” x 16” floor toms, and vintage-style hardware that’s beefed up for modern use.


Pearl’s Vision Series drums have many features found on Pearl's classy Masterworks and Reference series drums at quite affordable prices. The "Vision thing" is all-birch shells of differing thicknesses designed to coax the perfect tone out of the various drums relative to each other in the sonic spectrum. The rack toms are relatively thin while the floor toms and bass drums are thicker. The concept is that the floor tom and bass drum shells will deliver depth and power while the thinner rack toms provide greater sensitivity and more delicate tonal shadings.

You're trodding around in a daze from NAMM's sensory overload, thinking you'll freak if you hear one more massive drum fill, when you behold it and you can only stand awestruck: Yamaha's 40th Anniversary Washi Drum Set. Based on the vaunted Recording Custom Series, the drums are finished in Washi paper (used in traditional Japanese arts), featuring intricate artwork depicting scenes from the Genpai War that rocked Japan from 1180 to 1185 and ushered in the shogunate era. These elaborate battle depictions were patterned after a hand-painted screen in the Takamatsu Historical museum in Japan. This limited edition, playable work-of-art will ships in July.

If you've been considering getting into electronics, Yamaha’s DTXpress IV Electronic Drum Set just might tip you over the edge, with all-new sound samples taken from both Yamaha’s Motif Series synths and their fine acoustic drums, including the Maple Custom, Oak Custom, and Beech Custom Series. An advanced built-in programmable metronome with Groove Check and Rhythm Gate tools let you work on your groove and timing skills.

Other NAMM drum standouts included: Omar Hakim playing the daylights out of a set of Roland V-Drums; the reintroduction of the Rogers drum line by Yamaha; a truckload of percussion introductions by Meinl; Taye's versatile GoKit; striking new Force sets from Sonor, and some lust-inducing new snare drums from DW including a gorgeous bamboo model. Apologies to those not mentioned, so many great drums, so little time!

Percussion Discussion: “You play with passion and you do things for certain effects for certain reasons, but I don’t sit down with a freaking meter on my leg to see how many singles I can play.” – Vinnie Colaiuta, in Modern Drummer, March 2007

Drum track of the week: New Elephant on “Absolute Quintet” featuring Dafnis Prieto. Hailing from Cuba, Dafnis has been tearing it up in the New York jazz scene over the last few years. A drummer with unreal skills who also writes great tunes—what's not to love?