How To Hit Steel Drums

Video Transcript

Hi, I'm Alan Lightner and I'm here with Expert Village and we're talking about the art of playing the steel pan. The steel pan is a hand make instrument as we've talked about before. That's the way the best ones are made and the majority all most one hundred percent of them are made by hand, and defiantly any one that I have ever liked. Given that, there will be idiosyncrasies, there will be little quirks that this particular instrument has as apposed to one of my many other instruments that are like this because they are made by either a different person, or even by the same person but just at a different time. Any time your hand doing something every one is going to be slightly different. So you want to learn your particular instrument. On my particular instrument for instance, I realized that this note, I can hit with this much intensity, and it still sounds good. I'm going to demonstrate now what happens if I hit it too hard and it sounds terrible and it takes the drum out of tune so we really don't want to. So I'm going to demonstrate it not as much as I could. This is played well, you can all ready hear that the drum doesn't sound as good at that higher volume and since we tune the drum and build the drum with a hammer, if I strike it too hard I'm detuning it. If it's all ready in tune I strike it too hard then I'm detuning it and we don't really want that at all. So developing a good touch is going to require your ear. You have to listen to where your notes sing, that note sings out right there. Being a hand made instrument I know that there are problems on some of my notes. For instance I know that this note I have to hit very softly. Just this particular note as apposed to some other note. This note I can hit harder. This note begins to break up right away if I hit it too hard so I know as I'm playing a song when I get to that note I've got to be careful. That takes time just to learn your particular instrument, but with time you will learn it and you will become a better steel drummer your instrument will sound better when you learn your instrument. Any time you?re playing steel pans the lower notes which are the larger notes you have to play softer. The higher notes which are the very small notes here, you have to strike with a little harder intensity. So very soft, very hard for the same volume that you will get. If I hit this note, the small note, as softly as I play this one I don't get the same volume.

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