Playing a Melody on Steel Drums

Playing a Melody on Steel Drums
Hi. I'm Alan Lightner with Expert Village. We're talking about playing steel pans and fitting into various musical situations or ensembles, concentrating very much on accompanying the rest of the band because that's the part that most musicians can be a little confused about. It seems a little bit of a mystery. How do you accompany another musician playing? We're talking about playing chords and arpeggios and rhythmic ideas. Well there's also the time when you're going to join and play the melody and how do you differentiate between the accompaniment and the melody? So if I'm playing, let's say I'm playing an accompaniment using the chords, like we've been talking about, what I'm imagining is someone else is playing a melody while I'm playing that. So I'm playing it at a nice, easy volume. You can hear it, but I'm not playing it too loud. Now if it comes to be my turn to play the melody, I may bring that melody out a little bit and then come back down and play that accompaniment, such as this. There are certain ways that you can play the accompaniment for yourself or you may be the only one playing the chords. And let's say in a reggae situation, if you're accompanying the rest of the band like that, how are you going to bring out the melody and let the melody be heard? One way is octaves. When I play octaves, I'm playing this note which is my "c", and then I'm going to play the eight which is the "c" above that. On most steel drums, again these are all hand made, so on my drum, it's right here. So if I'm playing nice and quietly and I want the melody, that's a way to use octaves to bring out your melody.