Playing Harmonies on Steel Drums

Playing Harmonies on Steel Drums
Hi. I'm Alan Lightner with Expert Village. We're talking about playing steel pans and fitting into various musical situations and a way that you can let this instrument, the steel pan, sing out and be heard in perhaps a rock situation, or a jazz, or a pop, non-traditional, non-Carribean, non-Calypso situation. One, one technique that steel drummers like to use are chords, which we've talked about before. We talked about playing the first and the third. This being the first, second, third note of a scale. So we've talked about that before. We can also use this when we're playing melodic ideas. So let's say my, my melody is here. If I want to bring that melody out, if I want the drum to sing a little bit more, I may play that in what we call sixths. That melody is still being heard, but I'm accompanying it with these, with these harmony notes. What that allows me to do is get both drums ringing, for one thing. On this drum, if I just play those notes, this drum's not ringing at all. I only have these notes. If I accompany it with the sixths, that melody is still on top. You still hear that in the high notes but below it, I play these lower notes and it gets this other drum ringing also. The reason that these are sixths is because from this low note to this high note, there are six notes in between. If we used that scale, we started here, this is one, two, three. But if we start here, we're going to count six notes before we get there. One, two, three, four, five, six. One, two, three, four, five, six. So that's why we call it a sixth. So practice your sixths and it's a great way to let melody sing. It's another technique that we Steel Drummer's use to fit into an ensemble and let this particular instrument sing out and be a solo voice.