Playing Leads on Steel Drums

Playing Leads on Steel Drums
Hi. My name is Alan Lightner. I'm here with Expert Village. We're going to talk a little bit about steel pans and the various instruments in the steel pan family and their roles in the traditional music, which is Calypso or Soca. The music that comes from Trinidad, the same place that the steel pans originate. So I'm standing in front of this instrument here. We call it, typically, a lead pan or it's also called a tinner pan. It's called the tinner pan in Trinidad usually. It's kind of a misnomer just because it's more in the soprano range, but tinner pan is what we call it, or a lead pan. It also is the instrument or drum that plays most of the melodies, most of the lead lines in a song. It's got a range from that is much higher than the other drums in the family. This particular drum goes down to a low "d". That's where, that's the first note, that's the lowest note that it has. Other lead pans or tinner pans may go down a couple more notes down to a low "c". I don't have a low "c". I have this high "c". This is my lowest note on this drum. And I've got about three octaves. There are about, about thirty notes or so, give or take a few, depending upon who made your drum on a lead pan. About thirty notes, and as I say, this drum is mostly responsible for playing melodies. What I'd like to do is perhaps play a little, short melody. A little, small melody here on the lead pan and then I'll take you through the rest of, the rest of the instruments and show you how, how they all play their part and how it all fits together. So if I just play the melody which is just on an "f" scale, very simple melody and I'll take that and go around on all the drums and show you how, how they sound different and the different roles that they'd have in the music. If this were played like a Calypso, it might be a little more rhythmic than that. It might be something like... That's the sound of the lead pan.