Playing Strumming Patterns on the Steel Drums

Playing Strumming Patterns on the Steel Drums
Hi. I'm Alan Lightner with Expert Village. We're talking about the different roles that the members of the steel drum family play in the traditional, Calypso or Soca setting. A traditional steel band setting where you've got the full orchestra, the full range of instruments from the very high to the low bass. I'm playing on the instrument the double seconds and we're talking about strumming patterns. Strumming, as you would strum a guitar, we strum on pan also. We were taking our simple melody, which is just based on an "f" scale, we harmonized it and we're going to demonstrate the different rhythms using that harmony. So now this, this particular pattern is going to be, instead of a group, instead of two groups of three, instead of that, now we're going to have a group of two and a group of three. We're just going to eliminate the middle note on the first pattern, on the first group. So we're going to get rid of that guy and then we'll have these three, we can follow that. So, I'm going to go slowly and just do it on the very first chord just to demonstrate. So if I say, "one, two, a one, two, three, four, one,". So I play it one, two and then one, two, three. Listen again. One, two, three, four, one. Still leaving off all those down beats. I'll demonstrate that one last time. One, two, a one, two, three, four, boom. That boom was the down beat and I did not play there. That was a rest. I'm going to go through the chords now. I'm going to play that strumming pattern playing the chords that, the way we've harmonized our little melody. A one, two, a one, two, three, four, one, two, three, ahhh, boom, boom, down, down. That is the second strum pattern for the double seconds.