Relaxed Playing on Djembe Drums

Video Transcript

Okay, this is Scott Swearingen at rythmpig.com back to you. Let’s talk a little bit about relaxation while you play. When you first start playing the drum, first of all if you never played before, when you start to hit it, it hurts your hands. So in order to get used to it, you have to do it over and over. First of all play 30 minutes a day, start 5 minutes and add 5 minutes every day and go on from there. You are going to get calluses, you need to get calluses in order to do it. As you are getting your calluses, that where the hand cream comes in, one of the reasons that split it got cold around here as playing on a drum circle I did not have any of these on my finger split, that is what that nasty thing was all about. Get yourself some good hand lotion, I use stuff with cortisone in it. Put cortisone or moisturizing hand lotion on right before you play, during playing and after playing. It is probably okay for a natural skin drum to have hand lotion on it because that is what that is for skin and just helps the skin to stay nice as well. So that is number one, number two is when you are playing try to stay relaxed… look at… I am sitting and playing…. very relaxed… Now I’m going to play when I am really tensed, I am tensed up…, really, really tensed, it takes a lot of energy when you are tense. When you relaxed… a lot of people to get real fast they think I have got to get real tense, you know, in order to go fast you have to be relaxed, the more tense you are the less fast you can go. Try to get real tensed and see how fast you can go…One more time. One more time. Now I'm going to relaxed.. Do the same thing relaxed. Now my time is keep going, relaxation, one of the keys learn how to relax. It is naturally get tensed at first you do not know what you are doing and that is right if you play for 15 to 20 minutes every day it is going to really give you the confidence and that takes away a lot of that sort of… you know the real tension. When you get into the higher order rhythms and you want to start playing faster, you got to be relaxed, just you cannot do it tensed like that.

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