Techniques for Playing Maracas

Video Transcript

Hi! I am Aaron Bland on behalf of Expert Village, and I'm going to demonstrate how to play the maracas. I've got a maraca right here in my right hand. Now, the maracas are actually kind of a deceivingly difficult instrument to play. It doesn't take much to create a sound out of the maracas but to actually play in time, because you have got to get the beads to roll back and you want them to hit the front of the maraca right on the beat. Now there's not really a distinct transient sound like where you can't hear the exact attack. It's somewhere in the vicinity of, right there. So experiment with the maracas, and see if you can practice playing straight time, quicker tempos your going to find because of the rattling around of the beads or the seeds or whatever is in your maracas, your going to get a lot of extra kind of ambient noise out of the maracas in addition to the beat beat that you're actually playing. The technique that I'm using is just the same technique I would use if I were bringing a drumstick down on a drum head, but in the air, it's almost like your playing air drums. There's the idea. The maracas are also going to kind of dictate the feel of a song whether it's straight or whether it's swung, all of those extra rattles, all the extra rolling around inside of the maracas is going to kind of give you some other textures to the music. In addition to if you were playing metronome time; you're still going to get a whole lot of extra sound out of it. You could hear a lot of stuff going on in what I was playing. I was concentrating mostly on keeping a fluid motion, but, playing those basic accents, those air drum hits. There's your basic maraca technique.

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