How to Hit Steel Drums

Video Transcript

ALAN MARK LIGHTNER: Hi. I'm Alan Lightner, I'm here with Expert Village, and we're talking about playing steelpans and fitting into various musical situations. Right now, we've been talking about fitting into a traditionally jazz or pop ensemble. We talked about the range of the instrument knowing that playing low notes may be--may get covered up. The steel pan as we've talked about in previous clips, you have to have a certain touch and when you play above that touch, when you strike too hard, the drum starts to sound bad. It starts to break up. That note doesn't sound as good as when I play it softly. It's going to be very important for you as the steeldrummer in the group, whether you are the leader or just a sideman in the group, it's going to be very important for you to communicate to the rest of the musicians in the band that you've got a sound limit. You've got a volume limit. You cannot strike any harder than that and make your instrument sound good. The drummer can hit very hard, the guitar player can turn up, keyboard player, if he's plugged in, can turn up. If you've got other amplified instruments, which you normally have or often have in a jazz or pop ensemble, you've got to really be aware of your instrument because you can damage your instrument. If you bang on your instrument like that too much, you're taking it out of tune as we've talked about before, and then you have to have in tuned again, which is not as easy as tuning a guitar. You can't just sit there and do it. It takes a lot of know-how, a lot of skill in the hammer and very involved, and it can be very expensive. Not to mention that, the more you tune the drum, the more you damage the drum. The drum is not going to last forever. You're bending the steel every time you're playing it and every time you're tuning it, and sooner or later it will break. So you want to really take care of you instrument. Really, you have got to be very serious about that and you got to really communicate to the rest of the band members that--that's as loud as I can play. So without--if I don't have proper amplification, everyone else has got to play quietly. I can't emphasize that enough. Communicate that to your band members

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