How to Play Chords on Steel Drums

Video Transcript

ALAN MARK LIGHTNER: Hi. I'm Alan Lightner with Expert Village. We're talking about playing steelpans and fitting into various musical situations or ensembles. If you're going to play with an ensemble and perhaps be the leader of that ensemble or even fit in as a sideman if you will, right? And an accompanying member, not the leader of the band, it's going to help you if you can learn harmony; if you can learn to play chords. That way, you can play melodies, if you're actually playing that, or when someone else is trying to play melodies, you can also fit in and support that melo--support whoever is playing the melody like a guitar player would or like a piano player would. So, it's going to be important for you to learn harmony and to learn to play chords. It's a little tricky and it takes some time and it does take some know-how, but starting out learning a scale would really help, and one most people would start with is a C scale. We usually start that because of how it works on the piano but we'll do it here: C-D-E-F-G-A-B-C. Now when you get your steelpans for the first time, typically the notes will be written all along on each note. They'll be written here. Even on these drums, even though I've been playing forever, when you get your drums for the first time, the notes will be written here. They're not written in here just because I know now but I just do that scale again really quickly, that C scale, C major scale: C-D-E-F-G-A-B, and back to C, B-A-G-F-E-D-C. And that is C, that's middle C on the piano if you will go there. The way--the easiest way to begin experimenting with chords is to play every other note in that scale. Starting on the first note, the C, the second note was here D, and then the third note was E. So if I play the first and the third or every other note together], we get a nice-sounding chord. I can also do that starting on the second note of the scale which is - the scale was C, D, so that's the 2nd note. If I wanted to keep this, I could still play every other note, in other words, from the D, the next one was here at E and one after that was F. So if I skip one, I also get a nice chord there. By the same token I could take a start from the 3rd and get to this note so I can play these two notes together.

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