How to Play Rhythms on Steel Drums

Video Transcript

ALAN MARK LIGHTNER: Hi. I'm Alan Lightner with Expert Village. Today, we're talking about playing the steel drums and fitting into various musical ensembles. One of the most confusing part, the mysterious parts to playing music in an ensemble for many people is how do you support other musicians that are playing the melody. If you're not playing the melody, so we've been talking about playing chords [PLAYS CHORDS], we've also talked about playing arpeggios, [PLAYS ARPEGGIOS], but in some situations for instance, some rock situations let's say or a jazz situation, you might--where the music is more rhythmic and the rhythm is what's going to build the intensity and it's going to be a part of the song, you want to use those ideas, those chordal ideas or the arpeggio ideas, but you gotta come up with kind of a rhythmic concept, and that's really going to be up to you as the musician but there are some traditional patterns. You can almost think--imagine what a guitar would be playing. In a traditional setup in Trinidad, an accompanist would play something like what a guitar would be playing. So if a music we're playing work this with the time of the music [TAPS ON MALLETS], one-two-three-four [PLAYS STEELDRUMS] One-two-three-four [PLAYS STEELDRUMS]. That's a rhythmic idea that works in calypso music and in soca music. There are different kinds of music. It doesn't matter you know, what you choose. There are rhythmic ideas that you can use with chords. For instance, if you're playing some Latin music and you want to play the Clave rhythm which some of you maybe familiar with. You can also hear it in a lot of New Orleans music [PLAYS RHYTHM]. That's a rhythmic idea. You should develop many of these ideas and have a whole repertoire of rhythmic ideas that you can use with the chords to accompany the rest of the band.

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