How to Play Atabaque in Brazilian Capoeira Martial Arts

Video Transcript

"Hi, my name is Adjo Gadu on behalf of Expert Village. Today, we're going to talk about how to play the atabaque in Capoeira. The atabaque has a few different rhythms, some of them pandero, I don't know if you've seen that clip. I recommend that you watch the pandero clip if you're going to watch this one as well, because the pandero and the atabaque essentially do pretty much the same rhythm. If you can play the basic pandero rhythm on the pandero or the tamborine, playing the atabaque is really the same thing but you're using two hands instead of one. So what you want to do, the atabaque is a big wooden drum for lack of a better way of explaining it and what you want to do is stand in front of it. For me, I'm right-handed and you can kind of play it any way you want, but you want to use both hands and you want the rhythm to sound like this. You hit the outer edge with your tips of your fingers about half-way down your fingers. You hit the outer edge of the drum that gives you one sound. You hit with your palm flat in the middle of the drum that gives you the second type of sound that you're going to use on the atabaque. So, you either do out-out, in-out, out-out, in-out. Now for me, I do that right-left, right-right, right-left, right-right. That's how I play it. Other people play it a different way, for me that's the most comfortable. With most instruments in Capeoira, you just kind of want to play with it until you're comfortable with it and you figure out what works best for you to keep the rhythm correctly and be able to do flourishes and that kind of thing, to make it sound a little bit nicer."