Playing Maracas in Accent Beats

Video Transcript

"I'm going to talk to you about a maraca technique--playing accents, or accentuating notes. Again, in percussion, or really any other instrument that you play, accent is a note that sounds out from all of the other notes, by means of being louder. And, again, in percussion, that translates into "play it harder." So let's take the straight time that we were playing on the maraca. All even across the board. Now, if you wanted to accent a note, you would basically kind of snap your wrist a little bit harder just to make that note sound out from everything else that you're doing. Now, I'm going to demonstrate this where I'm going to accent the first of every four notes. One, two, three, four, one, two, three, four, one, two, three, four. A lot of times, what happens when you are accenting notes on the maracas, you end up kind of twisting your wrists. And it's just kind of inherent in the way that your biomechanics--the way that your body was designed. And what it does is it puts a spin on all of the maraca beads. And I'm going to play that one more time, just like I played before, and listen for--it kind of, it almost sounds like a roll. Juj, juj, juj, juj, juj, juj, juj, juj. There's your maraca accents, and you can do them two at a time."