How to Play the Shaker for Percussion

Video Transcript

"Hi, my name is Lennon Leppert, and on behalf of Expert Village, this is "How to Play the Shaker". There is a variety of different shakers and a variety of different settings you may use the shaker in. The first is pop music, and the second most used is probably musicals. When you're playing a musical or a pop chart recording or live, when you get a chart or a part for a musical, they don't usually say what kind of shaker to use, they just say "shaker", and you have to use your own discretion to decide what kind of shaker you're going to use. The first thing with a shaker is what's inside of it, they use glass, little glass bits, seeds, all sorts of stuff. Second is what the exterior is made out of, metal, wood, there's a lot of different things shakers can be made for. So when you're shopping for shakers you want to get a variety of shakers so when you get a shaker part in either a pop chart or a musical, you can go through your bag of shakers and find the exact right one for that particular piece. So the first kind of shaker I'm holding here is, it's a larger shaker, it has glass inside, sounds like that, and usually with a bigger shaker you can use both hands or you can. The second shaker is also metal, like the first one, it's smaller; also glass, as you can tell it's higher pitched. And the last one is more of a pop, this would be more of a pop probably recording setting because it's so quiet, and this has, I believe it has seeds, and it's a wood exterior, and has that kind of sound. You can do rolls with shakers, or you can do rhythm, depends on the part, and they'll usually be pretty straightforward on how to play it and on what hand to play it with. And that concludes, "How to Play Shakers"."