What is Shaker Percussion?

Series Summary

Shakers, whether big or small, are great additions to bands of many different musical genres. Using a percussion shaker is fairly easy and very intuitive, but using a percussion shaker well is far more difficult. There are many different styles and effects you can achieve with percussion shakers. If you would like to learn how to use percussion shakers well, for playing in a band, you have come to the right place. You can learn how to use percussion shakers, for free and online, from on of our experts.

In this free music lesson, learn how to play percussion shakers from musician Ryan Larson. Ryan will show you basic shaker percussion techniques and patterns such as loose rolling effects and muting effects. He will teach you how to play percussion shakers with "soul", and how to play shakers with a band. Additionally you can learn how to play percussion shakers with two hands, how to play triplets, how to mute large shakers, how to play two different sized shakers, and how to set up microphones for recording shaker percussion music.

Video Transcript

"RYAN LARSON: So, today we're going to over the shakers and it seems kind of redundant but you'll be surprise how big of a world the shaker is. I mean, how hard is it to just to keep the same motion going consistently and not change it? It's really a matter of patience and time and concentration and really, you need a machine to get expert precision to get the same sound every time. I mean, if I just make slight changes, I get different sounds. And there's obvious different ways you can throw the conga. You can get the balls on the inside to roll around and you really want to think about the instrument and how to approach it and you can mute it. I'm going to go through and show you all these techniques and then we're going to approach the big shakers. And you can get a lot more sound, it's a little up there. But there's ways to control it and you can even mute one shaker or one big shaker and get that same effect. So, we're going to go through and shaker it up."