Building Speed on the Djembe Drum

Series Summary

The djembe is a large, goblet-shaped drum that is skin covered and played with bare hands. The drum is a membranophone, meaning its covering in a shell, usually rawhide. Its origins trace back to West Africa, where it is a monumental part of the culture and musical history. According to African tradition, the djembe contains certain spirits which motivate the drummer and are an active part of the experience for the listener, as well. While the djembe drum has found popularity in the Western world as a part of a drum circle, its intended ensemble use is with a dunun drum and bells. Djembe soloists or lead drummers will beat rhythms to accent and accompany dancers, signaling changes in dance steps as well as adapting to the dance. For this reason, its important for djembe drummers who want to use the instrument in the traditional fashion to learn a variety of rhythms and beats popular with African dance. Playing a drum with bare hands might seem like and easy task, but when the musician is required to play, predict and adjust to dancers and other musicians, it becomes a little harder.

In this free video clip series, our expert will introduce you to the djembe drum and how its played. Learn how to do everything from basic taps and beats to more advanced rhythms like polyrhythms and sixteenth notes. You will also learn about proper posture and body mechanics for playing the drum as well as slapping and soloing techniques. Everything from the most basic introduction to rhythm to the execution of difficult exercises such as triplets and sextuplets are included.

Video Transcript

" Welcome back. Well, so now you know how to play quarter, eighth and sixteenth notes, triples and sixes or sixtuplets. How you get there, how you build it up. It is hard. You have to play it for a longtime. If you just jump into and trying to play sixes or sixtuplets, you get lost and you get off. So again if you play everyday just for 15 minutes you are going to find yourself getting a lot better and a lot more capable with this stuff. So one of the easy things to do to learn how to go fast is to build it up from the basic quarter, eight and sixteenth pattern. So that you start playing quarter notes one, two, three, four… and then you go to the eighth note…, now it sounds like I got fast…, but I did a lot doing stuff like this note, now I have got sixteenth note …, now I have got the 16th note… one, two, three, four… one, two, three, four… one, two, three, four… one, two, three, four… So if you want to build up and build down within sub-diving those beats. It helps you learn how to get all this together. One, two, three, four… one, two, three, four and…. So that’s all I did. I started with my quarter notes one, two, three, four then I went into my eighths. One, two, three, four and then I went into my sixteenth one, two, three, four and then I am going to back down. So one, two, three, four… one, two, three, four…"