Tips for Polyrhythms on Djembe Drumming

Video Transcript

"Welcome back! So this lesson is going to be on polyrhythms. Why you bought a drum, you did not buy a drum just to make noise, I told you about that. You bought a drum because you want to play with friends, you want to play with yourself, the whole thing about playing drums is playing with friends, especially African drums and Cuban drum. This is one of my friends, his name is Anderson. I had to rent him and the rental friend plays because I do not have many friends, but this is one who plays. Tell them who you are and what you do... My name is Anderson, I my project is called One Man Tribe but what you can, check out at line at onemantribe.com. I have been playing percussion for about five years, been multi-instrumentalist for about seven and that is pretty much it. There you go. Anderson and I are actually the Swearingen Session is our projects. So what we are going to show you is polyrhythm’s, basic easiest concept. The whole idea behind polyrhythms is that one person is playing one set of rhythms on one drum and another person is playing another set of drums, but they go together. At the African drum especially emerge as a communal sort of expression. A really easy one to do with one of your friends is called the basic chico pattern and that is the one I played before… that is the basic of it or you can double that last one. This is actually one of the standard chico pattern. Now I will play that I'm going to have Anderson play… Now I like this little beat here, just to show you what you can do… You have a basic rhythm within the song that is your rhythm, that’s your part and a polyrhythm. You can go outside of it and make up a little bit to come back to that rhythm because the whole song is built up of a tie between one rhythm and another rhythm. The easy way to start is like we just did. One person plays eighth note and one persons plays quarter, sixteenth notes. We are going to a basic level. One, two, three, there you go. "