Non-dominant Hand Rim Stroke

Drumming tip of the week ( or maybe the month):

Terminology is usually "ka". It is really hard to put it in words alone. The key is to not be attached to getting sound at this point. Getting the correct movement is way more critical. Don't force it, don't do the "look how cool I am with my left hand flapping away". It is more of a straight drop: elbow-wrist-ring finger. Your thumb and index finger hang out together, your other 3 fingers provide the weight, the relaxed drop is speed, one of Newton's laws of physics, I believe. After you get the feel of the drop, you want to start minimizing the movement. You will end up playing this stroke with the heel of your hand and outside edge of your hand resting on the drum, you will hit only the top joint of your ring finger, and everything will be totally relaxed.

Doing this stroke on the drum rim itself will give you the highest sound with harmonic overtones. Moving it down onto the head will give a flatter and lower sound. Happy experimenting.

Internal rhythm structure

Back to drumming. The following is part of my response to a post on tribe.net about rhythms; what they are called and how to play them. I've been working with one of my students a lot on keeping the integrity of the internal pulse structure both when playing basic beat and when improvising. Here it is:

"Here's a few points of view triggered by a couple of talks I had with Reda Darwish and that Faisal, Tobias and I have had some discussion about. You could actually play any rhythm just with doums or teks on the pulses in the rhythm structure if they are correctly placed. In other words while the predominate way to explain (and unfortunately play) saidi is DT-DD-T-, this is incorrect. Likewise to do the same with maqsoum and play it DT-TD-T- brings you to a similar circumstance. The internal structures do not always fall exactly on the beat, depending on how you count them out.

You could very easily play what is usually considered a maqsoum pattern and actually be playing baladi. You can play maqsoum and use two doums to start off and not be playing baladi. It is highly unlikely that the chops you have worked out in either maqsoum or baladi will actually fit in saidi if you are playing saidi correctly."

Regime Change aka F.U.B.

While I really enjoy playing music, I was extremely pleased to see the regime change. Of course, over 50 million of our fellow citizens voted for the G&G ticket...quite scary. While we count down the days of our Mad Hatter in residence, let's keep in mind what, on the surface, kicked off the last 7 years of domestic, let alone international, hell. That day that will live in infamy like that other day (whenever that is). Maybe we can now get an answer as to why the CIA head of Middle East operations was visiting Osama bin Laden, while in a (U.S. military?) hospital in Qatar getting dialysis treatments, six weeks before the 11th of September attack.