When an established conga player transitions to learn to play djembe he or she has certain advantages and disadvantages. When you play congas, there is much emphasis on pushing in to the drum to make tone. On a goat skin djembe, do to the thin tight skin, you must pull the sound out.
work on pulling and keeping your hands in near the rim
Despite this energetic difference, the technique for making tone is nearly the same, you just do not leave your hand in the drum as long, you alllow it bounce making one fluid hit and return motion, vs two seperate motions. I call it follow through. When you hit a baseball with a baseball bat you do not stop when you hit the drum. Your motion continues forward
making contact right side before final motion to pull in to rim
left hand and right hand slap set up for final
On djembe drum it is the same. You can not go through the drum so you allow your slap to spring back. This is something that needs to be practiced over and over. The “spring back”.
By allowing your slaps and tones to spring back after you hit the drum, you thereby reduce your output of energy. MY first drum teacher George Terzis in Boston puts it simply, “minimum imput, maximum output”.
One difficult thing for a conga player to loose, (myself included) is the cup motion of the conga closed slap. Many modern conga players actualy use an open slap similar to djembe these days especiay for the modern Afro Cuban techniques.
Many Guinea djembe experts have a slap that is extremely close to the rim and uses very little of the hand where as the Cuban style traditionaly uses much of the hand. This is also hard for a conga player to put so little hand on the drum.
rt hand pre pull back to rim
If anyone has seen Mohamed Diaby play he is an expert at the close to skin slap and made me a true believer of it’s power and sound output as well.
So for all the conga players out there who want to also play djembe, really work on pulling your hands back closer to the rim for slap, tone and bass!
sending...
…and I am curious what was that info you were looking for?? Was it about djembes, Mali Music, Afro Cuban, Brasil, Haiti or?
My son has played the djembe occaisionally on a friend’s djembe. Now he wants to play regularly as rhythm backup in a church worship band. As I was looking at types of hand drums, I saw that there are various types including Conga, and others. When I talked to his band teacher about the djembe, they said that they didn’t play much african music, and I see a lot of references to latin music with congas. Are they that specific. Our friend who plays the djembe as rhythm backup to piano and guitar seems to do just fine with a djembe. I saw that pearl makes some travel congas, and didn’t know if I should encourage him to take a shot at them. He is very musically gifted, and so I thought that the Congas might give him more range, and challenge.
Generally, congas are going to give you a better range and more dexterity then a djembe. I play both instruments and for bands generally I like to play congas and people (the other musicians) prefer the sound of congas to djembe, which is high pitched. Having said that, I travel with a djembe as it is much lighter and bringing two congas around can be difficult with out a car, whereas a djembe can go on my back even on a bicycle. I also have a set of LP compact congas synthetic which are small, but there is absolutely no bass, just tone and slap and I have not been able to get used to them 100% as I love the more natural sound of the congas.