I am starting a new on line downlaodable djembe and dunun and drumming lessons series entitled, “Can’t beat em join em” for people who would like to very casually learn to play west african influenced rhythms and only  want to learn the most basic and easiest rhythms. You do not need a lot of experience to learn or study these videos.

These traditional rhythms  have been reformatted and adapted to be used in drum circles or open formats. My goal is to make the rhythms and patterns easily accessible to anyone and to make playing  them as easy as possible while maintaining much of the flavour and integrity in the rhythms.

Many people do not want to to study or learn any thing new but still want to have fun.

I have put together these arrangements so that almost anyone can learn these simple rhythms to bring to their next outing to break the redundancy inherent in the drum circle pantheon.

You can still “do your own thing”, express your creativity, play off of each other and do what you want as well! The goal is to add to this experience, to enhance your playing . Not take anything away from you or your playing experience. Don’t want to learn technique? Fine! Don’t want to hold a pattern? Fine! Do can still do your own thing.

We start by using Ballet style rhythm arrangements, that is to say arrangements where the set of 3 dununs that are traditionally played sideways (double sided bass drums hit with stick on side and bell on top) by one player on each drum are now played up right (all three drums) by one player.

This will give us a start at integrating and fusing the different styles of drumming.

The dunun drums create the bass line, melody and rhythm pattern that any jam session works directly off of.

Since many of the rhythms I am showing have already been adapted for performance styles by our teachers and elders they are also easily integrated into open jam and drum circle style formats. All we need is open minds, open hearts and a little time and patience and this will indeed work beautifully!

I created these particular  lessons after visiting many drum circles all across the globe and noticing the need for greater information to be shared n the drum circles.

Although dununs are now present and in force in many places, often the dunun players are unable to change beats, can get stuck in the same groove and lack spice and definition in their playing.

We all need to add different feels to our repertoire from time to time to keep things interesting. “Variety is the spice of life”.

My intention is to simply shed some light on the subject and help those that are open minded and interested to see that there is indeed a connection be tween the traditional drumming and what can happen in a drum circle if people listen to each other and learn a few simple patterns .

Please click on any of the links directly below to see a demo of the concept in action before and after at drum circles.

Ballet Style Arrangement For Drum Circles #1

USING KASSA BALLET STYLE IN A DRUM CIRCLE DEMO

Using An Arrangement Of Lingin In A Drum Circle Application Demo

I will be adding the actual longer format lessons soon so you can learn these patterns for dunun and djembe in a step by step format.