I Hear Drums...

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......I can play them too!!

On Friday I went into work because I'd arranged for Art Brasil - a drumming group - to come into the Library and hold a free workshop for our customers. Well, it was mainly for children and their parents but they said that Nathan and I could join in too!



Awesome drumming group

 I was pretty excited by this! A couple of year's ago Janet (yes - my good friend :-) and I went to the Victoria Hall and saw a Japanese Drumming Group who were out-of-this-world. It was a fantastic experience. We were both moved by it all. We even looked up to see if there was any way of joining a class round here - but they were all off in Edinburgh or London.

So when Art Brasil said they'd do an African Drumming session I thought it was a chance not to miss! Plus I wasn't sure how the people of Silverdale would take to drumming so was worried that no-one else would turn up. I needn't have worried - we had over twenty kids and parents!

The session was run by Mika and Leandro, who were great at getting everyone involved and making the session fun. We were each given a small stool to sit on and a drum to hold between our legs. Mika told us that the drum was called a Timbre and we could get two distinctive sounds out of it. One was called a Tone - which was obtained by hitting the drum on the edge with your fingers and letting them bouce off - the other is called a Bass and obtained by hitting the centre of the drum with the flat of your hand.

She also got us to relax our hands by shaking them. She said if they started to tingle as we played we should blow on them and rub them to get rid of it. They had just come back from the Notting Hill Carnival where they had been drumming for eight and a half hours! I bet their hands were sore after that!

She then got us to copy rhythms that she did first - with a variety of tones, basses and hand claps. We played "Follow my Leader" for a while as we all got used to the drums and remembering rythms.. Then she got us to play "Forbidden Rhythms". She played us one rhythm - a tone, a handclap followed by two bass notes - which if we heard it we were NOT to copy. So this time Leandro played us a variety of rhythms and tried to catch us out by putting in the forbidden one every now and then. I have to say we were pretty good and not many of us slipped up no matter how hard he tried!

It was such fun the hour went by in a flash! They told us that they were setting up classes for younger children and older children - but didn't say there were any for adults.

Could my drumming career be over so soon????