Yo Dawg.
In this post, we’re going to revisit our 12/8 Soloing – Licks – One Tone, Two Slaps video, which is one of our advanced videos containing solo ideas – you can find this video in the Soloing > Improvised Soloing Tips and Ideas section of African Drumming Online:
https://africandrummingonline.com/soloing/improvised-soloing-tips-and-ideas/
We thought it would be a good idea to develop a blog series where we take some of our most popular free videos, and distill the info into text form as best we can. Different people learn in different ways, so we hope this helps some of you!
Not yet a member? You can sign up free to get access to this video, here:
https://africandrummingonline.com/
I wanted to do a blog post for this video, even though it’s a pretty advanced lick, because I like it. It’s also an important lick to get under your hands if you are serious about playing Guinean djembe drumming – it’s very common, so you should know it.
The only problem with this one is I don’t know how to convert it to a text format – I think it works better as a video!
So, instead of attempting to summarise the whole video, I thought I’d just notate the lick so you can have a visual reference to help you learn it.
I’ve notated the lick in this video with the following – ‘T’ means a tone, ‘S’ means a slap. Here’s the lick:
If you’re not sure how to read this notation style, checkout the 11th episode of our ‘Blergh’ that explains how, here:
https://africandrummingonline.com/blergh/
The way to develop this lick, like most things, is to start slowly – make sure your sounds are clean and consistent from hand to hand – then gradually speed it up.
If you have a lot of hand movement between your tones and slaps, that will make this lick hard to play fast – if you’re getting to the stage where you want to play this lick, it’s worth trying to get your sounds more efficient first! Try to get as little difference as possible between your tone and slap – this will help make you faster – but don’t sacrifice the sounds.
Good luck! Let me know how you go!
