Getting started

Where I began

I have been playing percussion since middle school. I have not consistently played it, but it has been a part of my life in one way or another since then. I did middle school band percussion, then acquired a beater drum kit and learned to play on that during high school. I am a compulsive finger-tapper, knee-drummer, etc. I would say there is even a rhythm-awareness component to DJing (have to be able to keep time when blending and all that).

Complicated, poppy, syncopated rhythms also interest me. Middle eastern percussion is right up this alley, and as instruments that were originally meant to be played with minimal infrastructure (literally sitting around with peers), it’s particularly alluring.

The few times I’ve managed to get my hands on any kind of hand drum, whether it’s djembe, congo, bongos, or the very rare darbouka / goblet drum, I’ve tapped out things with my hands and it hasn’t sounded bad but it also didn’t sound right. It just sounded like…popcorn drumming? I could find some different tonalities, but as a whole they did not sound like they quite belonged in the way I was playing them.

I remember a concert performance by Sarit Hadad that I watched, where she played a darbouka solo during one of the songs. Her hands just danced over that drum head.

It reminded me a bit of when I was first learning about the musical genre Drum & Bass – I tried making a D&B pattern in a drum machine and it was just a flurry of kicks and snares. To an outsider, which realistically I was at that point, maybe it would sound similar – but it was off.

Watching this person play, for example. How do I play like this?

Foundational lessons

I unfortunately don’t have the links for all the videos I watched initially, but here is a pretty good representative one from youtuber and percussionist Omar Kattan:

I found several other similar videos from other people with similar kinds of instruction. How to make the different sounds.

I was very surprised by the specificity in technique – though immediately after learning it I felt sheepish with my surprise – of course there would be nuanced and “correct” ways to play this instrument.

In my mind, it was just going to be a series of slapping the drumhead with the hand and also tapping with the fingers. Simple, right?

But there are very specific ways to do this, with reasons for why.

The doum sound is played with the heel of the hand hitting the outer rim (to brace the fingers) and the ends of the fingers quickly striking near the center to get a deep, resonant “douuummmmm” sound.

Tek is played with the right ring and middle fingers (though apparently, this varies by culture! Egyptian and Turkish traditions do this differently, and I suspect others may as well!), striking right on the inner rim of the drum head, yielding a higher-pitch “tekk!” sound.

Kah is played with the left hand. To my chagrin, there is actually quite a lot of precision and speed required by the left hand… I am right handed and while my wrists aren’t too bad, my finger muscles are definitely underdeveloped on my left side. This sound is with either the forefinger or ringfinger (2 or 4) and is played similar to tek except as a swiping strike, to let the sound ring and set the hand up for a stroke in the reverse direction.

The zek and slap sounds (the former in the video above) are played similar to the doum but mute the head so that there is no resonance. This gives a more punctuated quality to the tone.

Practicing

To start with, I spent a week just making each of these sounds, over and over. I tried to really “find” the sound for each one. For fun, I tried tapping out some rhythms using these sounds. It felt very awkward and unintuitive. My hands kept wanting to move the ways they have been for years.

In martial arts, a student would be taught kata / forms, which are sequences of movements that can be repeated over and over to train the body to move in certain ways. This is what I needed.

Omar Kattan (above) thankfully has a bunch of videos with different pattern lessons, so I found one that seemed basic enough and started learning it: Saidi Patterns #1.