i have wanted to share about this for some time, but haven't been able to sit down to it till now.
as you may know, i purchased a north indian mrdanga. it is a double sided drum about 1.5 feet long, which i adapted a djemba harness for so i can play standing, which is my preference.
to explain what i want to say, i need to start with different drumming styles. I began drumming with an indian drum, the pakhawaj - a larger double-sided drum, which is too heavy to strap up around the shoulders. that got me early into lateral drumming, and indian style, but i soon left after discovering african drumming style.
african drumming is pure left-right egalitarian - what one hand does, so the other. it is powerful and very physical, with full bodied hand-to-skin strikes.
now i am back to the indian style, for a start, african drumming places the high drum to the left hand (i'm not sure what southpaws do), where indian drumming uses the right hand for the high pitched skin. i did try to swing my mrdanga around, african style, but quickly realised it didn't like that, so i have returned to indian style, which is more like piano (another percussion instrument), in which the right and left hands have very separate tasks.
this has activated a really interesting discovery, which is what i want to talk about.
now i have known all along about this, but never placed a lot of emphasis on it. recently even with my congas i began to see a deficiency in the ability to produce a 'flurry' of strikes with each hand. that is not typical of the style, as it can't compete volume-wise with full hitting, but as i have grown more and more interested in subtle drumming, i saw my ability to speed drum with one hand was under-developed, so i began practicing the technique of the tabla, which is also a vertical movement drum set.
once i got into the mrdunga, this hand technique became immediately significant - it is the corner stone of indian drumming. luckily i had seen a teaching video of indian tabla style which jeff has (he has just about everything you can imagine), so i saw the primary trick they use, which i will describe.
you may hear a tabla player sound like (s)he is playing a fast two finger action, and in fact they do, but mostly it is not two fingers, but the index finger, and the rest - 3 together, with the middle finger prominent. the advantage of this is that instead of just two fingers trilling like a classical guitarist, what you have is a stunning realisation of the nature of the hand - its ability to pivot at tremendous speed.
there are numerous variations to this, but here is the basic pivot which most people can do a little:
hold out your dominant hand in front of you, palm facing horizontal, thumb on top, little finger bottom. pivot the hand so that the thumb and little finger alternate in movement - like twisting a door knob. the whole forearm pivots from the elbow, but a lot of effect is felt in the wrist.
computers can do a lot, but notice a very important feature - everything, absolutely everything they do, has been written in code in detail. they will do no more and no less than what the developer has stipulated. take a button you mouse click, which turns a different colour, looks depressed, then pops out again - all that is painstakingly prescribed in minutest detail by the person who designed it. there are no quantum leaps in computer programming, but there are in how users utilise a program, which is a different matter.
with the body we have a spectacular phenomenon where we can practice some physical movement, until one day, the body says "I get it!" and then takes what you have practiced into a new level - a true quantum leap, which you don't have to code in, you just have to practice the basic movements until click, it jumps into a new level of action, all by itself - true magic!
so too with this pivot movement. if you practice the hand pivot technique, very soon the hand jumps into hyper drive and takes off! now at first that new level of movement is clumsy, so needs further honing to get it to do exactly what you want.
Gurdjieff once said, contrary to common held belief that the mind is faster than the body, and the emotions are also faster than the body, that in fact the body is faster than the mind or the emotions - try clicking your fingers, or holding your index finger back with your thumb under pressure - let it go fast, and see if you can see the movement. the hand can move much faster than thought, which he said is the slowest.
once the hand learns to pivot with speed, it can go at tremendous speeds.
now, back to the drumming - what i had not placed sufficient emphasis on was the percussive delight of one hand's wrist pivoting. it is fabulous! and, always practice with both hands - they can pivot together.
an important variation is where the fingers move back and forward, without pivoting, but left to right in a fast action based directly in the wrist. so it is possible to combine these two actions.
if you watch a tabla player, the right hand will move to the further edge of the drum head and flash back and forward in a blur over the edge of the rim. that is one movement. then they will bring their hands back to the near edge and do a splendid movement which pivots the forefinger and middle-with-rest fingers in an equal blur.
i have been doing hand drumming yoga.
along with the pivoting movement of the hand, which should become a relaxed blur, i have also discovered this near-sided rim movement, which on the mrdunga turns to the vertical (a more relaxed hand position), and, most significant, the hand moves back to a position closer to the arm pits, with the elbows splayed out, and the shoulders lifted.
this movement is just like a bird who is fluttering her inner wing feathers.
I combine this with the 'prance' dance. I learnt this from CC's magical passes. begin by moving the feet around alternately, then start lifting the sole of the feet up the inside leg. then reaching down with the hands and drawing the energy from beneath the feet up into the abdomen. soon you begin to feel the 'prance' dance that is common to aust aboriginals - i call it the brolga dance.
you lift your knees high into the chest, and place them down onto the balls of the feet with control - the main thrust is up, not down, which causes the body to kind of take flight. normally the arms are down, but now i have added this feather fluttering hand pivot action - centered on emphasising the first and middle fingers - high up near/under the arm-pits.
the whole effect is wonderful! i recommend it to all.
