10 Fundamental skills you have to develop to become a great percussionit

Hi, If you are starting your learning path in percussion and looking for guidance to move forward in it, stay tuned!, because in this post I’m going to share with you the 10 fundamental skills that you have to develop to become a great percussionist. 

All the information and advices that I’m going to share with you in this post can be applied to any percussion instruments, such as: Bongó, Cajón, Conga, Djembé, among others.

Also, all the contents of this post comes from my own experience of more that 20 years as percussion teacher and facilitator.

SKILL 1:  Be able to keep a steady tempo along your playing over a song or any music part you play

This first skill is directly related with our role as percussionist in a band, that is timekeeping. 

To move forward and improve this ability, you have to work in three separate areas: 

• Train your tempo sense

  
  How you that?, well basically follow this rule:

  • Never, but never practice anything “On the Air”, what I mean always practice using a metronome or playing over music. You need an external musical source of tempo that helps you to keep it on the right track
  • Once you learn to play a rhythm, play it for a long time, to see how much you can keep the pace and most important the tempo. Remember the main function of a percussionist is playing a steady tempo on a song, so you have to train yourself to be able to do that.
  • I know that playing at high speed is more fun, but make sure to practice both fast and slow tempos. You are going to see that most of the time, playing slow keeping the tempo is harder. 

• Work hard on improving your hand technique:
  
  

  • To be able to keep a steady tempo when you’re playing a song, you have to be in full control of your hands. That means that you control the overall hand motion, as well as control that you´re playing each sound correctly and at the right volume.  
    
    
  • The key factor here is to work on a hand training routine that takes you through several musical and rhythmic situations that challenges you and helps to be prepared for any musical situation in which you´ll be involved. 

• Train your “musical ear”:
   

• As percussionists and musicians we have to feed us with tons of music, the more diverse the better, because you are going to learn a lot from listening to it. 

• A basic training that you can do is to play any random song on Spotify or Youtube and try to find: 

• first the tempo, if you want you can clap it or dance, you choose.

• Second, look for the beginning and the end of the principal rhythm pattern and try to replicate, with or with your instrument. You see, your body is full of sounds to play. You can also move on to other instruments and try to mimic what they are playing. 

• To improve this training look for songs you are not familiar with, to get better you always have to live the comfort song.

SKILL 2:  Be able to play at different tempos.

For a great percussion tempo is not an issue. What I mean is tempo can´t change your sound or your way of playing or your musicality.

Yes, I know you’re going to tell me that maybe in the point that you are right now, there are some tempos that are out of your reach because they are too fast. I give you that, however keep in mind this idea, if you look for popular music, you’re going to find out that on average, songs are mostly between 90 BPM and 200 BPM.

So if you train yourself to be able to play between these two tempos, you’re going to be more than well.

SKILL 3: Be able to break the “Dominant Hand” trap

• No matter if you´re right handed or left handed, most percussion students battle with this issue. The “dominant hand trap” means that you use one hand more than the other, obviously because you feel more comfortable and safe with it. That’s no good, because it makes you develop several playing vices that go against your development as a percussionist.

   

• So it’s recommendable, that your practice routines focus on developing both hands equally, in a way that you don’t have to think about what hand you have to use to play, you just flow and play. The goal here is to achieve an organic way of playing, similar to what happens when you walk. Think about this, when you walk from a point to another you just go, I mean you don’t see which foot goes first. Well you have to train to get that way of working with your hands.  

SKILL 4: Be able to play loud and soft, follow what the music you´re playing ask for

• This ability is called Dynamic Range, and It’s one of the most important abilities you have to develop, because it is directly related with your musicality and the expression of the music that you play in your drum. When you control this everything that you play sounds better, because sounds and accents of the rhythm are in the right place and you can groove better.

   

• Basically this is going to give the ability to control the volume of the different sounds that you play in a rhythm, so you can build it the right way. Let’s look closer to this rhythm, listen to how it sounds when you play it “plain”, I mean you play all sounds at the same volume. And how its sound improves when I play using the Dynamic Range, I mean when I play accents louder and filler notes or ghost notes softer.