Workshop Review: Michael Beach - Drum & Rhythm Workshop

This has been a great fall for workshops. I am still absolutely smitten with Amel, and now I absolutely cannot *wait* for Michael Beach to come back and teach another drumming workshop. I learned more in this two hour workshop than I did in months of half-assedly noodling around with my drum.

He's one of the members of Brothers of the Baladi, and he's a seriously awesome drummer - so he had a whole lot to teach us. But the hugest thing is that he's a funny and engaging teacher. The same workshop could have been a dull bore or a horribly intimidating experience if it had been taught by someone without a sense of humor. He made even those of us with minimal drumming experience feel at ease.

The workshop was held on Saturday, November 3rd, sponsored by Simone's Seventh Veil. It was held in one of the studios at Just Dancing. The workshop got off to a late start, since Michael was flying in that morning, but went for the full two hours and was absolutely packed with information.

He fits the content of his workshops to the skills of the people taking them, and since we were mostly dancers or family of dancers, we were mostly very familiar with the rhythms, but had little knowledge about how to actually play our drums as musical instruments. So he started with the nuts and bolts of drums.

He started us out with a breakdown of the different kinds of drums that are used in the middle east, what they are used for, how to chose one, etc. I have read a lot about Arabic drumming, but found information like a little bit here, a little bit there, very disjointedly. Getting it all in one place really helped me get a better understanding of the drum as a musical instrument.

He taught us how to make four tones on the drum: doum, tek, ca, and teca. Including where to place our hands on the drum, what parts of the hand to strike with. It was a fairly intimate class, only about 20 people, so he had a chance to watch each of us make each of the tones and guide us as to how to do them correctly. Near the end of the workshop, we talked him into showing us how to do rolls. Of course knowing *how* to do them doesn't mean we could actually do them. That was fun.

For the rhythms part of the workshop, he provided us with a handout, breaking down common rhythms. Most of us were familiar with the rhythms, but his handout broke down which hand should being doing what, etc. A couple of times he got the class going with a rhythm, then played a more embellished version on top of our playing. It was *fun*. Though we were laughing that, as dancers, it was very hard to sit still and play our drums instead of getting up to dance.

If you et a chance to take this workshop:

1. If you play some other kind of hand drum, other than a doumbek, go ahead and take the workshop anyway. We had a couple of djembe players in the class, and they seemed to enjoy the workshop.
2. If you don't have a drum, a tambourine works too.
3. Bring a a long belt or a sash to tie your drum to your waist. Michael suggested it in the class, and anything to make the drum more stable seems like it would make playing easier. He shows in the workshop how to do it.