Thursday, July 23, 2015

That insane Brazilian cymbal technique

It's a thing with Brazilian drumset drummers to play really fast, even singles on the cymbal with one hand when playing samba; here Adam Osmianski has posted an excellent roundup of stuff on the technique for doing that, including some correspondence with a student of his, who has gotten really deep into it— it's better and more informed than a similar thing I posted some months ago.

Playing this way gives a very exciting, high-energy sound. I've heard cases that are too extreme for my taste, where the player's technique has outstripped what sounds good musically to me. Most of us will never get there, and should just keep working on getting it as fast as possible. I keep posting this Elis Regina video, but it has been my guide for this, and as you can hear, it's pretty insanely fast— 16th notes @ quarter note = 126 bpm. The drummer will only do them for a few measures uninterrupted at a time, but that's quite hard enough. I'd love to be able to be this chilled out while being this blazing:


1 comment:

Ed Pierce said...

I remember first hearing Edison Machado do this on a mid 60's recording, and it was thrilling (as well as damn impressive!).