Create Waterloo and the City of Waterloo present Percussion Week Hey folks! Rich here with Create Waterloo
and this week is all about rhythm and percussion. We're going to break this video up
into two segments today. The first is going to be discussing some
of the rhythms that we're going to play with the "O Canada" track and the second
half is going to be looking at some of the instruments that you could
substitute at your house if you're going to submit a video. So we're gonna get
right into this right now. What I've done is I've created a rhythm that we can
play underneath the melody to accompany the "O Canada" part. This is going to go alongside the "Ukulele Video" that is also being released this week. So today we're gonna learn about some low sounds and high sounds on the drum and we're
gonna be able to apply this concept to any of the percussion instruments that
you might find around your house. We're gonna talk about that just in a bit.
Now, on the drum I have in front of me is just a normal community hand drum style.
This is a tubano, which is a product by Remo.
It has a few different
sounds similar to like a conga or a djembe. and you play with your hands. So the first thing we're gonna look at is playing a low sound. So if you are
playing a drum with your hands at your house you are going to play just with the
lower palm of your hand and you're going to strike that into the middle of the head.
Now that creates the low pitch. The high pitch is by playing on the bearing edge of the drum itself, so you can get some high sounds. *high drum sound* Now we can have the combination of lows
and highs and this is how we're going to build this rhythm for "O Canada". So first thing we're gonna do is just do a few exercises where we just go low,
high, low, high just with one hand. So try that with me. Hey ready here: 1, 2, ready, go! Low High Low High Low High Low High Great! Fantastic. Now we can embellish
that rhythm a little bit by putting in a second sixteenth so to speak with the
left hand. It fits in right in between on the high notes So we'll still maintain
our right hand with our low, high, low, high and we're gonna just insert our
left hand right after our right hand so it goes like this: two, three, four: Low High High Low High High Low High High Low High High Low So start that again just with the low
highs on the one hand and I'll show you how my left hand adds in.
Here we go Low High Low High Low High Great! So that's it! Those are all the rhythms that you're going to need to
know to play alongside "O Canada". So, we are going to do some variations of
what would I would consider a double speed or a half speed. – depending on how you want to think about it – to that same pattern. So off the top of this
piece, we're going to play this pattern. The way it would work is if the quarter
note is here – so if we go one, two, three, four O, Canada Our home on Native land Okay, so now – How did I do this and what did I do? Technically I had three
phrases of: Low, High, High, Low So three of those. And on the fourth measure the fourth time through, I
sped this up, I doubled the values of the rhythm and I played: 1, and 2, and a 3, and a 4, and 1. So this rhythm is
going to be commonly played as a cadence to the end of a phrase.
This is a rhythmic cadence as a rhythmic term to mean sort of the conclusion to a
rhythmic idea. So at the end of this rhythmic phrase, you're gonna hear that
same pattern again: 1, and 2, and a 3, and a 4, and 1. So I'm gonna try that slow for you right now. And then I'll speed it up. So it's so: Drumming: 1, and a 2, and a 3, and a 4, and 1. Beats 4 are just "4" and "1". So try that again a little quicker:
2, 3, 4: Drumming: 1, and a 2, and a 3, and a 4, and 1. And that's how we're going to do these phrases We also are going to include that cadence figure off the very top. Now, the way that this is
going to work is we have a two bar intro with our guitars and our ukulele and the
drummer's are gonna come in technically on the second measure of the intro.
This is before we start singing so when you're listening to the click track,
you're going to hear a woodblock sound – a high woodblock on 1 and then low woodblock on beats 2, 3, and 4. So you're gonna hear click, click, click,
click and then the second measure is where the ukuleles enter in:
click, click, click, click Then the third measure is where our drums come in with our rhythmic cadence rhythm which is: 1, and a 2, and a 3, and a 4, and 1. and that 1 is where we start singing
"O Canada". So let's try this! So basically what's
going to happen is we're going to play that cadence into our pattern Low, High, High, Low, High, High, Low So we're gonna break this down here.
What I'm going to do is I'm going to count from 1 to 4 through each of the phrases so that you understand how this fits and
I'll try and also sing a little bit of the melody. Now I'm not a singer but
you'll certainly get the idea of of how the rhythm fits alongside the anthem. Okay so here we go from the top: So we have metronome: 2, 3, 4, ukulele, 2, 3, 4, and cadence: 1, and a 2, and a 3, and a 4, and 1. 2, 3, 4 1, 2, 3, 4 1, 2, 3, 4 1, 2, 3, 4 1, 2, 3, 4 1, 2, 3, 4 1, 2, 3, 4 1, 2, 3 Now, that measure we finished on beat
3 before we start the next phrase so that is how we start our opening phrase. So this is technically an eight measure phrase let's try that one more time.
So you have from our woodblock: 1, 2, 3, 4 Ukuleles begin Now: 1, 2, 3, 4 *Drumming* Okay, so that's basically our first half of "O Canada" Now, the second half we start with these two phrases here. And we're gonna repeat them.
They go: That's the entire piece! So let's try
that second half just one more time. So we take the slow day quarter
note version of the pattern and then we go to the doubled version of the pattern
and that's every measure we switch. We do that twice and then we go
back to doing – similar to the top where we take that quarter note version and play that for three measures and then we do the rhythmic cadence again. We'll try that one more time So we have: 1, 2, 3, 4 That's the basic pattern that we
want to play through this entire piece. We're gonna try this again from the very
top, all the way through. I'm going to count and try and sing the melody as I go. Now, if you are an accomplished percussionist I encourage you to stick with this basic
rhythm as the bed track and you're welcome to add some embellishments to
this as you go such as some flams or accents as you go.
Depending on the drum that you use
you could perhaps add some rim clicks if you're having sticks,
you could perhaps do some head shots versus some rim shots so you're on the
rim. So, there's there's a very much of variations that we can do and by all
means we were encouraging you to be as creative as you want to be as long as we
stick with the click track and with the sort of foundation of the rhythm itself. We have lots of room to play with the creativity of the performance. So, here we go I'm gonna try this again from the very top and I'm gonna be
playing and thinking about this as if I was playing with the click track. So here we go So the click track starts: 1, 2, 3, 4 *drumming* For the next segment of this video
we're gonna look at some instruments that might be actually in your house that you weren't
sure that they could be used as instruments.
We going to talk about what we call "found sounds". Now, I just went upstairs just a second ago and brought a bunch of different
things downstairs here to my studio and I'll just kind of go through each of
them. First and foremost I have shown up with some wooden spoons these can be
used as beaters. Now, to my left here I have just a garbage can that I found in
my garage. that has a nice big deep bass sound to it. To my right hand, I have a metal garbage can and that has a bit of a higher pitch to it
and a more metal tomber to it. Then I have three different pots. So I have a high pot, a medium pot and a low frying pan. and so you can hear the graduated pitches – meaning that it goes from high
to low so we have I also have a box of Kraft
Dinner as a shaker. and this is just a can of normal popcorn. So these are just things that I took out of my cupboard and I encourage you to try and find what
other different sounds you can find! Obviously with the permission of your
parents if you're still living at home.
Otherwise, feel free to get really
creative. So what we're gonna do here now is talk a little bit about how you can
apply the sounds from the rhythm of the previous part of this video to this sort
of found sound menagerie. So again the same principles apply here we're looking for low sounds and high sounds. So for my low sounds, I have my my bass cannon over
here (that's kind of out of the camera but you can still hear it). I also have my low pan. And then for my high sounds I have variations here and my
high can so I can do really any sort of variation of low and high depending on
how I want to phrase this. So if we take the intro of this cadence for
example so it's low, high, high, low, high low, high, low, low, low, So I could do something like this: Or I could do something like this: Or even take two high sounds I can go: It really is endless in terms
of what you could possibly do with the sounds that you find at home.
Now the shakers are basically just going to be timekeepers. So if you're listening to
the woodblock you're basically going to listen for that quarter note. So what I'm doing here is just basically making that "c shape" and I'm doing a
pulse on every quarter note. My back stroke is actually making a
syncopation. You could just do quarters That's a little difficult and a little awkward
You could do eights: So I'm just going back and forth.
So that's a some separate
variation on the shaker. Now what I want to do is actually do a full run on the
sounds that are in front of me. As I was saying, feel free to be creative
with whatever instrument you want! The idea here is to just stick with the
fundamental of the rhythm now you can embellish it as you as you feel creative
to do but we still want to be able to start and stop as per the instructions
for the song so that we can all play together. So we're going to listen to our
click track so you're going to hear 1, 2, 3, 4 * drumming * There we go! So that's it folks! If you would like to stay in touch remember that these videos are coming out every Friday. And pay particular attention to our deadline of Wednesday June 24th. We would like to have all videos and that's
our final deadline for submissions. We will have our Click Track and the music
for this particular drum rhythm will be in the bio in the description below. we would love you to subscribe and to smash that like button
and hopefully you will stay in touch.
So signing off here! Stay creative for We
are Waterloo..