Improvisation is an extremely useful skill for any musician to have, but learning the art can seem very scary and daunting at first, even to advanced students. When teaching an ensemble how to go about improvising, the players will feel the most comfortable and confident when there are clear structures to work with, and when they are supported by their fellow players. Most importantly of all, the students will look to you, their conductor or teacher, for positive feedback and assistance, and you need to be as encouraging as possible at all times.

For the purposes of this blog entry, I will not attempt to cover everything about improvising: that would be impossible. What I wish to leave you with, however, is a basic starting point for your untuned percussionists to feel comfortable playing short, interesting and spontaneously composed segments of music. This will add to their individual skills as players, and give your ensemble another dimension and colour to explore.

The first step is giving the students something to improvise over. It’s much harder to create ‘something out of nothing’ than ‘something out of something’; set up a groove in the group that can inspire your soloist. Many of the tunes on this website have repetitive grooves that can support your lead player’s journey into the unknown. Take ‘Conga and a Samba’ for example, and the music in particular at C. Click here for excerpt. You could repeat these bars over and over to provide a platform for someone to step into the limelight. Or you could even loop the first 3 bars of ‘Up and On’, and slip a solo section in the middle of the tune to fatten it out. And of course, if those examples don’t float your boat (or you’ve used them both already and are looking for more!!), you can make up your own.

Once you have successfully set up a base for improvising over, and it’s grooving like mad (see blog number 1), you’re ready to start making music up. But you can’t just tell the students “Ok! Improvise! Make up what you like!” because they won’t know where to start. At least, I wouldn’t, if I were them. A great way to begin is by trying a ‘call and response’. You can take an instrument, like a tom tom, and play a simple pattern on it for 1 or 2 bars. Then ask a student to respond to what you played, trying to keep it the same length. They can repeat what you did, or make up something of a similar style. My tip: start simple. Simple, simple, simple. If the groove that the rest of the band is playing sounds good, then even just playing 4 crotchets (quarter notes) to the bar is going to sound cool. Then move to quavers. Or to whatever level is appropriate for your group. Have a few exchanges with one student, and then get them to get back into the groove, and have another ‘conversation’ with another member of the group. Keep that smile on your face, it will help keep their nerves down. And once everyone, or at least the majority, of the group is comfortable, they can start trading ideas amongst themselves. Choose 2 players and get them interacting!

The next step is to have your players improvising on their own, without needing to hear anyone first for inspiration. Arrange a solo section in a tune, and say ‘Ok, can Johnny take a 4 bar solo over this part?’ or something along those lines. And when they come up with something creative, or at least, don’t give up halfway into their feature, shower them with praise. It’s important for to know that their ideas don’t suck.

Of course, you don’t have to only have improvising over a groove. You can create a ‘break’, where the rest of the band stops, and one person solos on their own. During this time you can get everyone else hitting beat 1 of each bar, or you can leave the whole section silent. Breaks are very effective between loud groovy parts of a tune, for example, if we take the same section of ‘Conga and a Samba’ as we did before, we can play the section twice as written, throw in a 4 bar break for a snare drummer, and play the groove one last time together.

In order for this to work, your soloist needs to feel very confident with improvising, as well as having a great time feel. This kind of idea works best when you have an advanced player looking for a chance to step up to the next level and wanting to show off their skills.

I hope that helps with some basics. In the next blog, I will explain some of the elements that you can use to make improvising more interesting, and create longer solos. I will also provide advice for teaching the development of improvised ideas in a logical and exciting way. Happy drumming!

I like to divide untuned percussion music into 5 elements: the low, bassy tom tom or timpani sound; the back beat or cutting snare drum sound; shakers and hi hat sounds filling in the gaps; crash and bell sounds, like cymbals and cowbells; and finally woody and scrapy sounds, like clave and guiros. With this basic understanding, we can go about making our own instruments.

Element 1: The low tom tom or bass drum sound
Every single tune that I have written to date contains this sound. It is drives the band from the bottom, and can be very intense. Plastic or metal trash cans make for fantastic tom-tom substitutes; just turn them upside down and you’re ready to go. Oh, and if the metal trash cans are too tinny sounding for your liking, cover the top with a sheet or something similar to make it more ‘thuddy’. I recommend finding some of the fattest drum sticks you can track down, and hold them backwards so that the drum is being hit with the thick end of the stick. Also, I’m a big fan of the 19 litre (approx) blue spring water containers that go upside down in dispensers. You can play these with sticks, but also sound great when played with hands. See how many sounds you can get out of them!

Element 2: The cracking snare drum sound
Snares play a very important role in all types of western music, from marches, to pop music, to jazz, and latin. When trying to find junk to replace a snare, you just need to find something that ‘cuts through’, so that even when lots of people are beating out on their plastic containers, you can still hear it riding over the top. My vote: place a metal oven tray on a table. Depending which way up it goes, and what surface it’s sitting on, the oven tray can have lots of different sounds, all of which are crisp and easy to control.

Element 3: The shaker
The shaker fills in all the spaces between the first 2 elements, and is fundamental to the groove. Making shakers are easy, you can put nuts and bolts in a Tupperware container, or sand in a glass bottle, or small metal washers in a margarine box. Choose your materials according to how loud you require your shaker to be, and what blends best with the other instruments you have made.

Element 4: Bells and crashes
There are 2 types of bells and crashes; the ones that are really loud and have lots of wash (like a cymbal), and the smaller instruments that have a short, coarse sound (like a cowbell). The possibilities for scrap metal are endless! For your cymbal replacement, the most important thing is that it can resonate, so take a sheet of metal, drill some holes in it, loop some string or wire through, and let it hang from a stand (or just hold the string yourself). As for the shorter sound bell, metal trash can lids make great sounds! As do hitting old scrap appliances, such as microwaves. I’ve even tried using uprooted fence posts. Experiment!

Element 5: Scrapy and woody sounds
These are the quieter instruments that make the overall sound complete. Try scraping a stick along a piece of corrugated iron for scraper, or beating an old school desk instead of a wood block. The world of junk is at your fingertips!

Adaptation:
Of course, these are just ideas, and are useless on their own without some music to play. So, let’s make this practical. My piece Conga and a Samba is written for agogos, cowbell, maracas, congas, 2 snares, 3 toms, a triangle and a woodblock.

But using my junk percussion tips, this piece could just as easily work for:

2 metal trash can lids of different sizes (agogos)
Old beaten up microwave (cowbell)
Tupperware container full of nuts and bolts (maracas)
A spring water container, played with the hand (congas)
An upside down oven tray (snare 1)
An oven tray, right way up (snare 2)
3 large solid trash cans (tom toms 1, 2 and 3)
1 old metal fence post (triangle)
Old school desk (woodblock)

But this is just my idea. You can use ANYTHING! Anything at all! You are only limited by your imagination. Have fun, and all the best.

Zac Courtney

Welcome to the new blogging section of my site! Every month or so, I’m looking to post some new information to help you with your percussion ensemble. I’m hoping to slowly cover as many areas as possible, including music reading, grooving hard, creatively adapting my tunes for your group, making junk percussion instruments, and anything else I feel inspired to write! If you have any suggestions for particular topics, just hit the ‘Contact’ tab at the top of the screen and let me know, and then I’ll see what I can do.

Today: it’s all about getting into the groove through a good warm-up.

I’m going to introduce you to my favourite warm up. This is a every effective exercise to improve the overall groove of any percussion ensemble. However, I have also used it with concert bands and jazz bands to help all the players with their time feel and listening skills. This groove is particularly useful as a warm-up to any Latin tune, for example my tune ‘Loud and Loaded’, but it also works just as well as a stand alone exercise.

To start off, choose 1 or 2 bars of one of a tune that have a repetitive groove. Generally choose a part of the tune that you are going to rehearse that day, but anything like the example below will work nicely.

Have all the players stand up while holding their instruments, set a tempo that’s not too fast to begin with (for example, 140 bpm), and get everyone stomping their feet on beats 1 and 3. Keep this up for a minute or so, and make sure everybody is ‘locked in’ together.

Once the stomping is feeling comfortable, bring in the instruments one at a time. The first instrument in the example is the clave. This is the most important percussion instrument in Latin music. It is essential that everyone can hear and feel this first rhythm as it repeats over and over. When the groove is feeling strong (I recommend at least another minute or so), bring in the second instrument, which are the congas or bongos in my example. Make sure that everyone can hear how these two instruments lock in together, and how it fits with their foot stomping. Again, when the groove is feeling like it’s ready to move on, slowly bring in the third instrument, and then the fourth etc, until eventually everyone is playing their 2 bar pattern over and over again.

Once everybody is playing, keep the groove going for a couple of minutes.

In order to make these patterns ‘gel’ together, everyone must be aware of exactly how their rhythm fits in with everyone else’s, and everyone must be agreed on the time feel. Once your ensemble is used to the warm up, you can start at a faster tempo, but make sure you never lose the groove.

Some tips:

1. Stomp your feet with all of the students. As a conductor, you need to be a key driving force for the groove that your ensemble members are creating.

2. As each instrument comes in, clap the new rhythm with the student(s) as they play. This will make them feel secure and confident about what they are playing.

3.For a change, sometimes do the warm up without any instruments, and just have everybody clapping the rhythms instead. This can make it more difficult to groove, but it’s just another way to practice listening skills and locking in with each other.

4. But above all, have fun! When this groove is played over and over and over by your ensemble, everyone should feel like dancing!

Good luck, and see you next time!