If you have just started learning the African djembe, you may be feeling frustrated with the sound you’re creating on the side of the drum. Perhaps you are wondering why it is that whenever you attempt to make the tone, you get a flat dead muted note. If you’re experiencing this frustration, try focusing more on the way you lift your hand, than the way it falls on the drum. Any unnecessary movement in the joints, fingers and wrist as you lift your hand will affect the quality of your tone.
Raising your hand to strike the drum, the tips of your fingers need to be the first thing that lifts up with the rest of the hand, wrist and arm following behind. Imagine you’re a string puppet and there is a cord attached to the very tips of your fingers. As the imaginary cord lifts, your fingers come up first and everything else follows. Doing this sets you up to strike the ‘tone spot’ on the djembe with the right angle so fingers bounce off easily. As your hand and fingers come back down for the strike, your fingers will be slightly raised at a 30 degree angle and land gracefully on the tone spot of the drum. If your fingers are relaxed and not tense (more on finger relaxation soon), they will bounce off the drum creating a beautiful resonance for your tone. But the point is not to think about the way your hand and fingers drop – it is the way you lift which matters.
You can see a djembe lesson video here:
The difference between a ‘good lift’ and a ‘bad lift’ can be very subtle. It is really about which part of the hand/arm lifts first. Here are a couple of examples of what can go wrong as you lift your hand to play:
1. Dropped wrist technique
Djembe technique to avoid - Lifting with the wrist first will mean the fingers are over projected as they land on the drum resulting in a dull flat sound.
As you raise your hand to strike a tone, your wrist might lift up first with your hand hanging on behind. Because your hand has been in this hanging position, your fingers will be projected forward as they fall to the drum, striking the ‘tone spot’ at the wrong angle. Instead of the fingers landing in a flat position, the projected angle of the fingers will absorb the bounce and press into the skin giving you a dull closed note without any resonance.
There is alternative outcome to this scenario with the ‘dropped’ wrist. When you raise your ‘hanging hand’ to the optimum height, you may flick the wrist back so that the fingers don’t project forward as they come down. The problem with this is technique is it creates too much movement between the arm and the hand as you play. Any unnecessary movement in the hand will sap your energy, hindering your ability to play with control and maintain stamina when playing for prolonged periods. However, the main issue is that this flick of the wrist at the top will potentially create a ‘slap’ sound instead of a tone – not a good ‘slap’ but a bad slap without any control or subtlety.
2. Dropped finger technique
Djembe technique to avoid - dropping the fingers as you lift to play a tone.
This technique is far subtler than the wrist one – and hence harder to detect and correct. In this scenario the wrist is fine. It is not interfering as the you lift and in general the hand is lifting first. But there is just the slightest drop in the fingers as the hand lifts up. You may barley notice it, but it can make all the difference. Usually in this scenario the knuckles are lifting first - either the fore knuckles or the front ones. In the same way as the wrist technique (but this time less acute) the fingers project forward and absorb the bounce to give you the same flat sound without tone resonance.
How to improve your lift movement
Good lifting technique for djembe - fingers lifting up first as you raise your hand to strike the drum.
If you think you might have fallen in to one of these habits and you are getting frustrated with your sound, here is a fun way to apply a nice ‘fingertip lift’ technique. Rest your hands on the side of the drum with your fingertips in contact with the ‘tone’ spot of the drum. If you don’t know where this is, check out our blog on hand positioning). Then lift the fingers up (really make sure your fingers up first) and do a ‘hiya’ with your hand. The hand just lifts up and come sown again. If you are with a group, you can all get really silly and start doing ‘hiya’ gestures with each other. Invariably this hand sign involves the fingers lifting up first so this gesture will trick your hand into applying the lift of the finger tips. With a little practise, this gesture will form a new habit in your hand movement which over time you will unconsciously apply to your tone technique.
I understand there is a counter argument to this technique that the arm and hand should remain as one unit and be straight. With the fingertips lifting first, the hand and the arm will not necessarily be straight and there will be some movement in the wrist. However, I don’t think there is really any problem in there being some wrist movement when djembe playing – what is important is the way it moves. With this ‘fingers first’ technique your wrist will be involved with lifting the hand up but will not interfere in a way that detriments your technique.
The other thing to recognise is the movement in tone and slap becomes far subtler as your technique improves. This means that this application of hand and arm technique may be highly pronounced when you first start to practise but will be less exaggerated over time.
I hope this blog helps you on your journey in mastering the djembe tone sound and I hope the exercise proves useful. At the very least – it’s nice to just say ‘Hiya!’
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