Darbuka Mastery

Level 1 · Lesson 10 of 11 · Putting it together

The Maqsum Family

Meet the Maqsum family – Maqsum, Baladi and Sa’idi – the bread and butter of Arabic rhythms, in basic and ornamented forms.

The Maqsum family! A group of some of the most famous and popular darbuka rhythms that have ever existed. The Maqsum (or one of its derivatives) can be heard in musical tracks throughout all of the Arab world, and it is a critical part of the heritage of Arabic music. If you don’t believe me, listen back through the tracks of the greats of Arabic Music, the likes of Umm Kulthum, Asmahan, Fairuz, Farid Al Atrash and you will hear the Maqsum in so many of their compositions. It is the bread and butter of darbuka rhythms, and any darbuka player worth their stuff should know and be able to bang out a great Maqsum!

Rhythm families #

To make it slightly easier to remember all the different kinds of rhythms that we have available in our arsenal, and to make ornamentation and rhythm switching easier, I like to group rhythms into families. I typically group rhythms by their rhythmic emphasis (Iqa’). If the emphasis is at very similar points in multiple rhythms, I group them under a family to simplify this. I’m not sure whether I’m the first person to have done this, I assume not, however not everyone will refer to these families as “families”. Just keep that in mind!

However, for the purposes of our learning, we will treat the Maqsum family as a collection of rhythms that sound very similar and share similar emphatic points. The good thing is, you have already studied a member of the Maqsum family, the Heavy Sa’idi. Let’s take a look at the Maqsum and see how similar it is to the Heavy Sa’idi.

Maqsum #

Maqsum, the big daddy itself. Maqsum is the king of all Arabic rhythms, and it is one of the most fun to play rhythms you will ever come across. Maqsum, in its most basic form, looks like this:

Maqsum 4/4
1
D T
2
T
3
D
4
T

Notice the similarities between the Maqsum and the Heavy Sa’idi. The Maqsum has two extra Tek notes compared to the Heavy Sa’idi. This gives the Maqsum more of an aggressive sound. It’s more of an “attack” sound, and it can sound faster because of this. However, it’s this sound that is prevalent through so much of Arabic Music.

Let’s also take a look at a slightly ornamented version of the Maqsum. This version of Maqsum uses the same basic ornaments that we learnt for the Heavy Sa’idi. The drum tab looks like this:

Maqsum with basic ornaments 4/4
1
D T
2
k T
3
D k
4
T t k

The Maqsum has many derivatives, but we are just going to look at the most popular of them for this lesson. I have included two versions of each rhythm, a basic rhythm and an ornamented rhythm.

Baladi #

Baladi is very similar to the Maqsum, but it has a Doum-Doum at the beginning rather than a Doum-Tek:

Baladi 4/4
1
D D
2
T
3
D
4
T
Baladi with basic ornaments 4/4
1
D D
2
k T
3
D k
4
T t k

Sa’idi #

Sa’idi shares very similar characteristics to the Maqsum also, however, it has a Doum-Doum in the middle, rather than a Tek-Doum:

Sa’idi 4/4
1
D T
2
D
3
D
4
T
Sa’idi with basic ornaments 4/4
1
D T
2
k D
3
D k
4
T t k

Note that the Sa’idi and Heavy Sa’idi are different rhythms. Heavy Sa’idi includes two sets of Doum-Doums, whereas a standard Sa’idi only has one set of Doum-Doums.