Closing
You made it! A recap of everything you’ve learnt, how long to keep practising, and why the basics are where mastery begins.
If you’ve made it this far, CONGRATULATIONS!
It’s no easy feat to play an ornamented version of some of the rhythms we just looked at. It’s even harder to switch between them and maintain control and speed while doing so. However, it’s not impossible and is definitely in your grasp. Keep trying, and you’ll get there.
Let’s just recap what we’ve covered:
- What the darbuka is
- How to hold the darbuka and play basic notes
- How to read drumming tabs
- How to turn these basic notes into a rhythm (the Heavy Sa’idi)
- How to ornament this basic rhythm with the Ka stroke
- How to use a metronome to practise
- The Maqsum family of rhythms
- How to switch between rhythms
That’s a complete foundation: everything you need to play with confidence and keep building on your own. When I teach in person, these are the topics I spend the most time on, because they’re just so important. If advanced rhythms or ornamentation come in before these are solid, a player gets overwhelmed and ends up sacrificing a lot of their basic technique.
For this reason, I would recommend that you spend a good amount of time practising these rhythms. If practising, say, an hour a week, I would expect it to take around 2–3 months to get the last ornamented rhythm switch at 150 BPM. If practising more regularly, you could probably do it in a month or so, but I would be amazed if someone managed to get to that stage in such a short space of time (unless they’ve had previous musical experience).
I’d like to close this section with a story. The great Russian weightlifters of old times, who could lift enormous weights and manipulate them in such complicated manoeuvres, used to have a policy whenever a student would come to learn advanced weightlifting from them. They would teach them a manoeuvre and then tell them to go away and practise that manoeuvre until they could lift a ridiculously high weight. Only when the student could lift this enormously high weight with perfect technique, were they allowed to move on. Everything impressive they did later was built on those basics. So practise hard and get this sorted. Once it is, you won’t need anyone to hand you the next step. You’ll have the technique and the ear to take on the rhythms you hear, and to keep unlocking even greater highs in the Arabic style of darbuka playing.
Where you go from here is up to you. Put on the Arabic songs you love and play along. I spent months playing a fast Maqsum along to Bashar al-Khayr. Keep the rhythm library open when you practise. And when you want to explore, Study has the rest: new rhythms, advanced technique, choosing, tuning and caring for your drum, and more than a thousand other questions answered.