New toys

Sometimes if you're in the musical blahs a change of instrument is just the ticket. I suddenly got addicted to tamborim, frigideira and repinique practice again. I don't know why; I just found the frigideira one day and thought "I ought to work on this sucker - I bought it and I've never tried it" and now suddenly I CAN'T PUT IT DOWN.

Frigideira is a little frying pan - yes, literally, a little frying pan - that you hit with a whippy stick that has a metal ball on the end. It sounds kind of like a bell, swinging along on every little 16th, and is wickedly loud; just 2 or 3 frigideira players can be heard over an entire 300-person bateria. Typically it'll play nonstop swing for a long stretch, then stop completely and take a long break; then come back in again. Kind of like chocalho, and with the same function as chocalho: lifting the energy tremendously, and also locking the swing. Beija-Flor has long had featured frigideiras, and Mocidade recently added them.

What's fun about frigideira for me is that it's a totally new hand trick! Frigideira has a constant rotation in the left hand, and a constant down-up-down-up in the right hand. That doesn't sound that hard, does it; but I am spending quite a bit of time fighting unhelpful tamborim and pandeiro impulses that kept trying to take over my hands and jerk them out of phase. (Pandeiro impulses are the least helpful, since they cause me to miss the frigideira completely on every single stroke: swish, swish, swish! It's air frigideira!)

Awesomely enough, it seems that frigideira is one of those muscle-coordination tricks that comes pretty fast if you just do a few minutes a day, or even every other day - just enough to give your muscles a taste of what sort of coordination they need to be learning. Every practice session it's magically 5 or 10 bpm faster, smoother, and going longer. Probably some of this is thanks to Junior Teixeira, my first tamborim teacher, because he recommended to me early on that beginner tamborim players should practice that very hand pattern - basically, the frigideira pattern played on a tamborim. Some tamborim players play that way routinely. Junior recommended including a few measures of it in a little warmup before every practice. Just to make you nimbler, and to strengthen up your hands, and to give you an option for another way of playing in case your hands ever tired out in the middle of a samba. Honestly I haven't been all that diligent about it, but I did fool around with it now and then, and I think it helps.

So the frigideira happened to be stored in the same bag as my tamborim. So, if you're like me, once you've been playing frigideira for a while you notice the tamborim and think "well, might as well do some tamborim too" and then "Hey, this is fun" and then "Might as well practice both the multi-strand and the single strand" and "Hey, if I get good at single strand, maybe I could learn to play a bottle cap, like Junior!" and then you remember "Hey, don't I have a superb video of Mestre Jonas superbly demonstrating the dois-e-um pattern in slow motion?" and you rummage around on your laptop and find the video (along with several hundred other highly distracting Rio drum videos that you'd forgotten all about), and you try it. And dang if dois-e-um doesn't seem like almost a piece of cake. (Almost) Ten minutes on it and you're already at 120bpm!! - shaky, sure, erratic, short, but definitely a promising start for a brand new technique!! It's just so relaxing....with dois-e-um it almost seems like your right hand can just stop entirely and rest for half of every beat. I must say, Jonas teaches dois-e-um extremely clearly and swings it beautifully, and it suddenly makes so much sense.

And you remember "Jonas is coming to Brazil Camp this year! For the first time ever! So wouldn't it be sweet to be able to play that style when camp time rolls around?" And then you think, hey, wouldn't it be SMART, if you are a constantly travelling drummer who moves ten times a year, to finally learn the two SMALLEST instruments in the bateria, instead of always lugging around the LARGEST?

So that's frigideira and tamborim. Repinique, now, repinique's because of a well-timed kick in the butt from Pauline, and that's becoming very fun too. But more on that later.