When you talk about drumming, you
should also know about drums and various kinds of drums. The drum set is unique
among musical instruments. Its individual parts originated from all over the world over thousands of years. Percussion and drums
can be defined broadly as an instrument that must be struck with a mallet or
shaken to produce a sound. The surface can be made of animal hide, wood, metal,
or really anything that produces sound. The mallet or beater which is used to
produce the sound can be pretty much anything including a human hand. Drums
include a variety of instruments that make similar sounds to a piano; such as a
xylophone, marimba, glockenspiel, etc. Percussion instruments that must be
shaken are mostly made up of contained beads or metal. The most famous
percussion instrument, the snare, also has beads with adjustable tension along
with metal disks for additional sound. All of these instruments go back
thousands of years to around 6000 B.C., and it is believed that percussion
instruments were the first musical instruments ever invented. Ancient Africans
used drums as a form of communication, to send signals. When drums were first
invented, they were made out of natural materials such as animal hides. Since
drum sticks were not around then, people would simply use their hands. From
there onward drums have evolved by the people and cultures that made them and
the styles of music they were designed to play. Today, advancements are still
being made in what was once a very simple instrument. There is a wide variety
of drums, which vary depending on their purpose.
There is one interesting story about the
origin of drums and this story is so old it surpasses the title ancient. Of
course, there are those that say the drum is merely a tool to help those that
cannot hear the beat in the world that was always there. That may be so, but
the reason the drum came into being wasn’t to help those that couldn’t hear the
cosmic beat; it came as a gift of grief. The characters in this story didn’t
have names because they didn’t know words. They didn’t know much, in fact,
except that in the wide, wild and fearful places there was comfort in each
other. As the story goes; two of these creatures got separated from their troop
and could not find their way back to the others. From then, they started living
together until one of them died and this is how the other one felt the pain and
started beating his chest in utmost grief. To know more about this heart
breaking story, you must ask your drum teachers Swansea, Neath.