Hand percussion

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Modern half moon tambourine Rhythm Tech tambourine.jpg
Modern half moon tambourine

Hand percussion is a percussion instrument that is held in the hand. [1] They can be made from wood, metal or plastic, bottles stops and are usually shaken, scraped, or tapped with fingers or a stick. It includes all instruments that are not drums, or any instrument that is a pitched percussion instrument, such as the marimba or the xylophone.

Contents

Types

Shakers

Caxixi from Africa Caxixi.jpg
Caxixi from Africa
Gourd shekere from Africa with seeds in the net. Shekere.jpg
Gourd shekere from Africa with seeds in the net.

A shaker (percussion) is any instrument that sounds when shaken. Historically, naturally occurring items such as seed pots were the first shakers. A caxixi is a basketwork shaker made from a gourd. Gourds are used all over the world, covered with a net with shells or seeds to create an instrument such as the shekere . Modern shakers are often cylinders made from metal, wood, or plastic containing small hard items such as seeds, stones, or plastic - an example is the egg shaker. Another category of shaken instrument uses jingles, discs of metal tap together when shaken. Tambourines also fall into this category, using several zills to produce their sound.

Scrapers

Modern fibreglass guiro from South America Modern fibreglass guiro.jpeg
Modern fibreglass güiro from South America
Frog shaped guiro from Japan FrogShapedGuiro.jpg
Frog shaped güiro from Japan

Scrapers have ridges on the body. Often known as Guiro , rhythms are created by running a thin stick up and down the ridges at different speeds. Gourds or bamboo have traditionally been used as Guiros, as they have a resonant hollow body, and can easily be cut with ridges. A common type from Asia is a carved wooden frog with ridges cut on its back and its mouth and belly hollowed out.

Cowbells

Modern agogo bell Modern-Agogo.jpg
Modern agogo bell

Cowbells originate from the bells tied around the necks of livestock. [2] They are any type of bell tapped with fingers, or with a beater. They are found all over the world and are used extensively in Latin percussion and often found as part of a standard rock drum kit. The name cowbell usually refers to a single bell, the Agogô bell usually refers to a double or triple bell.

Triangles

A modern triangle Modern-Triangle.jpg
A modern triangle

The triangle is a piece of metal bent in the shape of a triangle that is struck with a metal beater. It is generally suspended by a string to allow it to resonate. The performer's hand can open or close to mute the sound. Triangles are commonly used in South American music to give a persistent high pitched pulse.

Sticks

A pair of claves Claves.jpg
A pair of claves

Tapping two sticks together is the simplest form of hand percussion, and has developed a place in traditional music all over the world. Indigenous Australians use clapping sticks alongside the didgeridoo, and claves are an integral part of South American music.

Small drums

A variety of small hand held drums such as tamborim fall into the Hand Percussion category.

Listening

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Percussion instrument</span> Type of musical instrument that produces a sound by being hit

A percussion instrument is a musical instrument that is sounded by being struck or scraped by a beater including attached or enclosed beaters or rattles struck, scraped or rubbed by hand or struck against another similar instrument. Excluding zoomusicological instruments and the human voice, the percussion family is believed to include the oldest musical instruments. In spite of being a very common term to designate instruments, and to relate them to their players, the percussionists, percussion is not a systematic classificatory category of instruments, as described by the scientific field of organology. It is shown below that percussion instruments may belong to the organological classes of idiophone, membranophone, aerophone and chordophone.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Güiro</span> Latin American percussion instrument

The güiro is a percussion instrument consisting of an open-ended, hollow gourd with parallel notches cut in one side. It is played by rubbing a stick or tines along the notches to produce a ratchet sound.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">General MIDI</span> Standard for MIDI-based music synthesizers

General MIDI is a standardized specification for electronic musical instruments that respond to MIDI messages. GM was developed by the American MIDI Manufacturers Association (MMA) and the Japan MIDI Standards Committee (JMSC) and first published in 1991. The official specification is available in English from the MMA, bound together with the MIDI 1.0 specification, and in Japanese from the Association of Musical Electronic Industry (AMEI).

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Cowbell (instrument)</span> Musical instrument

The cowbell is an idiophone hand percussion instrument used in various styles of music, such as Latin and rock. It is named after the similar bell used by herdsmen to keep track of the whereabouts of cows. The instrument initially and traditionally has been metallic; however, contemporarily, some variants are made of synthetic materials.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Caxixi</span> Percussion instrument

A caxixi is a percussion instrument consisting of a closed basket with a flat bottom filled with seeds or other small particles. The round bottom is traditionally cut from a dried gourd. The caxixi is an indirectly struck idiophone. Like the maraca, it is sounded by shaking. Variations in sound are produced by varying the angle at which the caxixi is shaken, determining whether the contents strike the reed basket or the hard bottom.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Cabasa</span> Percussion instrument

The cabasa, similar to the shekere, is a percussion instrument that is constructed with loops of steel ball chain wrapped around a wooden cylinder. The cylinder is fixed to a long, wooden or plastic handle.

Adiemus is a series of new-age music albums by Welsh composer Karl Jenkins. It is also the title of the opening track on the first album of the series, Adiemus: Songs of Sanctuary, recorded in 1994 and released the next year.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Shekere</span> Percussion instrument from West Africa

The shekere is a percussion instrument consisting of a dried gourd with beads or cowries woven into a net covering the gourd. There are multiple ways to produce sounds with the instrument. It can be shaken or hit against the hand. The instrument can also rest in the palm of one hand while other hand holds the handle of the gourd. A twisting wrist motion is used so that the gourd moves while beads remain in place causing friction and sound different than when the instrument is simply shaken or struck. The shekere originated in Yorubaland West Africa, which comprises the countries of Nigeria, Benin, and Togo.

Afro-Caribbean music is a broad term for music styles originating in the Caribbean from the African diaspora. These types of music usually have West African/Central African influence because of the presence and history of African people and their descendants living in the Caribbean, as a result of the trans-Atlantic slave trade. These distinctive musical art forms came about from the cultural mingling of African, Indigenous, and European inhabitants. Characteristically, Afro-Caribbean music incorporates components, instruments and influences from a variety of African cultures, as well as Indigenous and European cultures.

Batucada is a substyle of samba and refers to a percussive style, usually performed by an ensemble, known as a bateria. Batucada music is characterized by its syncopated style and fast pace with a marked rhythm.

Latin percussion is a family of percussion, membranophone, lamellophone and idiophone instruments used in Latin music.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Agogô</span> Type of bell originating with the Yoruba and Edo peoples

An agogô is a single or a multiple bell now used throughout the world but with origins in traditional Yoruba and Edo music and also in the samba baterias. The agogô may be the oldest samba instrument and was based on West African Yoruba single or double bells. The agogô has the highest pitch of any of the bateria instruments.

Orchestral percussion refers to the various percussion instruments used in an orchestral setting. It may also refer to the act of playing such instruments in an orchestral style. Many music schools and conservatories offer training for musicians interested in developing their skills as orchestral percussionists. Typically, an orchestral percussionist does not specialize in one particular instrument. Although there is no exhaustive list of all instruments that an orchestral percussionist must be able to play, there are particular instruments that are frequently used in the orchestral repertoire. This includes timpani, snare drum, bass drum, xylophone, glockenspiel, triangle, and tambourine.

Struck idiophones is one of the categories of idiophones that are found in the Hornbostel-Sachs system of musical instrument classification.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Güira</span> Percussion instrument

The güira is a percussion instrument from the Dominican Republic used in merengue, bachata, and to a lesser extent, other genres such as cumbia. It is made of a metal sheet and played with a stiff brush, thus being similar to the Haitian graj and the Cuban guayo and güiro. Güira, guayo and güiro all have a function akin to that of the indigenous native maracas or the trap-kit's hi-hat, namely providing a complementary beat.

Síppal, dobbal, nádihegedűvel (2000) is a song cycle in seven movements by the composer György Ligeti based on poetry by Sándor Weöres. The work is scored for mezzo-soprano and an unusual ensemble of percussion and wind instruments. The lyrics are whimsical and often nonsensical, sometimes combining random Hungarian words or parts of words into a nonsense language.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Egg shaker</span> Hand percussion instrument

An egg shaker or ganzá is a hand percussion instrument, in the idiophone category, that makes a noise when shaken. Functionally it is similar to a maraca. Typically the outer casing or container is ovoidal or egg-shaped. It is partially full of small, loose objects, such as seeds or beads, which create the percussive sounds as they collide, both with each other and with the inside surface of the container. The egg shaker is a Latin American instrument, cheap to buy and relatively simple to play.

This is a partitioned list of percussion instruments showing their usage as tuned or untuned. See pitched percussion instrument for discussion of the differences between tuned and untuned percussion. The term pitched percussion is now preferred to the traditional term tuned percussion:

References

  1. Jones, David Evan (1990). "Speech Extrapolated". Perspectives of New Music. 28 (1): 112–142. doi:10.2307/833346. ISSN   0031-6016. JSTOR   833346.
  2. Washburne, Christopher (2020-04-28). Latin Jazz: The Other Jazz. Oxford University Press. ISBN   978-0-19-970758-4.