On Tuesday, December 1, 1992 at 10:03:23 PM UTC-6, Kip Bishofberger wrote:
I have on numerous occasions broken all kinds of veins in my fingers, esp. my thumb and middle finger, whenever I play entirely too loud on the congas.
There is the correct way to play them, which I am not a complete expert on, but can perform reasonably well in, and there is the "play as loud as you can just to get heard over an un-miced band of 20 blaring horns and such" way of playing, which causes the bursting of blood inside my hands. The callouses develop slowly, slower than the 4-mallet, inside the forth finger callouses from keyboard stuff.
It is true that learning the correct way to play is not self-teachable; get a teacher, or do what I did, go to the nearest symphony (for me at the time it was sacramento) and seek out a percussionist (stan lunetta is percussion god),
and just ask him, the actual technique is easily taught.... after that its just trial and error.
How do you tune a concert bass drum? I was taught that the non-batter head is
as loose as it can w/o any rattle, and the batter side somewhat tighter, but I
keep getting some tone ringing through the thing.
kipster
Kip, you're probably not reading this reply that comes 25 years after your post... I can see why someone might have said conga hand technique is not self teachable in 1992, before YouTube, before available technologies could even handle widespread
instant video streaming over the internet...
Anyhow, I'm gonna try my hand at "self" teaching conga technique (heh, pun not inteneded...) with YouTube videos. Here's to technology as boone and not bane!
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