Update on djembe drumming

Okay, so ages ago I did this blog entry on djembe drumming, but I'd just started the classes when I did that so I probably got a lot of things wrong. Now that I know more about djembe than I did before, I'm going to write about it again, and hopefully I'll be a bit more accurate.

Firstly, there are three main sounds when you're doing drumming; tones, slaps and bases. Slaps are loose strikes on the edge of the drum; tones are firmer, with your fingers closed; bases are tones in the middle of the drum. A slightly harder sound to make is a "flam". To do this, you have to hit the drum with both hands, one a fraction of a second before the other.

Secondly, you need to tilt the djembe slightly away from you, gripping it between your knees, so that the sound can resonate better. 

I used to find it hard to concentrate when my teacher is talking because he sometimes starts saying things that I don't understand, and at the same time he can talk fast. I still do sometimes, but I understand more. He goes into this weird djembe gibberish mode and I don't get a word.  To me it sounds like this: "You sometimes think it's hard to do the fill 'cos it's a different level something something something because the rhythm sounds strange but after a while you get all ten not two and it's not hard any more something something something and then you can do it faster blah blah blah". 
I have to try really hard not to daydream when this happens because if I do, when he changes back in to normal mode, I'll still be off in my own world and miss something important. Then I'll be lost when everybody else is doing a new rhythm.

I'm not sure whether in the last blog entry I said this, but I've started doing a different kind of drumming on Saturdays, which is called "Dun dun" or something like that, I think I spelled it wrong. On saturdays I do djembe too.