About the Drum Charts
These drum charts are original, developed and transcribed by Greg Beuthin. Many of them come from existing folkloric drum patterns, others come from club, dance and hip-hop tracks. All have been modified to work with our current drumming setup of "bass" trash bins and buckets.
While many of these patterns are modeled on folkloric rhythms, they are not meant to represent or replace the original folkloric rhythm. (This is why all rhythms have new names.) These charts are meant to codify Orkest Asfalto's repertory of patterns / songs, as played on our instrumentation.
All Orkest Asfalto Drum Charts
by Greg Beuthin - Balé Techlorico are licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License.
Reading the drum charts
Our drum configuration is a little unorthodox, so in order to understand our drum charts, you need to understand our setup.We typically use large plastic trash bins for the bass drum, and buckets for the mid-range drums. Hence "Trash (bass)" and "bucket" in the charts. ("Bell" should be self-evident - think cowbell.)
All of our drums (so far) are played with sticks. The bass player has a mallet for tone strikes in his/her dominant hand, with a regular drum stick in the non-dominant hand for rim strikes. This changes how some common rhythms are played, and we've had to adapt to this hand/stick requirement.
The bucket player has two thick (1/16) timbale sticks. On the bucket, you can strike the center (typically with a raised circle as a "target"), the flat area around this circle ("off-target", for a less rich tone), or a rim strike.
We also use a modified Larry Morris / box drum notation system:
O - tone sound
X - rim strike
Ox - flam
t - a "touch", typically an off-target tone hit for the bucket player