Clanadonia & Tartans

[OC Richard]

For me a little of that music goes a long way.

There's a style of drumming which has had 150 years to develop a sophisticated symbiosis with the Highland pipes, the sort of drumming heard in the top civilian pipe bands today.

Banging a repetitious 4-beat on toms ain't it. Maybe in 150 years they will have figured it all out.

It's a fascinating topic, how various musical traditions have evolved different instruments to beautifully fit in to one another.

Notice with that one Wicked Tinkers clip they were using a Djembe with the pipes which worked very well. I was piping at a wedding years ago and a guy showed up with a Djembe and we spent a few minutes comparing rhythmic patterns to see what we might play together. Turns out that, just like with Highland pipe music, Djembe music has a large number of traditional rhythmic idioms so it was a matter of finding the right match. As I recall there was a Djembe rhythm that meshed perfectly with 4/4 Marches so that's what we played.

So a drumming style can co-evolve with the melody instruments, or you can get lucky and find just the right mesh from another tradition.

In any case here's the drum style that's evolved for the Irish pipes, it's amazing.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kLX0_U9JZCA