June 16, 2021 | Instruments, Resources
The conga belongs to the percussion family. It’s a single-headed drum that originated in Africa. However, it was only when Latin music, namely mambo and salsa, became popular in the United States around the 1930s, when the conga drum started to receive a lot of...
June 3, 2021 | Instruments, Resources
The tambourine is a percussion instrument consisting of a frame, commonly made of wood or plastic, paired with metal jingles called “zills”. These sit on the frame’s outer edge. The instrument may or may not include a drumhead, and in most cases, it...
June 11, 2021 | Instruments, Resources
The Bongo drum, better known as the bongos, is a type of Afro-Cuban percussion instrument made up of two small open-bottomed drums of different sizes. The larger drum of this pair is called “hembra”, female in Spanish, and the smaller drum...
January 7, 2021 | Instruments, Resources
The most recent addition to the repertoire of orchestral percussion instruments is the vibraphone (also known as the vibraharp or vibes), with its early origins dating back to the vaudeville era of the 1920s. The onomatopoeic name vibraphone refers to the vibrating...
December 20, 2020 | Instruments, Resources
The bass drum plays an important role in a variety of western music genres. It often establishes the foundation pulse of large and small ensembles because of its timbre. These ensembles include military music, where it plays along with the cymbal, in pop, rock, and...
