Advanced

Mad jungle skillz by the whipper-snapper!

Clearly it runs in the family.

Turkey's young virtuoso, Onar, with his friend Levent. The piece they are playing is a darbuka standard, similar to the ghenere ghena jha one for khol - I forget the name of that one right now - it's at the beginning of Babalu's mrdanga book.

Misirli Ahmet, "Misirli of Egypt" as his Turkish countrymen call him. The maestro who developed an innovative style of play.

Here's an instructional video showing you how to play using the split-finger technique that Misirli developed. (This guy sounds like an Aussie, doesn't he?)

David Kuckhermann of framedrums.de travels the world learning from traditional percussionists. This is a great introduction to doumbek / darbuka.

You'll never look at a tambourine (or "Riq" as it is known) the same way again after this excerpt from David Kuckhermann's Darbuka and Riq instructional DVD.

And a bonus for the seriously hard-core: David Kuckhermann's trio 4th Race. If you were ever into old-school Yes, Jean Luc Ponty, Dream Theater, Fates Warning, or any other uber-technical music with the odd time signature and heavy syncopation, this will float your boat. :-)

This is the more complex version of the Damodarastakam, using passing chords to bring out different emotions.

The chord structure is:

Dminor Cmajor Gmajor
Dmin Cmaj Gmaj
Dmin Cmaj Amin D#maj
Dmin Cmaj
Dmin Cmaj Amin D#maj

In the key of E, when we change up:

Emin Dmaj Amaj
Emin Dmaj Amaj
Emin Dmaj Bmin Fmaj
Emin Dmaj
Emin Dmaj Bmin Fmaj

This is a mrdanga demonstration by Vijay Prabhu, who played mrdanga in the kirtans that we did on the recent visit to Melbourne's Mahaprabhu Mandir. The sound is ok, but the frame is clipped, and it's dropping frames. Somehow the camera got set to 640x480, 30 fps, which is wrong for youtube. I'll try uploading it to Google and see what happens there.