How to Play Ballet Style Dununs

Playing dununs in the old village style–the traditional setup with bells on top of each drum, one drummer each–is great if you have enough skilled players for each of the three drums: dununba, sangban, and kenkeni. But often only one competent drummer is available to play duns, so the solution is to play all three, upright, as shown in the photo on the left.

This upright, tandem setup is called ballet style, since it reflects the change when West African drumming moved from the village to the stages of Conakry, Europe, and beyond. I have just started releasing a new series of free videos on YouTube to show you how to play some of the most popular dance rhythms on the ballet style duns. A few years of experience playing these rhythms at the Little Beach Maui drum jams on Sundays has served as a testing ground to learn and select the best of these patterns for you to use in your own locale… or at Little Beach!

Here is the playlist at YouTube.
The first three of these free videos are:

Introduction | Kakilambe | Kassa