LP Latin Percussion Flex-a-Tone Standard LP1-5

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Its melodic possibilities are less used or explored, though tension-building, semi-melodies are heard, mostly when introducing song parts like choruses and bridges.

This was soon followed by other, African drums, like the Djembe, Ashiko, and Talking Drum, and other drum types.Relatively most of these idiophones are “struck” in one way or the other, and on one of these I am going to focus now: the “Flexatone” (also spelled as Flex-a-tone). While shaking the handle, apply pressure to the blade with the thumb which give a high/low wah-wah effect. The same applies to Culture’s 1999 album Payday (with similar mixing choices and “drum and bass”-focussed sound).

Let’s say that the definition of percussion in this case is all rhythmic instruments outside the (trap) drum kit/set, so commonly used now in modern pop music. I heard it less in modern dancehall, but this is especially because that genre is more Digital, with less space for an acoustic instrument like the Flexatone. Subsequently, the history of the flexatone became remarkable after it was patented in New York in the year 1924.The flexatone or fleximetal is a modern percussion instrument (an indirectly struck idiophone) consisting of a small flexible metal sheet suspended in a wire frame ending in a handle. Quite regularly in Roots Reggae from the 1970s and 1980s too (and later) for instance, where it was not “standard”, but regularly employed by several active studio percussionists in Reggae (Scully, Sticky, Sky Juice, and Bongo Herman), and younger percussionists (of which Sidney Wolfe and Denver Smith can be mentioned, as well as the even younger Hector Lewis (b. These possibilities have been used widely in various genres, though one can say that the variation and use differs per genre. A tremolo is the normal effect, and thumb pressure on the free end of the plate alone changes the pitch, resulting in a glissando from note to note.

You must — there are over 200,000 words in our free online dictionary, but you are looking for one that’s only in the Merriam-Webster Unabridged Dictionary. Bells (cowbells), shakers (of different kinds), scrapers, thumb pianos, woodblocks, tambourines, cuicas, balafon, rattles, a. On some songs of this One Stone album I seem to hear – softly - the “glissando”, characteristic of the Flexatone, setting it thus apart from other (metal) bells used. Regarding mainstream Soul, the tambourine seemed to have been used most in Motown recordings, among the percussion, despite an occasional use of conga’s or bongos.Perhaps it is even more frequently used than more rarely used instruments (I know even examples of “castanet” use in some Reggae songs, after all, and a few examples of “talking drum” use, but not many), because it is hard to give and exhaustive list of all Reggae songs with the Flexatone: still simply too much, plus also hard to study. Also the newer New Roots artists, besides Chronixx, (Sizzla, Luciano, Bushman, Buju Banton, Anthony B. Not much use in repeating a (or even several) Wikipedia article(s) here, of course, which are publicly available to all already. If using the instrument with the balls removed, indicate strikes with single notes followed by arrows indicating the direction of the glissando (similar to a guitar tab pitch bend). Later, with the New Roots revival this trend was reversed luckily, to which the roles like the mentioned new-generation Jamaican percussionist in Reggae, like Hector Lewis, attest.