I know na on rim.ta on maidan.tin on border' tu and di' .ta'ti tita; 4'3'1' closed sounds .a flam' what is palm covering treble drum?trakra?.please describe all hand positions you know.on dholak how many positions?on bayan how many?what is ne?hom is a fast rela done ?like snare drum roll ?why middle finger on rim?open tin closed tin ?where can iget whole thekas ?pieces for tabla not basic bols filled in? regards drum people kev.
Hello, I hope you are having fun learning the tabla. However, my personal advice is tha finger positions on the tabla cannot be accurately expalined using words only. My teacher is puts a huge amount of focus on millimetre accuracy of all finger positions.
I have seen some books thatshow many finger postions
but they don't do the level of accuracy needed justice.
I hope you can find a good teacher because mistakes at an early stage are difficult to fix.
I hope my advice was useful,
Stephen
I was in the same position as you not to long ago, trying to learn bols over the net. If you really cant find a teacher, which I couldnt at first. Order some books and videos. I ordered The Fundementals of Tabla and one of the Ashwin Batish tapes about tabla bols. It helped alot, in a way. But in a way I also misunderstood the importance of theka, kaida, rela until i got a teacher, these things are very important. The problem with all of us telling you the hand positions over the net is that we most have learned from one or maybe two sources, which means we play things all a little different and call everything just a little different names, check out the TiRaKitTa thread for proof of this. The only person who could offer you the exact right way to play things is a teacher, or perhaps a video.
In different gharanas they have different ways of using tabla's ability to produce tones. Even a player inside a certain gharana may have his own approach in some special cases to get a tone that he/she wants. "The correct information" is hard to get, because everybody plays a little bit different and everyone wants to be right. If you want to sound like Pandit Kishen Maharaj you have to study with him.
I haven't had a teacher and I have learned with the help of books, videos and cds. I have listened a lot of different players and tested different things. I use the ones that work for me. Fundamentals of tabla explains nicely the different strokes, rules of kaida and thekas and prakars for different tals. Advanceed theory of tabla tells about different forms of fixed compositions and a lot of general information about playing, but more deeply than the Fundamentals. Then get for example Alla Rakha's video+booklet set and see how he does the strokes. When you know the strokes and the theory you can start to use that information and create your own compositions in addition to tradition. I hope that cleared things for you!!
Jake
