About Darbuka
The darbuka is the drum played throughout the Middle East. Each country has their own version of the drum and their own way of playing it. It's used in folk, pop music and to accompany oriental dance. In the last decade it has also become a shining solo instrument.
Darbuka is also known as: tabla, dumbek, doumbek, darbake, dumberleki, tarabuka, tarabaki, derbake, debuka, dumbec, dumbeg, dumbelek, tablah, toumperleki or zerbaghali
Darbukas can be made out of metal with a plastic skin or clay with a natural skin.
CLICK HERE to find out what kind of darbuka to use for this school
About Split Hand Style
Split-hand is a style of playing darbuka where you use individual fingers instead of the whole hand, like in the Arabic style. It allows the drummer to play much more intricate and fast patterns, similar to Indian tabla players. This style began about twenty years ago in Turkey, and since then, there has been what I call a "revolution" there with many drummers practicing and getting inhumanly fast. Darbuka players from around the globe are coming to Istanbul to learn this style.
Split-hand players tend to prefer using clay darbukas with natural skins, but this technique also sounds amazing on the metal Arabic drum.
Misirli Ahmet, a Turkish darbuka player, invented the Turkish Split Hand Technique around the turn of the century while living in the Sinai Desert with his brothers. Many drummers got ideas and inspiration from Ahmet, and he deserves recognition as the father of this technique.
There are now many other players like Bünyamin Olguncan and Suat Borazan, who have taken the idea of split-hand and branched out creating their own unique styles.
About Darbuka School
Raquy Danziger is an internationally acclaimed darbuka player and teacher specializing in split-hand style, who developed her own unique method of teaching the darbuka. After teaching darbuka to drummers across the globe, Raquy Danziger decided to put all of her teaching material onto an online school platform so that darbuka players in any country could easily access the material and continue their training. Such a platform that includes videos, written notation, and audio files gives the students a great learning experience that they couldn't get from just a book or a CD.
When you enroll in a course in the Darbuka School you get valuable content, broken down in a clear and organized way. Your learning journey will be accompanied by videos, audio files, and Raquy's original notation system that indicates what finger to use and exactly where and how to hit it on the drum.
The Darbuka School is all about great and current content. Raquy has a very clear way of explaining and her notation system makes it possible for you to play a piece, just from looking at the notes. In these courses, Raquy demystifies the modern split-hand style of playing. It was developed in Turkey and gives the player incredible speed and dexterity. Raquy teaches you how to use these techniques in a practical way when you are playing in everyday situations. Thanks to the weekly broadcasts of new content and the LIVE lessons, the students can keep up with the latest freshest ideas.