You’ve been cooking on the traps in the studio and you’re listening to the playback now. It’s great, but there still might be room for improvement—more color, more spice. How? With the addition of a layer or two of hand-percussion instruments—simple ingredients like cowbells, maracas or tambourines—you can add new textures and rhythms to your music without investing your life savings. Depending on the genre and the groove, you can pack more drive, excitement, texture, or just good old energy onto your tracks for a fraction of the cost of a new cymbal or electronic drum machine. Cowbells and tambourines are still the workhorses of the Latin, rock, and funk world, but over the past 15 or so years, jazz has imported percussion instruments from all over the world to broaden its sound spectrum. Eventually, these colors will find their way into more situations as musicians get tuned in to […]

April 1984 Issue