Taiko is percussion. Technically, so is a piano, since hammers inside hit the strings when you depress a key. What I'm going to get at here is the hand percussion, the stuff that's not drums. You might have heard of narimono, the Japanese word for these other percussion instruments.
Some taiko groups give their newest members the percussion and say "just play along". There's a few problems with that!
- It downgrades the percussion to a tertiary status. (Front row, back row, percussion.)
- It often leads to a frustrated player.
- The song sounds sloppy.
First, don't put percussion "in the corner". Percussion is metal and wood and plastic, noises that often cut through the boom and the thwack of the drums. If you have untrained hands playing it, you're at risk of both awkwardly-played notes as well as awkward note placement. That never helps a song!
Second, think of the players themselves. If you spend time on the percussion, you'll have more confident players. So what if you don't have a lot of time? You should be able to agree on a simple pattern to play over and over, but at the very least the percussion can play downbeats or upbeats.
Third, if you get a chance, watch the experts! Afro-Cuban and Latin music have a lot of amazing artists doing things in their percussion, and YouTube is always available. :) Heck, there's probably even online tutorials in basic technique. Even if you're not playing one of those specific instruments, learning the musical basics of one instrument will carry into many others!
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Percussion as an afterthought rarely leads to a good outcome. It can be as easy as change of perspective to make percussion work for you and your group! Plus, nothing quite sucks as much as being given a weird thing you don't know how to play and told to play it. Yikes!
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