West-African Rhythms for Drumset: Drumset Book & Online Audio

This book delivers authentic West African rhythmic language without exoticizing it. Hartigan's collaboration with Ghanaian master drummers ensures the material is pedagogically sound and culturally grounded, giving your drummers access to four distinct, historically significant rhythmic systems they can actually internalize and build from.

These grooves pulse with the complexity and resilience of West African drumming traditions. You'll encounter interlocking patterns, asymmetrical phrasings, and a relationship between soloist and ensemble that rewires how you think about time and interaction on the drumset.

Intermediate to advanced drumset players ready to expand beyond Western rock, funk, and jazz vocabularies. This book suits musicians in world music ensembles, college percussion studies, and any program seeking to deepen drummers' understanding of non-Western rhythmic organization and phrasing.

• Listen to the online audio repeatedly before attempting the notation. These rhythms live in the ear first; the page is a map, not the territory.
• Start with hand patterns on a practice pad or tabla before transferring to the full drumset. The body learns these interlocking parts more efficiently when you isolate the coordination challenge.
• Record yourself playing and compare against the audio. Swing and microtiming in these grooves won't match Western expectations, and self-recording reveals where your internalization needs work.
• Practice each of the four rhythmic groups (Sikyi, Adowa, Gahu, Akom) separately until each feels like home, then explore how they relate to one another.

Pair this with world music or global percussion units in your curriculum. It also works as a bridge between jazz improvisation and non-Western drumming contexts, giving drummers perspective on how different cultures approach ensemble playing and rhythmic freedom.

• Playing four distinct Ghanaian rhythmic traditions (Sikyi, Adowa, Gahu, Akom) on drumset
• Understanding polyrhythmic frameworks and interlocking hand and foot patterns
• Internalizing non-Western time feels and microtiming outside the Western grid
• Listening across an ensemble with awareness of soloist-ensemble roles
• Transferring oral tradition concepts into notation-based learning