Sudanese Music : Production Blunders

Salam and peace to all


Hope all is fine,


anyway..these days my status is just waiting and waiting ...

just ended a visit to the MPH stock-clearance .. it was good .. cheap :)

a long week it is .. waiting for a job - am i dreaming ? - i say to myself yet still im waiting as it was so near ... not anymore ..

imagine finding yourself falling down to earth from a challenger rocket which has already left earth's space and about to land on the moon .. how will that feel??

You fall not because it was you who wanted the fall but that of another person's advantage you fall .. you have no relation with that advantage he has nor you are related to the other competitor ...

anyway ... life goes on ... and now I'm not sure of the future is hiding... who cares??!!! right?, but it annoying and i cant focus on anything ... ayuuuhhhhhhh

so today lets talk about Sudanese Music, the hidden music of the world ... not many have heard it .. and not many have tried to make it available to the world to hear it ...

A music that is produced only and only for the local "market" ... call it a market if u want to ... its not a market in a sense that it will bring in more money .. its a market where creativity is disallowed ... a market where only a single "mood" is accepted .. be it a good or a bad "mood", as long as everyone thinks its ok then it will be ok ...

Ok so a little bit about Sudanese music .. Sudanese music is actually a very elegant, emotional, rich and very unique type of music ... really really unique ... because once you hear it .. you will know it's Sudanese!! no 2 can argue on it ... some say it's similar to Asian music (Korean, Chinese, Japaneses and Thai) .. but the drum pattern is totally different, so a listener can easily distinguish between these styles.

The whole musical structure is based on old classical hymns ... quite old ... its part of a sufi's (Islamic spiritual sect ) lifestyle, but then music was introduced as time passed ... and more music was in ... violins, accordions, Oud (Arabic lute), flute (different types of these) .. and of course bongos for drumming with some un-obvious Tabla (derbukka) -i say that becasue it isnt as clear as in the general Arabic music where the Derbukka is really clear ... all this was based on another view-point of which lyrics and melodies preceded music ... it was fine .. and was good as well .. people focused on the song lyrics and a little bit of music ... life was good .. and people were satisfied with that ..

The follwoing is an example of an old track .. ... this was an extension to the old songs which were to be named "Haqiba" songs



a more faster and interesting drumming pattern can be found at the follwoing link

http://youtube.com/watch?v=eQejtz9cGRc&feature=related

the author disabled embedding .. so im passing just a link

I'l leave you with AlKashif in the next sample .. a classical very good example .. at that time music was more organized although they didn't have that much of technology .. recordings were cleaner ... but this example from youtube lack sound quality .. but the remastering of the track itself is quite good and we can actually hear different instruments being played together ..



suddenly in that time we notice the word orchestra, so they tried to add more violins ... a typical band will use 3 violins (or more) , an accordion and a flute playing quite the same tone .. this was a sample of music been played ..

it was quite good ... but it was again not the best choice of instruments IMHO, the use of more violins like a European orchestra would have brought better results ... at least a similar one to the orchestra used by many Arab singers ... but be aware here ..

"Sudanese music is based on a musical scale called Pentatonic scale: scale with 5 notes to the octave, like the black notes in the piano. It is similar to the Scottish, Chinese and Porto Rican music." .. so you might want to read more if you're interested on knowing more about this scale :)

wait!!! are those fiddles or violins? .. well, it is mixed ... since many people don't really differentiate between many instruments it just goes through the ears ..

unfortunately as time passed ... not much changed either and this system was followed and was bigger bands were introduced with more instruments ... the worst thing was people were satisfied with this style ... no one wanted to change and those who did were considered failures at first until they proved otherwise ...


There were some creativity here in there .. such as this example ... it introduced more continous music with the singer doing all the work within the lyrics, it wasnt a known way of singing but he did try something new ,,,, although it was still within the same domain as any other ... it followed the same instrumental distribution and there was little change in the way it was produced ...



these examples are just simple examples, and the music evolved even more with a continuation i will present tomorrow ... this was just the beginnings of Sudanese music , a good beginning for their time which later producers brought down this evolving art ...

____________________to be continued_____________________