I was trying to make sense of the Wood Rhythm Bones Home Made page, have somewhat edited it as well as finally figured out how to allow comments there too.
Then to make this post a bit more entertaining I checked to see if any new Rhythm Bone videos had been added over at YouTube and sure enough, along with some new videos presenting rhythm bones made with different materials and how they sound by “bonedrymusic” (check these out if you haven’t yet, and even so: it’s a growing collection), was this excerpt from a Bones Instructional Video by “bonesmanplunkett” which I’m happy to have bought last fall and recommend wholeheartedly.
Considering the statistics of it all, you have most likely already heard Mr. Plunkett play the bones, that is if you saw the box office hit “TITANIC”, since he performed the Irish percussion tracks (Bodhran – “Celtic Drum”, Spoons and Bones) in that movie’s soundtrack.
The guy’s an awesome bone player!
updated to add: Mind you, I haven’t seen enough other instructional videos for rhythm bone players to compare, and think that they all probably suffer from the weak side of the medium: it’s hard to see the fast movements and making little segments repeat themselves is a time consuming activity. However if you’re like myself, far away from the nearest rhythm bone player, it still can be a tremendous help. The video contains a lot more information than I first though; the fun is you need to learn the basics to understand what’s going on in the harder lessons.
Every time I watch it, and I do regularly, I always have at least one “Aha!” moment where I get something that I hadn’t before…
Rhythm bones are like washboards in the sense that it isn’t that hard to learn a few basic movements which permit you to play along with recordings or even better: other musicians. Yet both instruments offer a mind-blowing number of possibilities if you care to go along with them and work at it enough; each little step can be so much fun!
More information can be found at his website: World Beats