Interview: Barbara Merjan talks percussion, taiko, and working on Broadway shows

I have always enjoyed hanging out and talking with Barbara and this interview was another one of those occasions. We first met when I was visiting Kaoru Watanabe in Brooklyn, realizing we both work in a variety of genres a percussionist, drummer, and taiko player. Barbara is a highly accomplished and experienced musician who speaks with thoughtfulness and humility. I was always happy to see her participate in Edo Bayashi classes taught by Suzuki sensei or myself because I knew that she was appreciating the musical intricacies found all throughout that music. We might find ourselves working in incredibly eclectic musical situations, but in fact, it all seems to be connected by the somewhat bizarre reality that we just hit things for a living. I found Barbara’s stories about the Broadway scene very interesting, especially about the issues of gender discrimination as well as the trend toward high-tech production where the musicians are placed in separate rooms rather than in the conventional orchestra pit.

Barbara sent me some video links of some projects she has worked on. The links are below and I would encourage everyone to check them out. She also sent me some audio tracks for me to include in the interview. They are:

I Wonder As I Wander - Julia Simpson’s Christmas album
Mad Coyote Madly Sings - The Character of American Sunlight (Jerome Kitzke)
The Swan and the Vulture - Teetering on the Verge of Normalcy (Guy Klucevsek)

Thank you to Barbara for generously making time to record this conversation. I hope you enjoy listening as much as I did interviewing.

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Barbara Merjan is a drummer and percussionist who has worked in a variety of musical contexts, including Jazz (Newport Jazz Festival, 1980, 2002), Broadway (Cabaret, Sunset Blvd., Cats, Miss Saigon, Fiddler on the Roof, Big, Elf, The Unsinkable Molly Brown….) Pop/Rock (Robert Palmer, Lesley Gore, Women of Woodstock) and Contemporary American Classical (Mad Coyote Ensemble, Linda Fisher).

In addition to these musical styles, she has been studying, performing and teaching Japanese taiko for the past 15 years - Wesleyan University (2016-2020), Kaoru Watanabe Taiko Center.

Ms. Merjan has also recorded in all these genres.

For many years, Ms. Merjan brought music workshops into the NYC public schools via Music Outreach. The workshops were an introduction to music for younger grades with an added focus on reading skills.  Along with musical introductions we always told a children’s story with musical accompaniment.

Bachelor of Music:  Ithaca College 1981
Master of Music:  NYU 1991

Video Links
An excerpt from a piece I performed in with Fumi.  It is Blood Moon.  We did it in Jan. 2020.
https://www.garrettfisher.com/blood-moon

A video from a perfomance a in 2016, of Paha Sapa, by Jerome Kitzke:
https://youtu.be/WRSPPj12vcY

Mad Coyote Madly Sings, also by Jerome Kitzke:
https://youtu.be/Us-d3xv-wyQ

4th movement of Yukiwatari by Midori Larsen.  We performed at the end of 2019:
https://youtu.be/ciD7mTyTLUs

Top 9 Apps I Use and Recommend

There are many great apps available these days. Of the dozens I have tried out over the years, a handful of apps have proved to be essential in my practicing, teaching, and music creation. It’s not surprising that almost all of these are paid apps, as higher quality is more likely when we pay for a product. Below is a list of nine apps that I find most valuable and highly recommend to all musicians. Feel free to contact me with any questions you might have about this topic or would like to schedule a lesson where I can help you get the most out of these kinds of practice methods.

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1. Time Guru Metronome - this is an incredibly valuable tool to help strengthen our inner sense of tempo control. The main feature is the option to randomly mute the metronome clicks based on the percentage we choose. By starting out at a manageably low percentage (10 - 20% mute) and working your way up to a more challenging percentage (60 - 80% mute), you can boost your ability to keep a steady inner pulse by gradually reducing your dependence on a constantly audible click. I also appreciate the capability for complex odd time and mixed meter programming. It’s only a couple of dollars to practice with this guru and I would pay ten or twenty times that amount without hesitation.

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2. Anytune - this is another indispensable tool for my daily practice and teaching. It allows you to independently change the tempo and pitch, which is extremely useful for transcribing music and playing along with any recording - two very important practices for consistent musical growth. I also heavily rely on the ability to add markers to the audio waveform, allowing me to quickly move the playhead to any marker with one key stroke. I can’t say it any better than the 5-star reviewer on the app store screenshot where it says, “Perfect - I use it everyday in my music practice.”

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3. Cleartune - this is a very simple and user-friendly tuner app that I have been using for years. Just like a metronome gives us an accurate reference for steady tempo, a good tuner is essential for providing us the truth about our pitch. If the music is sounding out of tune, a tuner can quickly clear up questions such as “am I out of tune?” or “is my instrument out of tune?” or “is the other player or instrument out of tune?”

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4. SuperMetronome - starting in my high school years, I practiced constantly with my Yamaha drum machine, which allowed me to choose beats from dozens of music styles as well as to program my own patterns. As helpful as that tool was, this app is ten times more powerful in the features available to us. There are many pre-programmed beats, sounds, and genres, and everything can be edited to accommodate your exact needs. I can’t believe how many great tools are found in this very intuitive user interface. It’s super amazing and I use it all the time in my practicing and teaching.

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5. Gap Click - this is a brand new metronome app by the fantastic drummer and educator Benny Greb. It’s a very simple app that allows you to quickly program an A B click pattern. For example, bar 1 plays quarter notes and bar 2 plays eighth note upbeats. In the past, I would manually program such patterns into existing apps like the ones listed above, but now I can start practicing within seconds of opening this app. Like his teaching, Benny Greb’s app is clear, focused, and includes zero extraneous material. I wish this tool existed a long time ago but I’m glad this gap is now filled.

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6. Logic Pro - yes, this is a DAW (Digital Audio Workstation) for music recording, editing, and production. Logically, I use it for that purpose too, but it is equally important to my practice routine for a few reasons. First, it allows me to record myself along with any other audio and listen back for things which need to be worked on. Second, it has been invaluable for creating my own play-along tracks. Many times, I will have a piece of music that needs to be worked on and I will quickly create a backing track which can be looped. For example, I did this when I needed to practice playing a drum solo over some unusual hits in my piece Vents. Third, it helps you put together ideas for composing or arranging music and later allowing you to export demos for people you are working with. Fourth, I use it for producing music such as the audio recording and mixing for my recent video collaborations on Haseru (Masa Ishikawa) and TaTom (Patrick Graham).

The first three uses are very easily accomplished on the free app Garageband, which I used for years before upgrading to Logic Pro. I would only recommend getting into Logic Pro’s more powerful and complex features if you are looking to use it for more involved audio recording, mixing, and mastering.

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7. Ecamm Call Recorder - five years ago, I started my blog’s interview series where I post audio of my conversations with colleagues and past collaborators. I purchased this software which seemed a bit pricey at the time, but it ended up being very reliable and consistent through the many interviews I have conducted. When the person I’m interviewing is taking valuable time out of their schedule to answer my questions about their work, the last thing I want on my mind is the worry of whether the audio is recording properly. Only once, I made the mistake of using Skype’s built in recording feature, which resulted in the poorest audio of my interview series (most ironically, the Part 1 discussion with Isaku Kageyama about home audio recording gear). These days, I spend more time on Zoom so I have other options for recording those calls. It seems common for people to use the recording feature within Zoom, and I don’t know how well it works since I haven’t used that option. The recurring moral of this story is to spend a few dollars for quality and consistency, which I’m sure will demonstrate its value as you use it.

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8. ProMovie Recorder - for most of my videos, I use my Canon DSLR in full manual mode where I lock in all exposure, frame rate, color, focus, audio input, and other settings when I record in the controlled environment of my studio. I hesitated to use my iphone for video recording due to the lack of controls until I discovered ProMovie Recorder. This app provides the same controls I get on my camera so that my iphone can capture footage that I can rely on using. I have used this setup on the overhead shot for my 4-part knife sharpening videos as well as the instrument views on my kadon live Edo Bayashi workshop promo video. Recording your practice sessions or rehearsals is important to your musical growth, and an app like this can help to make sure your phone is capturing footage like a pro.

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9. Loopback - like many other musicians, I was struggling with the complex and somewhat uncharted territory of routing various audio input and outputs through my computer over the past year. There are various free ‘workaround solutions’ to this problem, but I found them to be hard to understand and unreliable as I tried to get the best audio quality out to my online students or livestream audience. From the beginning, I should have just purchased Loopback from Rogue Amoeba, which would have prevented many hours of headache and confusion. This app is now essential for my online teaching and presentations because it provides full control of the audio inputs and outputs in my computer. It helped me immensely during the recent Online Edo Bayashi Gathering when I routed multiple mics, my audio interface, play-along tracks in Logic, and pre-session music in itunes as one input source going directly into Zoom. I wasn’t in the loop about this company previously, but now I’m a fan and have gone back to purchase their other very useful apps.

Good earplugs are essential for drummers

Photo from Etymotic.com

As a longtime drummer, hearing protection has been a critically important issue for me. Hearing loss and tinnitus (high-pitched ringing of the ears) are very real consequences of repeated exposure to loud sounds. Even today, the mechanics of how our hearing changes are not fully understood, and there are currently no cures for hearing loss and tinnitus. This means that protecting our ears is the only thing we can do to help prevent future problems. We are lucky to be living in this time of increasing awareness and a variety of options for hearing protection. I highly recommend all musicians look into this.

When I arrived to Central Michigan University in 1995 as a first-year music student, I was told that all percussionists in our studio were required to purchase musician's earplugs. This type is custom molded to the ear and uses interchangeable filters which lower the volume without changing the balance of frequencies. At $100 – $200 per pair, it is not a cheap option, especially for a young college student. Yet having these earplugs turned out to be one of the very best investments of my career. Twenty-one years later, I am still using them (I'm on my second pair) for practicing, rehearsals, performances, and any loud environment.

Photo from Etymotic.com

In workshops, I often bring up the topic of hearing protection, and I've been seeing more and more people using earplugs over the years. My first recommendation is to look into the universal fit high-fidelity earplugs by Etymotic. There are other companies making similar products but Etymotic is the one I am most familiar with. At around $12 per pair, these earplugs have the same type of filter as the musician's earplugs. Unlike the cheaper foam, rubber, or wax earplugs, the hi-fi plugs allow you to hear more accurately with a reduction of around 20 dB. Hearing clear music and conversation keeps everyone using earplugs rather than taking them out in order to hear better (completely defeating the purpose of earplugs).

Musician's earplugs are well worth the effort and price tag to purchase. They are comfortable, nearly invisible, and can be customized with interchangeable filters for various situations. The first thing you need to do is to find an audiologist in your area that offers musician's earplugs. For my current pair, I went to Hawaii Professional Audiology in Honolulu. I chose this place because they were used to serving the Honolulu Symphony musicians. When you go in for your appointment, a foam material is used to take your ear impression, which then gets sent to the company making the earplugs. While I recommend this option to almost everyone, there are two situations I can think of where you might want to wait. The first is if you are going through significant weight change, which would likely affect the fit later on. The second category for waiting is younger people who are still growing, for the same reason.

There might be an element of old curmudgeon-ness involved, but I feel like loud volume situations are increasing everywhere: concerts, movies, earbuds, awful restaurant acoustics, TV commercials, and so on. I always keep my earplugs with me and am constantly grateful for this technology. After thirty-plus years of drumming, I feel fortunate that my hearing is in relatively good condition. Without a doubt, consistent use of hearing protection over the years is the biggest reason.

1990 Modern Drummer Article: An Occupational Hazard