Zil Lyrics

Can you pat your head and rub your belly at the same time? I can, because I taught myself how to do it when I was seven. I started by placing one hand on my head and another over my belly button and patted them both together at the same time. Then I started using the lower hand to start patting little dots in a circle on my belly. Then I smoothed out that circle and removed the pat. Now I can even do it while I’m shimmying.

Playing zils while moving feels a whole lot like patting your head and rubbing your belly. When you’re new at it, any playing while moving feels impossible, but even when you get more experienced, mixing challenging zils and challenging moves can feel just as difficult as when you’re first learning. The reason for that is that when we play and move at the same time, we’re trying to manage two separate and complicated actions. But there’s a trick that I use with my students and in my own practice. I just sing a little song, but it’s a very specific song. The rhythm of my song is sung to the same pattern that I’m playing on my zils. The words of my song describe what I’m doing in the body.

For example, if I’m doing step hip with a threes pattern, I do, “Take a step and a hip, take a step and a hip.” For the record, I stole this idea from a dancer in California named Mesmira. When I was a newbie, she had a great VHS tape on how to play finger cymbals. Her example was, “Tap your foot, tap your foot.” Why does this help? Well, it takes two separate actions. Your finger is doing one action, and your body doing a totally different action to a different rhythmic pattern, and it turns them into a single action, following along with the lyrics.

This works, because singing is an ability that all humans share. From a very young age, we can effortly combine rhythm and words. Even toddlers can do it. So singing what we’re already doing let’s us use a skill that we have to yoke together those two more challenging skills, playing and moving. It’s also a great trick for learning choreography, but we’ll talk about that another time.

Here’s how you do it. First, you need to come up with lyrics that have one syllable for each stroke that you’re playing on the zils. It’s okay to add some ands and ums and ahs to your lyrics just to fill it out. You want to describe every action you take in the body or maybe just the major milestones or tricky parts. It really depends on what you need. You might want to try, “Take a step and a hip. Take a step and a hip,” for threes, or, “Drop and kick and then drop and a kick,” if you want to do the belly pattern along with that drop kick movement.

Here are a few tips to help you use this effectively. Do make sure that the description of what you’re doing happens as you’re actually taking that action. If they’re out of sync, it’s not going to be effective. For example, if you’re doing, “Take a step,” then it’s important that the word step happens while your foot is touching the floor. Don’t let hang ups about singing stop you from using this. If you feel really uncomfortable about singing, you can think of it as chanting or reciting, if you want to. It doesn’t really need a melody. You can think of it as speaking rhythmically.

Do be sure to sing or chant out loud. You don’t have to belt it out at full volume if you don’t want to, but you should at least mutter it clearly enough to hear it yourself. Doing this in your head doesn’t work as well, because you can’t actually tell if you’re on the beat. If you can’t sing a pattern accurately, you don’t actually know it. A lot of people will play something in their head and think that it’s accurate but not know that it’s wrong until it’s actually spoken out loud.

Don’t rush this process. Adding lyrics makes coordinating your moving and playing much easier, but it still does take practice. So start at a really slow tempo and get comfortable with the coordination before you work up to performance speed.

Next time you feel overwhelmed trying to move and play at the same time, just write yourself some lyrics.