oft steel pan music) - My name is Becky Bass and this is my take on the steel pan.

(soft steel pan music) I'm a musician.

(upbeat rock music) I've been singing and playing the steel pan since I was two years old, so a very long time.

I won't say how long that is.

(laughs) But it's been a long time.

♪ Love should be real ♪ ♪ Not this flakey stuff ♪ I was born and raised in St. Croix in the US Virgin Islands.

My father is also a steel panist and so when I was in third grade, that was the first time that you could actually take steel pan as a part of the curriculum of the school.

So just like band, choir, you could take steel pan.

And of course who was the teacher?

But my dad.

(laughs) So this has about 30 notes in here.

And so taking a look at it, the outside is actually the lower register.

The inside middle is more of the middle register, and then the tiny few notes in here are the higher register.

So if I were to play a C major scale it would sound like this, starting from what we know of as middle C on a piano.

(steel pan notes) Now I'm gonna play another octave up so you can hear the register shift.

(steel pan notes) As a performer, I think it's really important to share the history of your instrument.

(upbeat rock music) And so honestly I try to incorporate the story and the history of the steel pan as well as my story as often as I can.

Drums are a huge part of the African culture of my ancestry.

And drums were used to communicate, to express ourselves and for celebratory moments.

Back in the late 1800s, the British were colonizing Trinidad.

They decided to ban Carnival because they were afraid of uprisings.

By then, the Africans were emancipated, but it was still very much like, you know, they didn't want them to rule, right?

And so when they banned Carnival, they took away the Trinidadians, the drums.

And so on the island of Trinidad, there was a lot of scrap metal lying around the island.

And one of these pieces of metal were 55 gallon oil drums.

And they discovered that when you hit it on the edge, okay, it creates rhythm.

But when you hit it at a place where it has like a little bump, a little raised bump, then it actually creates sound and music and a pitch.

It started with one, five, eight, 15 notes and now what you're gonna see in my instrument is that there are about 32 to 34 notes now in there.

(soft steel pan music) It started in Trinidad, but then it started to spread and it went of course close in its proximity first, right, so the different Caribbean islands.

(soft steel pan music) You'd start to actually hear it more in popular music.

So like Jimmy Buffett, he started using the steel pan and things.

♪ Wasting away again in Margaritaville ♪ ("Margaritaville" by Jimmy Buffett) - And then even fast forward, like there's a very popular like hip hop rap songs that started using it too.

Like 50 Cent started using it.

♪ I dunno what you heard about me ♪ - Soulja Boy.

("Crank That" by Soulja Boy) And now when we think of the Caribbean, we always think of the steel pan, right?

(upbeat steel pan music) My name is Becky Bass and this was my take on the steel pan.