Between the 1950s and 1960s, a generation of Colombian drummers created a rich percussive lexicon. These musics circulated in Colombia and abroad under different names, cumbia being one of the most popular ones, we use the term 'música tropical sabanera' to group them. This chapter focuses on four drummers and analyses five rhythmic structures of música tropical sabanera to unveil the understudied yet deeply influential work of these Colombian drummers. Through their drumming practices, we trace the networks of music transnationalisms, media technologies, and commercial circuits that afforded the emergence of these musics. In a liminal space between the local and the transnational, the indigenous and the cosmopolitan, tdrumming practices we analyse unsettle the discursive predominance that the global north has had in the history of the drum kit and its aesthetic, technical, and musical developments in the twentieth century.

This chapter explores drummers’ experiences inside recording studios from social, spatial, and technological viewpoints to highlight the drummer’s place in the creative processes of making popular music recordings. Through our ongoing ethnographic research in studios, this chapter draws from observational fieldnotes when both authors were acting as ethnographers and drummers (‘drummer-as-ethnographer’) and a series of semi-structured interviews with eight drummers of varied backgrounds and experiences. Our analyses critique widely-accepted beliefs about drummers (or in Bourdieu’s terms “Doxa”) by spotlighting three key areas: (1) the social spaces of drummers in studios (i.e. where drummers ‘belong’, or not); (2) the production of social identities in studios (i.e. who drummers are in relation to power hierarchies within the recording process); and (3) the knowledge and involvement of drummers within the creative process of record-making (i.e. what drummers ‘know’ and are able to do with their knowledge in studios). We conclude the chapter by highlighting that although they are often overlooked, drummers are vital actors within the social, spatial, and technological worlds of the recording studio.