The Riq

Position
Holding the Riq is a little tricky in the beginning. You open your left hand and
place the instrument between your thumb and index finger. The thumb is
placed on the back of one jingle pair and the index finger holds the drum at
the edge of the skin. It is not a question of force but of balance. When you
play, tilt the drum a little away from yourself to keep the jingles as quiet as
possible.

Doum
For the bass sound you use your right index finger and hit the skin at the
side so that 2/3 of the finger hit the skin.

Tak
This stroke is done with the ring finger. You hit the skin at the very edge of
the drumhead.

Pa
This is what we know from other drums as slap. You hit the skin with all four
fingertips in the midle of the drum.

the jingles
The jingles are mostly played with the left and right ringfingers.

It is also possible to produce a lot of different sounds by using different

techniques of shaking and you can play different rolls using more fingers,
most commonly the right index-, middle- and ringfinger.
The Riq soft position
This position is used to play more softly than in the standard position. For
holding the instrument you form a U with both hands and place the
instruments between the thumbs and index fingers of both hands without
grapping.

Doum
The bass stroke is done with the right ringfinger. The movement comes
mostly from the wrist and the finger bounces off immediately.

Tak
This one is a little tricky. In this position Tak is not an open sound, but
closed. To make the sound closed, you put both index fingers on the skin
and press just a little bit while your ring fingers play on the edge of the skin.
The difficult part is to close the Tak sounds, but lift your index fingers for
the bass sound.

http://worldpercussion.net/lessons/riq/strokes/

RIQ-notations
Below you see the middle-eastern rhythm Malfuf. Its rhythmical subdivision is 3-3-2.
You find this pattern in different music cultures all over the world. For the start play just
the accents:

There are different ways to use the jingles and fill up the rhythm. For example you can
add a note before every tak.

or play the jingles continously between the accents:

When you lift your left thumb from the jingle while playing, you get another jingle
sound. Now two pairs of jingles sound at the same time, sounding more open and
ringing. In the second example the last accent is substituted by a stroke on the jingles, so
that the last four notes you play are open jingles.

You can put the open jingle sound to many different places inside the rhythm. Just
experiment.
If you add a second pattern, you have another middle-eastern rhythm called Chiftetelli.:

Now use the jingles to fill it up :

Apart from playing the jingles directly with the fingers, you can shake the instrument
back and forth to get another sound. You tilt the instrument backwards after a right hand
stroke and forward on the next 16th. There are different places where you can put this
movement inside the Malfuf rhythm. You can hit the drum again with your right hand
together with the forward motion like in the next example, or wait until the next 16th
like in the two following ones.

The next pattern is a combination of the last three:

The same technique now applied to the chiftetelli rhythm:

Now lets have a look at the soft position. The tricky part are the index fingers. You
have to press them on the skin for the taks, but lift them to get the open bass sound. First
some exercises to get a feel for the movements:

The next 2/4 rhythm is called Karatchi:

And now back to the Chiftetelli. In the soft position you can play it like this (in the
second example two pickup notes are added):

These are some examples to play rhythms in different ways. Of course there are many
more. Try around with the different jingle sounds. Also you can substitute the taks
with slaps or with bass sounds. The possibilities are endless.
http://worldpercussion.net/lessons/riq/notations/