Meaning of べた打ち


Does anybody know what べた打ち means, and what the kanji for べた could be? The
context I heard it in was the upright playing style of taiko.




Depends on if its a technical term or just a colloquial expression. I'm no
expert on taiko, but [this PDF written by a Japanese taiko
maker](http://yanagisawa-taiko.jp/taiko-tatakikata.pdf) says that ベタ打ち is the
opposite of the ideal way of using a stick to hit a taiko.

According to them, you're supposed to hit the surface of a Japanese taiko with
a snappy motion so that the tip of your stick touches only for a very short
period of time. This is supposed to make deeper resonance.

ベタ打ち is the poor form of hitting that does exactly the opposite (or so the PDF
says). You're not snappy enough so not only the tip of the stick gets landed
but also the side also touches the surface, killing resonance and potentially
damaging the surface of your taiko.

But I must admit that I didn't know ベタ打ち as a technical term before I googled
it today. And actually I was about to post an answer explaining the more usual
meaning of this word. Thank God I googled it just in case!

Anyway, if the speaker is not a taiko master, another potential case is that
it's just one of the usual meanings of べた, which doesn't have a kanjified
version as far as I know, plus 打ち. The ones I'm aware of that are often
followed by 打ち are

  1. no or little space in between,

  2. all over the place or a very wide range,

  3. raw or "as is."

The third one is sort of technical jargon and means that you copy&paste data
from one place to another or move data without changing its content to another
file etc. So this can't have anything to do with Japanese taikos. The first
one might be it because it kind of sounds like a sequence of rapid strokes.
The second one seems to be why the bad form of stick work is called ベタ打ち... So
if it's not the technical term, the speaker might have meant fast beat drum
work.

