Wednesday, November 2, 2011

How To Make a Bambo Drum

Today I am going to show you how to make a traditional bambo drum set. This bambo drum is very traditional music instrument and not common in many countries. Also we can not expect professional level sound quality from this bambo drum set. But if you are interesting in making different kind of drums and play them this will very good drum to enjoy. You might already know that traditional musical instruments are not very methodical and well fabricated. Always they are built with very common materials that are available around the environment. Materials for some traditional music instruments are difficult to find in some countries, but bambo drum is needed mainly natural bambos. Most of the countries in the world have bambo trees, specially in asian countries bambo trees are very common. If you find it difficult to get natural bambos you can use wood or plastic materials to make this drum. But if you make this drum as in traditional way you need to find a bambo tree.

This in not very complex design. To make this drum you need to have different sizes of four bambos. Here size or diameter and the length of the bambo will generate different sounds. That is why we need different size of bambos. Then as show in figure fix your four bambos to a stand. This stand can be made out of any hard material such as wood, plastic or metal. I think referring this figure you can make that stand. Here I can not give any measurements for diameter and length of the bambos. That should decide by doing some practical test, and use your common sense to select correct type and size of bambos. If you bambo is very thin very weak sound will generate, also if the bambo is very big if might very difficult to play this bambo drum. Once you select your bambos, cut their edges very shapely and smoothly. Once you done everything, each bambo should looks like two edges open cylinder.

 
Bambo Drum Set
As shown in figure fix all four drums onto the stand. Now your drum set is ready. If your hand is little big you can play this drum using your bare hands. But in many occasions we have seen that bambo drum player using some leather slap to play this drum. 

You need to cut leather slap from little strong leather sheet, shape should look like above image. But the size of the slap should little bigger than your bigger bambo of your four drums. From this slap you should be able to close the open top edge of your each bambo while you playing the drum.

Now everything set to play. How to play this drum. Take the leather slap to your right hand. Keep one hand on the body of the left most drum, and hit the open top edge using your right hand with the slap. Now you should get nice drum sound. But also make a note that if you play this drum first time it might not get any nice sound. But you need to practice little, then you would be able to get nice sound from your drum. Let try this bambo drum, and show your colors. If you have any concern regarding this drum just comment them, I will answer them.

Monday, December 27, 2010

How To Make A X-Ray Drum Set

Young generation very like to play acoustic or electric drum set. There are different kinds and different types of drum around the market. Their prices also varying based on the quality, features and material used to make them. Here I am going to discuss with you how to make a X-Ray Drum set for your music practice purposes. Obviously this drum set can not use as professional drum set, but this is more than enough to start your music practicing. If you don't have enough money to buy a drum set even this would be a good solution for you. Here why I am named this drum set as X-Ray Drum set, simply because I will use X-Ray sheets to make this drum. You know that there are different materials we can use to make drums. But sometime those materials are little expensive or hard to find. As a simple solution I am using used X-Ray sheets. You can find used X-Ray sheet very easily, most of the time zero cost, because after using one time X-Ray sheets not usable.

Let's make our drum. First you need to find
  • little large 3 or 4 X-Ray sheet (new or used)
  • 2"*1" wood strips
  • Carpentry glue
  • Small nuts and bolts
  • Tool set

Wood Frame of X-Ray Drum

First thing is making wood frame for your drum set. You need to have one little large wood frame for bass drum and two to three small wood frames for side drums. Shape can be any shape like rectangle, pentagon,...etc. Size you should decide based on the size of your X-ray sheet that you could find. As shown in figure make wood frames using wood strips, glue and nuts and bolts. This frame should be little strong, because later you are going to stretch and fix X-ray sheet to this. If this doesn't have enough strength, sound might not be very pleasant or as expected.

Once you done with the wood frames, next thing is fix X-ray sheet to wood frame as drum surface. This is little hard work, because you need to fix the X-ray sheet to wood frame while it stretched properly. Use some nails to fix it properly. Once you fix that, hit on the X-ray sheet see whether it makes some sound. Sometime if the X-ray sheet is not streach properly you might not get sound as expected. But don't worry only thing is X-ray should properly fix with wood frame. Later I will show you a method to streach X-ray sheet and tune your drum.

One Bass Drum And Two Side Drums
As same way you need to make two or three side drums as well. Now let's see how we can tune them if we don't get expected sound. In normally professional drum set, they you use some advance methods to tune them. Here I use very simple method and this method is posibble becouse you used plastic X-ray sheet as your drum surface. Now take one of your drum and hit it with a drum stick and check the sound. If you don't satisfy with the sound it makes you need to tune then, take small burner (you can use even your home hot plate, gas burner...etc) and heat out your drum surface (X-ray sheet). Make sure that you don't bring your drum surface very close to the burner, if so X-ray sheet will burn. What you need to do is give small heat to X-ray sheet. Then it will strech. Again try with the drum stick, make sound and check whether you are getting correct sound. If not again bring near to the burner. This should continue until you get safisfied sound from your drum. Do the same for other drums as well. If you did it correctly now you have well tuned bass drum and few side drums.

Final thing is fix all these drum on the drum stand. You can make simple drum stand for your drum set.

Complete X-Ray Drum Set With Wood Stand

Tuesday, July 27, 2010

Dum... Dum... Bum... Dum...

Drums and drum beats are very popular among the entire world. There millions of different drums and drum beats are available. The objective of this blog site is not to teach you how to play a drum, but how to make your own drum. You can easily make some drums and have a fun buy playing them. There are very complex drum designs as well. But here I will show you how to make simple drum either for you or your kids. Hopefully if you make a drum for your kids they will much more happy than you simple bought it from local music center.