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
