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.

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