Copyright © 1995 by Nicholas Breeze Wood
Nicholas Breeze Wood is a drum maker of many years experience. He has made hundreds of drums for people in the UK and Europe. In this article he describes the construction of a fairly typical Native American style frame drum. The drum described in this article is a traditional Native American single-sided frame drum. This type of drum is not confined to any one tribal group, indeed, it is seen all over North America, and also in Siberia and Asia. The method of construction explained here could, with little modification, make a drum of any size, from a few inches upwards.
Tools and Materials
A piece of animal rawhide - fairly thick - 0.75 - 1.5mm -such as elk or thick deer or goat.
Wooden hoop for the frame.
Rawhide strip for the lacing.
Stick for drum stick.
Soft leather or cloth.
Water & large container.
Scissors & sharp knife.
Small chisel & mallet.
Plastic ground sheets.
Water soluble artist's pencil.
The Frame
Unless you are used to working with wood and can confidently bend a plank andjoin it to form the frame I recommend the purchase of a commercially preparedframe. I would not recommend making a drum with a diameter of less than 250mm. Thedepth of the frame is a variable; for a drum of 300mm diameter or so, a depthof 50mm should be sufficient. For larger drums the frame needs to be deeper.This is partially for the look of the finished drum, but also to give the hoopmore strength: the stretched dry skin will put quite a strain on the hoop, and maybend it, or at worse implode it. Because of this I recommend the hoop is madeof wood of at least 8mm thick.
Preparation
The skin needs to be soaked until it is soft. I use the family bath for this, filled with cold water. The time for this will vary depending on the type of skin used. Make sure the skin is totally submerged. Once the skin is soft, it can be worked with. Place it on a flat clean surface and select the part of the skin you will use for the drum head. Place the frame on this area to make sure it is big enough and totally free of holes or very thin parts. If you are satisfied, then you can now draw around the frame in readiness to cut it out.
It is always better to draw on the back of the skin, the part that wasinside the animal, as the outer part (the grain side), will be the part thatyou put on the outside of the drum. The way to tell the two sides apart is thatthe grain side has a surface that is looks like leather, and the inner side,has small cuts and scraped areas where the skin was fleshed after it wasremoved from the animal.
Remember that the circle you cut needs to be a lot bigger than the headof your drum, as it will have to go up the sides of the frame and a little wayon to the back of the drum. As a rule of thumb, for an 450mm diameter drum on a 75mm deep hoop, youwill need a circle of about 650mm. Once the correct sized circle is drawn, itcan be cut using sharp scissors. Put the complete circle back into the water tokeep it soft and wet until you use it.
With the remainder of the skin, you can now cut the lacing you will useto lace the drum skin onto the frame. This needs to be long enough to do thewhole lacing job, wet rawhide is not easy to join, knots slip very easily. Thelength of lace needed, varies according to the size of drum made, for anaverage drum, 20 times the diameter of the frame is a good length. This can becut by spiralling around a roundish shaped offcut of skin. Cut it approximately10mm wide. It is always better to have the laces too thick rather than toothin, as later when you are tightening up the drum, you will be pulling quitehard on them, and the lace will stretch and get thinner and you do not want itto break. Once you have your lace cut, put it and all the spare skin you haveback into the water.
The next job is to cut the holes in your drum head that the lace willpass through. I have found that the best way of doing this is to use a hammerand small chisel. The skin first needs to have the hole positions marked on itusing the water soluble pencil.
The number and positioning of the holes is of great importance. There aremany ways of lacing drums. For the method described here you will need an oddnumber of holes spaced evenly around the drum. For the 375mm drum in thephotos, I have used 17. The lacing diagram shows how these holes are used. Ifyou want to use a different number of holes, work out on paper the rightsequence before you begin. When the holes are marked, you can cut them. Use awooden block to hammer onto, and cut them approx 12-15mm from the edge of theskin.
Once you start to lace the head on to the frame, you will not be able tostop until the job is completed, if you do not have the time to do this at thisstage, either leave the skins in the bath until you do (they will be OK left inthe water till the next day), or take them out, leave them to dry in a warmroom, and store them until you do have time.
Construction
Begin the construction of the drum by placing the circle of soaked skin grain side down on the ground sheet. Place the hoop over it so that the surplus skin is evenly distributed all around its edge. The skin can now have the lace put through its holes in the order shown in the diagram.
When the skin is laced up, the slack of the lace must be taken up, and the drum skin tightened. Begin this by working the lace from one end to the other, gently pulling it as you go. By pulling it thus, you will take up the slack, and stretch the lace itself. It's just like putting a new shoe lace in a pair of boots, you put the lace in place, then pull it tight, then finally knot the two ends together.
Once the slack has been all worked through, begin the whole processagain, and then again, and again, until it feels like you cannot get any moreslack out of the lace. Do not be afraid to pull quite hard on the lace, but dobe careful not to break it, or the holes in the drum head; especially becareful if you are pulling on a particularly thin piece of lace.
Once you feel satisfied that you cannot get any more slack out of thelace, you can begin to bind the back into a cross shaped hand hold. Not onlywill this make the drum easier to hold, but the act of making the crosssqueezes the criss-crossing spokes of lace together and puts even more tensioninto the drum.
If you have made a drum with 17 lacing holes in the head, you will have17 spokes. This cannot be divided by 4 evenly, so I suggest you divide it into3 lots of 4 spokes and 1 of 5. Select a group of four adjacent spokes, andeither using the spare end of your lace, or a specially cut piece, bind themtogether. Begin in the centre of the drum, and bind outwards approximately75-100mm. This binding can be finished off by using the spokes as the warpthreads and the binding lace as the weft, and weaving a little section at thetop of the binding. Tuck end back through weaving and trim underneath.
When you have done one arm of the cross in this manner, do the oppositearm, and then the two other arms. At this stage the drum is finished. You canleave it to dry out now in a warm but not hot place. Leave it somewhere the aircan get all around it, so it will dry out evenly.If it does not dry out evenly, the frame may warp as it dries, and youwill end up with a twisted drum.
If you put enough tension into the wet rawhide, when it dries out, youwill have a lovely resonant drum; if you didn't, your drum may sound more likea cardboard box. In this case, if you can face it, you will have to take thewhole drum apart and start again. If you do the skin and hoop will be Ok, butyou will need to cut a new lace.
Finishing
When the drum is totally dry, it can be painted, if you wish. This can be donewith a variety of paints, but there isn't room in this article to go into detail.
The cross at the back of the drum can be bound with soft leather. This isattractive, and it cushions the hand from any hardness of the rawhide.
A drum stick can be made by binding soft leather or cloth around a stick.
Nicholas Breeze Wood is the editor of Sacred HoopMagazine. He is a shamanicpractitioner and has been amaker of shamanic drumsand other ritual objects forover 20 years. He hasmade a lifelong study of thetools of shamanism andTibetan Buddhism, andnever gets tired of going onand on about them.
This copyrighted article was reprinted with permission fromSacred Hoop Magazine, Issue Number 10atwww.SacredHoop.org. Click on the following link to download (EPUB format) How to Make Drums, Tomtoms, and Rattles.epub by Bernard S. Mason.
