Ready To Rumba

Time to put all the bits together and find out if I’d really made a working drumkit!

I made the snare and hi-hat mounting pieces detachable of course, so they could be stowed away.

Getting A Handle On It

If the drumkit was going to be transportable it was going to require wheels, since I wasn’t keen on carrying it everywhere. Suitcases with wheels and extendable handles are very common and were an obvious place from which to draw my design.

I already knew that I was going to need some sort of framework to hold the smaller drums at the correct height for playing. Knowing that the kit would be lighter and easier to deal with if I used as few parts as possible, I decided to make the handle pieces perform more than one function.

Thumpa Thumpa Doof Doof

One of the goals of this entire build was to have all the smaller drums and cymbals and hardware pack up into the bass drum for transport. In addition, to simplify the kit setup and to make the footprint smaller, I wanted to use the bass drum as the player’s stool. So the bass drum had to be basically a large, strong, square box with one side as the resonating skin. They don’t make file folders large enough for this, so I simplified and tried a thin piece of MDF to start with.

There is a South American instrument called a cajon which is basically the same thing I was thinking, except a cajon is usually sealed on all sides (except for a sound hole) and played with the hands. I wanted to have a traditional kick drum pedal happening, so I needed to find a way to make a pedal with a remote beater that faced backwards.

Clang Clang Bang Smash Tink Tink Splang

How do you go about making homemade cymbals? I knew that whatever I MooGyvered up wasn’t going to sound anywhere as good as properly forged and turned ones, but I thought I’d give it a go anyway.

I went out and got some stainless steel dishes from the two-dollar shop. They were cheap enough that I could afford to experiment.

As I expected, straight from the shop they sounded quite clangy. Proper cymbals have a “washy” sound with lots of higher harmonic and white noise overtones, and a long reverberating decay. Nonetheless, I took a piece of pipe and wooden rod and made a little gravity operated hi-hat thingy just for fun (note that I have to lower the outside pipe to open the hats and raise it to close them lol):

For the next experiment I took two flatter dishes and hammered them into very rough cymbal shapes. I mean VERY rough. Without a way to heat the metal properly there was no way I was going to get any stretch or re-shaping flow happening. I also cut the rolled lip off which resulted in a rather sharp edge to file smooth (yes, I did cut myself at one point). The result was that I removed most of the clanginess but also most of whatever musicality and sustained vibration there originally was in the sound!

I rigged up a test hi-hat stand and cable-operated pedal so I could see what kind of spring I would need inside the tube to keep the hats open:

I thought it worked well enough for a starting point, so I moved onto the bass drum for a while…