Stick It To Me

Drumsticks are actually pretty easy to make, if you have a lathe.  Unfortunately I don’t have a lathe.  However, I did come up with a pretty good technique for turning drumstick shapes from blanks made from oak dowel.

Holding my hand flat, palm down on the dowel, I rolled it along the workbench with the dowel end hanging over the edge.  Then I held a file against the dowel and applied pressure as it rolled along.  Of course I had to stop and reset my hand position every 30 centimetres, but it worked.  Little by little I could turn the dowel down to the shape I wanted.

After about nine hundred passes, and a rather sore hand, I had homemade drumsticks!

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.

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.

Making a Square… er, Snare… er, Square Snare

After the successful proof-of-concept yet not-quite-good-enough prototype drum, I decided that the square frame (made of pine) worked well but I needed a better way of tensioning the skins.

Commercial drums have a wire bead around the skin circumference and a ring that holds it and stretches it over the edge of the drum body.  I decided to try putting a bead on each edge of the drumskin (still using a plastic file folder) and using wooden rails to clamp them tight.

The rails are made of oak and in pairs; the anchor side is fixed to the drum body (shown above) and the other one floats free.

The Purple Percussion Project – Origins

The idea for making a DIY drumkit came after a day spent at my friend Jayson’s house playing music (well, making musical noises) with Jimmy and Trevor from work.  Seeing as the three of them are all much more accomplished at playing tuned string instruments than I am, I ended up in the drummer’s seat.

Jayson has the Beatles Rock Band game for his Playstation and I was going to use the drum controller for that, but unfortunately something to do with [insert techno geek talk here] rendered the system unplayable due to micro-delays between hitting the triggers and the sound coming out of the speakers.  Listening to myself play it was impossible not to match the ever-slowing tempo until the beat ended up sounding like it was mired in thick molasses!

So Jayson got out a djembe (African hand drum) for me to play instead.  Except that I wasn’t allowed to use the drumsticks for fear of damaging it.  After playing for about five minutes with my hands and realising that I’m not a very good djembe player, I remembered something I’d tried years ago when mucking about looking for percussive sounds.

“Have you got any uncooked spaghetti?”

“What?”

“Have you got any uncooked spaghetti?”

“Um….”

Yes.  Bundles of uncooked spaghetti banded together with some rubber bands or hair ties make excellent DIY rute sticks (I never knew the name until just now)!  Soft enough to use on the djembe and surprisingly durable – I only broke a few strands of spaghetti in a couple hours of playing.

So anyway.  In my quest for a wider variety of percussive sounds I raided Jayson’s kitchen for pots and pans and lids and whatever I could find.  Using a portable laundry-drying rack and some bungee cords I ended up with a few different things to hit… MooGyver drumkit indeed.

Afterward I got to thinking it would be really nice to have a portable acoustic drumkit for events like this.  No electricity or amps required, so it could be played anywhere.  Portable?  Now there’s a challenge…

I’m reasonably handy with woodworking and fiddly stuff.  Not sure about making hoops and barrels though.  What about squares…

And cymbals… hmm… we’ll solve that problem later.