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.
moogyver strikes again 