Life is What Happens When Plans Go Wrong...

What do you do when your drum-making goes wrong?

First of all, don’t think of it as ‘going wrong’! Think of it as your materials taking different decisions to the ones you thought you’d made. Think of the opportunities to get creative in achieving a working drum… think of the learning opportunities. This is how our ancestors developed all the different techniques for making drums, around the world. Life, as they say, is what happens when Plans go wrong!

Take this reindeer and ash drum I was birthing last night as an example. I was just finishing off the last bit of the handle when one of the holes in the edge of the hide split right through!

It’s hard to hide a split hole on this style of drum – the ones with a secondary tension ring have a multitude of holes, you can punch another next to the one that split, or even just bluff it out and probably nobody will ever notice… but here? There are only 12 holes altogether and while I could have unpicked the handle binding and tried punching another hole, there’s every chance with reindeer that it’ll just split again as soon as I put tension on it..

So… creativity.

I finished off the binding, then used some of the spare lacing to bind right round the rim twice, pulling it as tight as I can. That holds the skin down smooth.

Once it’s fully dry, I’ll use the Irish bodhran binding technique; small broad-headed tacks right round to hold the skin, with a leather binding for decoration and to keep the edge of the skin down snug, then trim off the rest.

I’ll look through my stash of sticks and branches to find the right handle for it, then attach that on the inside of the rim. I haven’t used this technique before so thank you, reindeer, for making me master it!