|

Practice makes…another darn drum

By

I made one mistake in buying a ready-made drum. It was so shoddy there was no way to tighten it up enough to get a decent sound out of it. So I took it apart. The fourth-rate rawhide heads can be recycled into rattles. The frame, after a little work, was fit to use again. Not high quality, for sure, but solid enough if not abused.

Now the frame is reincarnated with a decent head. Part of this adventure was cutting a length of 1/4-inch rawhide lacing in half. I invested in an obscene quantity of 1/4-inch lacing because it was the best deal I could get. Way too chunky for most of my smaller projects, but when soaked it can be split with a sharp scissors. Slowly. Inching along. But worth doing.

The decorating was done in great haste with acrylic paint while the head was still damp. I did some research on this, to find the best and safest media. My coffee can drum, “First Raven”, has a couple of ambiguous symbols dabbed on in soot and spit with a finger. Any fine particle pigment can be embedded in the damp surface.

So here’s the newest in my growing collection, 12″ in diameter, hanging from a nail in a doorway to dry:

front
back

“Raven Dances” … the world into existence.

I still haven’t dug up that adapter for the microphone. Too much snow to shovel.

Morning-after note:
w00t, this baby has a voice! *reminds self to look for adapter*

Similar Posts

  • | |

    A Bed of Roses

    By

    Minding one’s own business doesn’t pay very well. I’m pretty quiet. I don’t have loud parties, don’t play a radio outside, don’t have a constantly barking dog. Many of my neighbors do. I don’t throw trash in my neighbors’ yards — although I may sometimes “return” something that I know is not mine. My neighbors…

  • | | |

    Fractal Sturgeons

    By

    The living sturgeons that gave their name to the bay that divides the Door county peninsula — and the city that straddles it — have been nearly wiped out by overfishing and pollution. But their ghosts now haunt the summer streets. Ten years ago the first “Sturgeons Around the Bay” brought out interesting variations on…

  • | |

    Buried Treasures

    By

    Amazing what one runs across when cleaning out surplus stuff. Also amazing what one never notices until…when one notices it. I rescued this old label some time ago from a box that had been used for storage since whenever. Then it knocked around here and there and was buried, until I dug it up yesterday…

  • A high, lonesome sound

    By

    Nearly seven years ago I was writing my last epic fan-fic novel, Borrowed Time. Hashmark Pin, the world’s smallest hacker (though very tall for a Borrower) travels from northern California to Sturgeon Bay, Wisconsin, in search of love and a purpose in life. He finds it all. I was also re-obsessed with music, having discovered…

  • Home At Last

    ByMatera the Mad

    …Or, Why I Kicked Windows into the Bitbucket and Started Living. My computing life began with Windows; I “grew up” in it. Sometimes I dual-booted one or another Linux distro, but Windows, whatever version, was my main workspace since early 2001. From 95 to Vista (and 7 at work), I slogged through Microsoft’s increasingly baroque…