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DJEMBE-L FAQ
Making djembes - ashikos - bowl shapes, lathe designs, bearing edges
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While I am only now about to build a drum, I have built several musical instruments and had great success with this procedure; it stabilizes the wood under for all climate changes, gives a high luster without a shine, and still lets you feel the wood itself: 1) When you are ready to finish the shell, use 0000 steel wool to get maximum luster. 2) Apply polyurethane tung oil thinnned with mineral spirits. Be generous so it will penetrate deeply and seal all pores. This will stabilize the wood. 3) When it dries (no less than 24 hours under optimal desert conditions), steel wool again to full luster. 4) Repeat steps 2 & 3 with unthinned finish. 5) Use citrus oil on a cotton cloth to clean and polish the drum as time goes by.

From: "joshua tinker" <congolupe@hotmail.com>

lumiere wrote:
I.e. are some types of wood (teak, cedar, whatever) prone to produce a less pingy drum. The best sounding ones I have heard at drum circles were made of extremely thick, heavy single-piece African
wood. Mine is made with staves of fairly light wood. But I've also heard single-piece, fairly thick wood African drums that sounded quite pingy.

Now sound travels until it is bent in it's direction by for example physical interference this is why a drum sounds awful when you play it with the base hole sat on the ground flush. Ok so you know you hit the top and the sound comes out the bottom but in between is wood (that on my drum's inside is untreated) and
obviously it is porous to an extent.. some woods are more porous than others ...in general soft wood is more porous than hard wood well the pores in the wood absorb some sound a guy here in england makes "djembe" style drums with pine or spruce ( very porous woods) using a chain saw .....fair play to him but i
would like to learn the drum making using traditional tools and skills.

A violin is made from sycamore and stradivarius and these guys really knew about soundandwood dynamics in my humble naive guessing way i think a lick of varnish or ten would harden up the inside of the drum and make the interior surface less porous and therefore push more sound out of the drum
I am a forestry student so i will try and dig out a table of porosity of woods to tell you suitable species

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

----- Original Message -----
From: R Clark <clark@acceleration.net>
Sent: Monday, November 16, 1998 1:24 PM
Subject: Ashiko Making

Hail ALL,

I apologize for the cross posting that may produce multiple copies of this for you and I would really love some feedback on this thread.

I have finished rebuilding my Ashiko. It looks lovely. I sanded down the cedar shell again and refinished it with "Minwax Wood-Sheen rubbing oil stain and finish #751 Rosewood" two coats took a little over 2 hours to apply and it is quite dark. It is now difficult from a distance of a yard
or more to distinguish that it is staved, it looks like one piece of wood!

I used a three ring system (four including the bottom ring) to mount the Elk skin. Elk is interesting to me as it is thicker than the goat I used previously and not as thick as deer. The elk-skin has one of the qualities of cow, part of the skin has that translucent quality that you may see with cow or water buffalo. I used the third example of weave found in Serge Blanc's book "African Percussion, The Djembe" (page 72) though what kept resonating in my mind as I did all this work was "This is not a djembe (repeat)". Which is why I chose a different weave than the standard Mali version. I wonder if any of ya'll have had experience with these alternate weaves? Which is my motivation for posting. Ya'll have any input on this or other alternate weaves? Number three from Serge's book is interesting (over
three, back under two, over and back under the trailing vertical, under two more...repeat) to me in that it creates a sort of zig-zag pattern up the side of the drum and bends two of the verticals at once. An additional bonus is that this weave is "self-locking" the knots are a bit difficult to pull, especially as the tension goes up, and it is fun trying to keep them from walking up (mostly eliminated by pushing the cord down as far on the verticals before pulling taut) and once the knot "pops" it is rock solid. I
put in three rows and my verticals were pretty tight to begin with I guess the elk stretches quite a bit. I just kept cranking until the sustain (ring) is now quite minimal. The bass & tones are wonderfully rich, the slaps are not sharp even at this high tension, though, and are only barely distinguishable from the tones.

Thanks again to David for the input you provided last month.
----------
> From: David Anhalt <danhalt@cis.saic.com>
> To: R Clark <clark@acceleration.net>
> Cc: DAVID.ANHALT@cpmx.saic.com; lowap@egroups.com
> Subject: [lowap] Ashiko Making: Feedback on R. Clark's drum
> Date: Thursday, October 15, 1998 11:29 AM
>
>
>
> R Clark wrote:
>
> Hail David and ALL,
> I have an Ashiko or is it Ashika that I built from scratch. I had no instruction, no pictures, no diagrams, only the memory of one that I had seen. It came out quite well having 16 staves, running from 6.5" to 12.25" over 27" long. I put on a harness of sixteen verticals and used the Mali weave to tension the head, which is a standard MidEast type goat skin, hair on style. The cord I used was parachute cord which stretches alarmingly and will not hold tune through several heavy bass licks. I purchased some 3mm rope from a drum builder to re-string it and he suggested that I switch from
> > > goat to deer for the skin. Any feedback?
> >
> > Sounds like it ought to work...
> > I use parachute cord on some drums, too. It does stretch like crazy, but eventually settles down. After I've pulled about 3 rows of diamonds, I undo them and re-tighten the verticals. After that, I haven't had to tighten too much.
>
> This seems to be true with the black 4 mm climbing accessory rope that I used for the verticals, also, I doubled up the cording for the harnesses which with the three ring mounting system is on display and the black and red against the Guatemalan belting I used to wrap the visible rings is gorgeous. Something else I innovated with this drum was on the "flesh ring" or the bottom of the three "top" rings, I used cotton bicycle handle bar tape thinking that it would be non-slip and would dry quicker, possibly,
> than other wrapping material. This worked great, as it is adhesive backed it went on really smoothly and stayed put perfectly, I may use this material for visible rings too as it is very kule looking when wrapped in this manner. At 2$US per roll which does about one of the larger rings, I realize that this is an expense that some would forego and I really love it.
>
> > The traditional skin for ashikos is goat. I'm sure any fairly thin hide would do. Out here in the West a lot of people use deer and elk hide that they get from hunters. I've never heard the same drum with goat and elk skins on it, so I'd hesitate to guess how it affects the sound.
>
> I like the change, previously the goat had quite a bit of sustain and was kinda "boomy" in a hollow way for the bass notes. The elk again has not the sharpness of the goat and two out of three improvements (bass and tones) is pretty good. I certainly would not use the Elk on a djembe and for this "mutt" drum of an Ashiko/Ashika I am very happy with it.
>
> I actively solicit any feedback, comments, criticism, alternate views, brainstorming, expert or newbie opinions and experience available out there.
>
>
> Blessed BE
> IN Time
> R
> Thanks and Praises, JAH, for the World

From: David Anhalt <danhalt@cis.saic.com>

silence@qnet.com wrote:
<snip>
>I just got a tree trunk two weeks ago, shaped and hollowed it to (1-1/2") wall >thickness. The drum will be 24"-h 14"-top if that makes a difference, so now >it is drying and I'm starting to get cracks and it is scaring the heck out of >me. Like a new born baby, I want the best for it. I was thinking if I took it >down to (1/2") walls it might dry faster and stop cracking, is this the right >thought or is there other things I can do to keep it from going too

You problems is that it's already drying too fast. Put it in a garbage bag to slow down the drying.

This allows the wood to dry evenly (the mosture deep in the wood can migrate as the surface moisture evaporates. You should also seal the endgrain (where the drying is fastest). There are special wax-like materials for this, but you don't have time to mail-order them. Paint the end-grain with good-ol yellow wood glue. Also, if "hollowed out" doesn't include drilling the large center hole through of the drum, you should do that immediately. Removing the core (pith) of the log allows the rest of the log to shrink into that area.

If wood is thin enough, it *does* become pliable, and very mobile. Wet-wood objects, turned thin will distort and warp to relieve the internal stresses, becoming (typically) oval as they dry. However, you have to turn down to a wall thickness of 1/8 inch for this to work reliably. So the technique isn't practical for djembes.

I don't think PEG is a good solution because:
    1) You have to submerge the drum completely for several weeks or months, so you need some sort of big tank and a place to keep it. (If i remember right, PEG is caustic to metals, too, so it has to be a plastic tank.)
    2) If your drum is cracking badly, you need to do something NOW. By the time you get a PEG lab set up, your drum will be in bad shape.
    3) PEG displaces the moisture in the wood with plastic. This has been found to be unpleasant visually ("greasy-looking") and tactilly ("feels like plastic, not wood") by others.

With the kind of bond that drummers have with their drums -- particulary if home-made -- I doubt if you'd be happy with it. (And yes, some wood artists, such as Ed Malthroup, *do* use PEG, but most don't.)

Good Luck,
Dave A.

Welcome To DJEMBE-L FAQ Making djembes - ashikos - bowl shapes, lathe designs, bearing edges v9c

Welcome To
DJEMBE-L FAQ
Making djembes - ashikos - bowl shapes, lathe designs, bearing edges
v9c