The Roto-Djembe:
What I did on my summer vacation, 2001

So here's the story. I don't really live in the woods, but sort of. Princeton used to be rural, but it's not anymore. There's still lots of woodsy areas, and the deer don't seem to get the fact that malls and yuppie condo camps are taking over the landscape. So some of my grief has to do with the scores (literally) of deer that live in my back yard. But they are cute, and they're also a forgiving audience for many of my experiments, be they musical, lumberjacking, or whatever.

Here's some of my woods buddies, triplet deer born last spring. I also view them as potential future sources of drum heads (read on). This was shot from my back door. These darlings were about 50 feet away.

Ok enough nature. Let's delve into philosophy and acoustics. "If a tree falls and nobody is there to hear it, it can still make a noise, If You Make It Into a Drum!!"

I wasn't there to hear it, because I was out of town when the winter wind storm caused a huge maple tree to fall in the back yard. The elder tree really was a sacred relic, with a trunk diameter at the ground of about 3 feet. It broke off at a point about 10' off the ground.

Of course my first thought was "firewood!!" So in the snow I went out and lopped off the upper (actually outer, laying well into my neighbor's yard) branches which were already dead and dry, and harvested the rich bounty of burnable wood for the remainder of the winter.

As spring approached, I got a strange idea to attempt to carve a drum from somewhere in the tree. I polled friends who had different types of single-log carved drums, collecting dimensions. I decided to carve an African-style Djembe, and selected a hunk from just below where the tree had broken off. The dimensions I decided to shoot for were 13-14" diameter head, 27" total height (14" base and 13" top "goblet"), 9" diameter at base.

Here is the tree as it rested in my yard, with the chunk removed that I would use to carve my drum.

I began hacking away on the tree with my old electric chainsaw, which I had bought 4 years ago when I moved onto the wood-farm which is my house and lot. The little electric dude couldn't really keep up with the tough maple, and my abusive tool-handling style, and the clutch burned out pretty quickly. So I rented a nice 18" gas saw from a local rental place for a couple of days, to get the tree cut up into chunks I could manage. That smoke-belching handheld motorcycle-driven-spinning-blade was so much fun, I went to Home Depot and bought a lovely 18" Homelite, and started in on my drum.

So here's the new saw, on a hunk of stump, next to the beginnings of my djembe carving

Just to prove it's really me carving this drum (or at least me sitting next to a drum in progress).

Notches in the top to facilitate hollowing it out

So why don't more people hollow drums out of solid trees? Because the wood splits. I wrap the drum tightly and forge ahead.

After carving is pretty much done, I haul it inside and glue the heck out of it. Giant hose clamps and cardboard padding, carpenter's wood glue, and a de- humidifier to help it dry.

Dry it out some more

Sand it smooth

Prep the surfaces for staining

Stain it

Seal it with PolyUrethane

So far so good right? Looking like a real wooden acoustic drum now, right? But i'm a music technologist at heart and by profession. And I can't work on something without thinking up things to improve on the design, or at least mess with it a lot. I got an idea to make a "Roto Djembe." What's that?

Well here's a RotoTom. You can tune it quickly by rotating it. Rotating causes a bolt to push upward on an inner rim which in turn pushes upward on the head.

The bottom of the RotoTom.

I sawed the lower support spider to fit inside the Djembe shell.

Then glued the spider inside the drum. This required quite a lot of routing and moto- tool work on the inside of the djembe, to get the spider to rest evenly, and to push downward rather than press outward on the inside of the drum.

I lined the top of the djembe rim with neoprene.

and put the top roto-rim in place.

A view of the tuning handle from the bottom of the drum.

After deciding that it would be just too gross to actually work with a raw deerskin (see top picture), I decided to order a 15" goatskin Aegis Thunderhead kit from bongocentral.com

At this point, I needed to read up some on how to head and rope african drums. The Aegis site had a pretty good guide on re-heading an already roped drum. I also found a dizzying description which only an eagle scout on steroids could read without passing out. Finally I dug in and began to rope the drum.

Lower ring with decorative yarn wrap, and loops strung for verticals.

Verticals begin. You can also see the crown ring and loops peeking out from beneath the fur on the top right.

All done!! Top shot of completed drum

Full frontal shot of completed Djembe. Gotta tame that unruly fur somehow. Also plan on removing head, putting more neoprene under roto-rim (fear lost resonance due to slit around rim).

So what does it sound like? Not perfect yet, but here's the first recording of it.

News Flash: Roto-Djembe Experiment Fails!!!

So i took the next step: I took out the roto junk and roped up the drum as a regular old djembe.

I also hollowed out the top section some more, hoping to increase the resonance.

Things were going quite well, almost getting it to sound like a real drum.

Just a couple... more... tightening steps... and........ POP!!!! The head broke. Sheesh.

So I got another goatskin Aegis Thunderhead kit
from bongocentral.com

and roped it up again. Things went pretty well this time, and here's the final result:

Listen to it

But, it's still not as good as a real Djembe made by a true master from Ghana. Here I've shown the least attractive side of my drum, next to a wonderfully crafted true African drum. Hear the difference here. The drums are on separate stereo channels