Ah, yes. The dog days of summer. Guess what? This kind of weather is not great for African drums made with natural materials. The same drums that had a booming bass and decent tone now has just a thud when you hit it in the center, and a small area next to the rim where tone is produced. What happened?
It's not the heat. It's the humidity. "Hot" in the horn of Africa is different than "Hot" in the Eastern & Midwestern United States. While it gets, and stays, warmer in the horn of Africa, there is not so drastic a change in humidity or in temperature over the course of a year. Also, when it is hot in the African horn, the air is also dry.
Goat skin has small pores in it, just like our skin. When it is humid, those pores get waterlogged, and then the skin stretches. When the skin stretches, it loosens, and a loose head has no tension to give you that good bass or tone you're used to.
What can you do? First, don't ever leave your djembe in a hot car. Don't store it in the attic. Don't leave it in a damp basement, either. (The damp basement can wreck both the drum head and the wooden drum shell, so that's a real no-no.) Next, for a quick fix, run a hair dryer, moving it back and forth about an inch over the drum head. This may dry it out enough for a performance or drum circle session. Third, move your drum into a climate controlled (air-conditioned) room, and let it dry out slowly. Overnight should do the job. Be aware of how your sanctuary is climatized. If it is only air conditioned on Sunday morning, and allowed to get damp and muggy during the week, you may want to keep your drum at home and only bring it to church when you are playing it. (If you don't have AC in your church at all, this works for that, too.) Fourth - try tightening up your verticals.
Verticals? Those are the ropes that run up and down over the bowl of the drum. There is a great instruction sequence at Hawkdancing. This gentleman explains what to do and why he does it that way. There are also some fine pictures that are truly worth a thousand words. He tells how to first pull your vertical ropes tight, and then how to do a Mali weave the RIGHT way. Although you can get someone else to do your rope tightening, it really is best to learn how to do it yourself. While it is possible to overtighten your drum, it's not probable. It takes a lot of strength to pull those diamonds (the Mali weave makes diamond shapes in the verticals.) and testing the sound after each diamond will help keep you from going overboard.
Another option that I have used unintentionally, is to simply refrain from playing the thuddy drum until the heat goes back on at the end of September. I'm not sure that this is good for the drum, but it keeps me from worrying too much about it.
What do you do when humidity returns to normal? If you wish, you can undo a couple of diamonds on your drum. I've found that the drum simply sounds better when it gets dry. I suppose that I'm one of those people who doesn't tune my drum to full tightness, so when it does dry out, it gets to the state of tightness that it should be at.
If this really sounds like just TOO MUCH of a pain to bother with, it might be better to purchase an American made, fiberglass head drum from a manufacturer like Toca or Remo. There's really nothing wrong with that, and if you are someone who has little time, or just plays occasionally, that may be a more satisfying choice. After all, if you pull out your authentic goat skin drum to play, and then end up putting it away, unplayed, because it sounds bad, how much joy are you getting out of that instrument?
No comments:
Post a Comment