For the last 35 years, my partner & I have played world hand drums, djembes, congas, bongos, ashikos, tabla & temple blocks. Mostly, we have played for the fun of it and the mystery of how the powerful sound affects us the drummers, as well as those who hear it. We played in an all hand percussion band for a few years and found it wonderfully challenging and very very satisfying.
In all those years, the thought of actually making our own djembe drums never even once occurred to us, even though it was a struggle back then to buy a decent hand carved djembe anywhere but Africa. We even traveled to Sierra Leone, West Africa in our quest and spent a couple of years teaching high school there. At that time, 1980, it was frowned upon for white people to play or touch the drums and it was riot provoking for a woman of any colour to do so. We managed to come back to Canada with two drums; one, a 14 inch sengui, from the Sierra Leone National Dance Troupe, the other a small tourist grade djembe. We never did get that one to sound like a drum at all, but the one from the dance troupe is still in our collection and is a great little drum. Our next drum purchases came from a music store in Mexico, a pair of gorgeous congas.
For maybe 10 years we were happy enough with these and with our ability to pound along with our favourite world music and reggae songs on the stereo. Then in about 94, we saw an ad for a 7 day African Drum workshop with the late great Babatunde Olatunji. We signed up, pronto, and ended up learning about a whole world we had no idea existed for drummers: Drum Language. I have written another article about this on our djembe drum website, so I won't go into that adventure in drumming here. However, it was at THAT workshop that we met another fabulous Trinidadian 'Trini' lead drummer named 'Sanga'. 'Sanga o the Valley' was his official full name on his business card. We had 3 little kids by now(Drumming isn't all we do!) and had been planning a trip to the Tobago (Trinidad & Tobago) for the coming winter. Meeting Sanga and he being from T & T was a huge coincidence/sign for us that our trip was meant to go ahead. Sanga gave us the contact info for his close buddy in Tobago who was a superb drummer, a great guy and a drum carver. We couldn't get out trip together fast enough. Sanga said that we should not even take our own drums with us, because his buddy would have drums for us there. SWEET!
Well were ever NOT dissappointed. We met up with Sangas buddy within a week of arriving and we really connected immediately. Wayne Guerra and his wife Carol and 2 sons same age as ours were such a great bunch of people. We got to play with Wayne & Carols drum band called Culture Stop and Wayne made each of us a drum in just a few days so we could really get into it. Holy Smoking Drumskins! Could those guys play. The way they played their drum music, so tight, all choreographed with signals and drum pattern communiques all built in differently to each song. We quantum leaped on that trip in terms of our drum skills & knowledge and we were even able to tape our drum sessions and actually write down the rhythms that we learned from Wayne.
The most extraordinary thing we learned though was how to carve, skin & tune djembe, djun djun & and ashiko drums. Wayne did it all with hand chisels and gouges, going at a log of mango wood like a mad man at first and then gradually, gradually shaping and smoothing the drum body until it was just the right thickness a feel. We sat for days, in the tropical heat, eating grapefruits from Wayne and Carols' backyard and watching him work. He was just a few years younger than we were, but yikes! What a powerful intense effort he was capable of, even thought the heat made us a pair of zombies all day until the sun went down. They were all that way when it came to their drum performances as well; some claiming to experience bleeding out various places from the strain of it. We were humbled and impressed. Their sound was incredible.
We got to watch as Wayne measured and made the welded steel rings that would stretch our freshly soaked goatskin over our new drum bodies. It was hypnotic really, the whole scene. One inch wide strips of scrap fabrics were torn from some bodys' old something, and then these long thin strips were then wound round and round the metal rings to soften and snug the connection between the rings and the rope that would pull the skin tight. Very pleasant work. It's kind of cool the way the pattern on the fabric looks when it is cut and then wrapped up against its' own edges.
The heat really got turned up for the next stage, which is to weave the rope through the rings at the top pair and down at the smaller single ring at the bottom of the drum body bulge. These top and bottom rings are then brought closer together by the woven/knotted rope that is made tighter and tighter with each knot. Wayne spent one whole afternoon of his life teaching us that knot. Over and over. And over. It was hard for us to get it, despite having it shown to us dozens of times. We blamed it on the heat. We all laughed for hours. When we finally got it, we were astonished at the genius and simplicity of the whole process. Wayne made a little sing song out of it for us to remember. Under, over, round & under. It went something like that.
It is the tightening of the skin that is the really strenuous part of drum making and tuning. MAN do you ever have to haul on the last 6 knots to get that skin tight enough. Being a woman exempted me from having to do this part. I didn't object at being treated differently than the guys for once. My partner, being a guy was not so fortunate and really busted a few parts of himself getting the hand of just how hard you have to pull, bracing your 2 feet just so on the drum body and then pulling the rope with a piece of hard stick to hold it with. Correct breathing must be practiced so as not to rip the drum skin. (Or your stomach lining!) The new drum is massaged and played just a little bit in between knot pulls to get the skin tighter & tighter. Finally, our drums were ready to play and we went nuts like a pair of colts released into clover. All this drum making was great, but we had come along way to play.
And play we did until it was time to pack our family back to BC Canada again. We were there 2 months in all, and that was about all the heat we could take. Beach or no beach, it is really really REALLY hot down at the equator. We made plans to have Wayne And Carol come to stay with us at our place. Maybe do a tour of shows and drum workshops around southern BC. Our new drums came on the long plane rides home, 3 flights, 20 hours. CHOKE!
It would be another year before Waynes' drum making lessons would call to us from part of psyche; giving us a strong urge to carve and skin more drums. We carved our collection of Djembe Drums from the heartwood of Douglas Fir trees from right here on our Vancouver Island acreage of rain forest. One of our hundred year old Douglas Fir trees died that year. It was 4 feet across at the base, plenty of heartwood inside for a couple of huge drums. We didn't have a djun djun set in our collection and this tree looked like it could definitely have a pair of djun djuns in it. We dreamed of a djun djun so mammoth it would need a special cart to get it to gigs. On the day we first stood in our yard contemplating it as our drum tree, a great big old Pileated Woodpecker landed on the dead top and called out loudly all that day. The woodpecker is the special wild creature that is a totem for drummers all over the world. maybe you have never thought of it before, but the woodpecker is a drummer. They often beat out patterns to us and each other on trees rooves and even our metal wind vane. We knew we would do it then. And we did.
That tree provided enough wood for thirty three djembes and two giant sized djun djuns that required two elk skins to make heads for them. Goats don't come that big.
My partner made the first three by hand, but then had to change the methods up a little bit to include power tools when his carpal tunnel of the wrist issue got ugly. After that, we used chainsaws, chisel bladed grinders, reciprocating saws and even power sanders in the end. The drums he made were gorgeous to look at, all of them, but just about half of them never did produce that certain popping sound of a great djembe. We never did figure out what had gone wrong with those, or what was so right about the excellent ones. Certainly, we learned from every drum, mostly that it is what is in your hearts' thoughts that determines the spirit and sound of each drum. It was amazing to hear the different personalities of each new Djembe as it was carved, smoothed, skinned and tuned. We had always felt the spirit of our drums as we played them, but this was remarkable. They seemed to come into this world like our children had, with their parental resemblance, dwarfed by their very own individual personalities and natures.
It was certainly interesting to make African Djembes & Djun Djun drums from the wood of Canadian rain forest trees, using the skills we learned on the Caribbean island of Tobago. The BC Douglas Fir tree makes an excellent sounding drum. The djembes we made from it had very strong, powerful voices and easily produced the loud, lively popping notes just like Waynes' mango wood and mahogany drums. We were proud and floored, really, that we could actually go ahead and make djembe drums with our own hands. Our white skin and North American spoiled childhood had not left us entirely 'drum useless' after all. It just took being shown how much sweat had to be shed and then pushed into making the tremendous physical, mental and spiritual effort required.
Thanks again Wayne Guerra, drum master, for your patience, humour and love while you taught a pair of unlikely people like us to drum and then how to make a drum. The ability to make a drum, skin a drum and tune a drum has changed the level at which we play the drum. I don't know why, it just gave us such a deep connection and comprehension of who the drum is and who we are in the drum world.
So djembe drummers; don't be afraid to try making a drum. I promise you, carving & skinning your own drum will make you a better drummer. These days, there are lots of books and videos on how to make a djembe as well as workshops all over the world. Highly recommended to make at least one drum in your drummers life. You will open up a whole new valley of drum in yourself and you will not regret it.
Diane Lennox
We carved our collection of Djembe Drums from the heartwood of Douglas Fir trees right here on our Vancouver Island rainforest. For our methods of construction, we ended up needing power tools to get the bulk of material out of the center of the djembe drum body, and then did the rest of the carving by hand. This is a test of strength and I highly recommend it to all the younger dudes out there wanting to prove their manhood through feats of strength and power. We made a variety of hand drums and about half of them turned out really hot, the other half so so. Certainly, we learned from every drum, mostly that it is what is in your hearts thoughts that determines the spirit and sound of each drum. It was amazing to hear the different personalities of each new Djembe as it was skinned and tuned. We had always felt the spirit of our drums as we played them, but this was remarkable the way they seemed to be born like our children, with the stamp of us, the parents, dwarfed by the in-born nature of the beings we had birthed.
There are several great videos of people playing Djembe Drums from all over the world, including a two year boy. To view the other videos, just click the Menu button of the video player and the list of Djembe Drumming videos will slide out.
Djembe Drum Shop On-line featuring djembe and other world percussion instruments from Africa, Caribbean, Latin America, Cuba, India, the middle east and around the world. Djembes, Ashiko, Djun Djun, sengui, congas, bongos, doumbak and tablas. Huge selection of hand drums, marimbas, xlophones, shakers, cowbells and temple blocks. Free How to make a djembe, play a djembe and tune a djembe articles, videos and tutorials.http://djembedrums.artbeat.name
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