Sharing my love of Taiko

Friday, September 30, 2011

Drummer Sighting


With the overwhelming frequency of accidents, rude behavior of other motorists, and my foolish tendency to listen to the world news, it's not very often that I encounter something on my commute to work that makes me smile. Today was definitely an exception. I was unable to snap a photo close enough to see the text clearly on an image this size, but I thought it was still worth sharing.


(for those of you who are concerned, we were all completely stationary at a red light when the bumper sticker was spotted and photographed)

Tuesday, September 27, 2011

Constructing the Bodies


I decided to make the bodies out of redwood. There were a number of reasons for this. Firstly, it was available, and in some quality cuts. And redwood is fairly inexpensive. I had read that shime were often made of “lighter wood” than the white oak nagado-daiko were usually made of, so I figured it would work well enough. Also, I thought it would be attractive once finished. I like natural wood grain better than lacquer, and I thought if I chose the right stock the redwood could be nice looking. And lastly, it's light. That's not an issue for shime, but these shime are also sort of a trial run for making larger okedo-daiko. I like the idea of being able to wear a drum while I'm playing it, but it would be better if it weren't too heavy. 


My friend Nick was kind enough to lend a hand and his table saw so I could do the angle cuts on the staves more accurately. We ripped my redwood boards into strips which I then cut down by hand to approximately the correct length. I decided to make each of these bodies a different height so I could test the differences in the finished drum. One is eight inches, one nine and the last is ten. 


I glued up the staves and bound them with a bunch of oversized rubber bands I purchased at my local office supply store. Once dry, I used a block plane to shave down the corners and round the entire drum body. Once it had been 'rough rounded' I took 60 grit sand paper to it, then 100, then 220 to smooth out the surface.

Monday, September 26, 2011

Making Shime

Though you can drum on just about anything (and anyone who plays Taiko probably does) conventional wisdom recommends a drum. Taiko drums are expensive, often prohibitively so. If I purchased my drums I would still be drumming on the arms of my chair. But making them is an entirely different matter. I love making things. All sorts of things. And Taiko drums are no exception. I recently started on a set of tsukeshime-daiko, or what is usally referred to affectionately as shime.

As I make my living creating digital images, it was only logical that the first step for me would be to create a computer model of what I was going to build. The heads aren't included in the image. It shows only the wooden body, made of 16 two inch wide staves, and the fourteen inch steel rings the heads will be stretched on.

If all of the staves are cut correctly they will yield a body with a diameter of just over ten inches, leaving two inches of drum head space on either side for stitching and binding.

Here we are

This blog started in response to conversations that sprung up during practice. Matsuri is in our repertoire, as it is for many (most?) Taiko groups, and we were discussing the many variations we'd heard. It seemed like each Taiko group had it's own version. (and why not?). One of our newest drummers wondered out loud if various versions were similar enough that, say, we could play along with one of our neighboring Taiko groups. I commented that in my experience I wouldn't have been able to follow most of the other versions I had heard.

  How does this result in a blog you ask? Well, on a whim I decided to begin a search for other versions of Matsuri to put together a collection for comparison. As I began my search I thought it would be great if I could put them all in some central location where the other members of our Taiko group could access them as well. Which snowballed into, well, this. Now it's not just a collection of Matsuri versions, but a collection of all things Taiko. At least that's the hope for the future. With the closing of Rolling Thunder the resources of the Taiko community have been significantly reduced. Though there are still some excellent resources out there, I thought I would try to contribute my small portion too.