Fue!

    For a lot of kumi daiko groups, fue are a way to add melody to the rhythm and increase the depth and appeal of their performance. Though I never play during performance (then I wouldn't get to drum! I've begun to get more fond of the idea of playing fue with the group, however. Maybe just one song . . .) I have played and made fue for years. Don't misunderstand. I'm hardly an expert. More so just an avid enthusiast. I thought it might be interesting to put some of my fue exploits here along with the drums.

   I tend to make flutes in batches. Since I buy my bamboo in ten foot lengths it's just not convenient to to leave them in one piece (difficult to store). I measure the inside diameter of one end of the bamboo stick with a caliper, making sure I'm not measuring at a node where the inside diameter narrows, then using this as a bore size, I measure the length of a flute plus the additional length of the head and add another few inches for errors in calculation, mark it and cut it off . Next I measure the inside diameter of the remaining long piece and complete the whole process again until I have cut the whole ten feet into flute longish segments. That will be a 'batch' of flutes.
   You may be asking yourself  "what's the length of flute?" That's determined by multiplying the diameter of the bore by 23. The length of the head just has to be enough for you put the stopper in the flute. Past that it's only a matter of personal taste. You can make it longer or shorter, whatever's comfortable. Then, as I said, add some at the bottom to allow for errors. Here's a diagram to help clarify.

   I do all my measuring in metric. It makes the math a whole lot easier.
   Once I have all the lengths cut I use a steel rod to knock out the intra-nodes. (that's just a fancy way of saying the interior walls that prevent bamboo from just being a tube). Once they're knocked out I grind them down to smooth out the bore of the flute. I start out with nothing more than a threaded rod I picked up at the hardware store, then I move on to 60 grit sand paper affixed to a dowel or rod. I spend a fair amount of time with the coarse sand paper to make sure the bore doesn't get narrow where the nodes are.
    Now that I have a bamboo tube with a fairly straight sided bore, I shave the nodes off the outside. I just take my trusty block plane (the one I use for drum bodies) and carefully shave down the nodes until the outside of the tube is fairly smooth. You have to be careful because bamboo splits in long splinters along the grain, and if you dig too deeply with the plane it can tear big chunks out of the body of your flute. When the nodes are evened out I sand out the tool marks with that same 60 grit sand paper.  I end up with a pile of proto-flutes that look something like this.

Practice Pads

     I live on a 23 square mile island. A better way to think about it is that it's approximately five miles on a side. (it's not square, but this is for purposes of conversation) The point being that when I or the group I belong to practice taiko most of the island can hear it. Unfortunately, not all of my neighbors love taiko as much as I do. So I needed a quieter way to practice. The solution? Practice pads!

     First, I purchased a commercially manufactured practice pad. It's been great and I use it often. I also purchased a stand for it that allows me to put it up at Odaiko height and angle, so not only can I practice my rhythms, but also my form and build my endurance. In western drumming practice pads are used primarily solo, meaning (or so it has seemed to me) you use one pad and practice your rhythms and your speed. When a western drummer needs to practice his form or practice coordinating hands on different drums, etc, he just practices on his kit. In taiko a great deal of our drumming is form. Our stance, our arm movements, and how we coordinate them across multiple drums or with multiple drummers is just as important as the rhythm. This, combined with my need to not aggravate everyone who lives close to me, made me consider a different approach. Though my one, commercially manufactured pad was good, I decided that I need multiple pads to be able to practice properly. Commercially manufactured pads are reasonably priced if you need one, but when you need ten all of a sudden they seem very expensive, so I thought I'd try to make my own.

This is what I did:
First, I went to a local discount store and purchased a yoga exercise mat. I got the thickest, spongiest rubber mat I could find. It cost me twelve dollars.
Next, to the hardware store to get a half inch piece of plywood. The commercial pad I own uses a high density particle board for a base, so I would assume you could use something similar to that as well.

I decided to make my base boards with twelve sides, just like the commercial one I had. I cut the plywood into twelve inch squares, then I went to this website:
http://www.calculatorsoup.com/calculators/geometry-plane/polygon.php
and calculated the angles and measurements I would need to lay that out. I cut off the corners and ended up with something that looks like this.

I sanded the corners and edges to round them and prevent slivers. Next I cut a circle out of the yoga mat using a rotary cutter and a cutting mat. I made the radius of the circle about three eighths of an inch shorter than the short radius (from the center of  one of the flat edges to the center of the board) of the baseboard.


I then applied glue to the back of the rubber circle.

 I used Loctite Stick 'N Seal. I won't be able to tell you how well it held up until after I've been using these pads for a while, but it seems to hold well. I've used it on other things without any problems.

  I then took the rubber pad and pressed it to the plywood base board, but not too hard. Then I pulled it off again. This left glue on the base so I could see where the pad was going to adhere.

I took a spreader and smeared the glue on both surfaces to apply an even coat. I was careful to get right up to the edge on the rubber pad.

The glue is like contact cement in that you apply it to both surfaces, allow it to "tack", then press both surfaces together. I let the glue set for about ten minutes, then carefully pressed it on to the baseboard, making sure to align the two circles of glue. I stacked some boards and stuff on top of it to apply pressure and let it dry overnight.

The conclusion to the story is I was able to make numerous practice pads that have decent action and good return (they act like drums when you hit them with a stick) for less than five dollars a piece. Now I can practice complex taiko compositions that move across multiple drums without having to move out in the middle of the desert somewhere.

4th of July

Wow! I can't believe how long it's been since my last post! Despite neglecting my bloggish duties I have still been busy with all sorts of taiko things. Our group has some performances coming up and we've been busily preparing. For the second year we're going to be performing in our local 4th of July parade, something I heartily enjoyed last year. Last year my family and I made hachimaki to commemorate the event, so we decided to do it this year as well. I guess that makes it a tradition. Our taiko group has grown some, so we had to make a few more this year.

The Finished Product

And here it is in all it's weird little glory! I'm mostly happy with how it turned out and I'm very happy with how it sounds. A bit like a shime but somehow richer. I already took it to class with me last week and a classmate and I spent time practicing with it. Noise was made, fun was had, all around a good evening.

I think I like the look of the painted heads a great deal. I'm sure I'll be doing more drums like this in the future.

Kimyōna Progress

It was a long process, but I've finally gotten some heads stitched for the kimyōna daiko. I put the the heads on the drum and laced it up so it would dry to fit the body with the right head shape. Once it's dry I will take the heads off again, paint them, then when the paint's dry put them back on and tighten it all down. I'm hoping the black rims on the heads will bring it all together with a classy look. I did some tests with the paint on some scrap raw hide and was pleased with the results. Can't wait to see how it comes out!

Nagata Shachu

It's been a while since I posted a video. This is another one of the groups I listen to frequently, Nagata Shachu based in Toronto, Canada. I love they way they play rhythms across multiple drummers, and they combine rhythms from modern, traditional and other sources in a very unique, strictly taiko way. I've discussed my love for uchiwa in previous posts, so this seemed like the appropriate piece to showcase.I've also added a link to their home page in the links column.
 Enjoy!

Finished Katsugi

Here's the finished beast! I'm fairly happy-ish with how it came out. I've spent some time playing, though not a lot, and it's addicting. (and a great deal of fun!) The sound is very bright with a fair amount of sustain. It came in at right about eleven pounds, I was shooting for under ten, but I think the body straps put me over the top. It can easily be lifted with one hand, and suspending it by a strap over one shoulder is no strain whatsoever.

The heads are of a lighter (thinner) raw hide than I usually use, but I was trying to keep the weight down and I wanted to see what it would be like. I also went with 'natural' instead of bleached. It was more a matter of what my supplier happened to have when I was buying the hide, but I thought, 'what the hell. Might be cool' The lacing (rope) is offset toward one side of the drum (the bottom in the image). I saw a group recently that had all of theirs offset like that and thought I'd give it a try. It doesn't seem to affect the tuning of the heads like I thought it might, so when I re-lace it I might just go back to centered.

The body is 20 inches high, sixteen in diameter and the heads are 20 inches. While I was making it sometimes this seemed way too large, others like it was just right. It did take some practice to get to the point that I wasn't nicking the rim when drumming across both heads, but I'm getting the hang of it now. The size ultimately ended up being quite comfortable.

Lacquered Kimyōna Body

Once I got the weird little drum's body rounded out and sanded I measured where I was going to put the body rings and masked it off with masking tape and applied 4 coats of lacquer. Once I was satisfied with the paint job I peeled the tape exposing a section of wood which I will glue the steamed oak rings to.

Because there is surprisingly little flex in oak once it's cooled after bending I either have to build a form specific to a particular drum or use the drum body itself as a form. As no two drums I make are alike, due to being made by hand, using the body itself seems like a better idea than having a unique form for each body size. While they were still hot I lined the oak straps up along the lines exposed by the masking tape and clamped them in place.

Return To The Katsugi

I always have multiple projects going at the same time (I'm just crazy that way). A while back I posted some photos of a drum body I had glued up that I was going to make into a katsugi oke diako. After gluing up a drum body I have to shave down the outside to make it round. So far I have kept all of my drum bodies at 16 staves. Most of the drums I make are small, so that makes the staves along the lines of an inch and a quarter to two inches wide on the widest side and reduces how faceted the body is before I ever start rounding.
With katsugi however, it's a different matter. Because of the size of the drums each stave is 3.14 inches wide and there is considerably more material to remove to make the body round. This is actually by design. Katsugi are most often played while being suspended from a strap over the player's shoulder. Usually there's a fair amount of moving and leaping about, so a lighter katsugi is more desirable. I make my staves from half inch stock, and once the body has been rounded a significant amount of weight is usually removed as the body thins down. When I was done shaving this body down it was more than two pounds lighter.

The first step is to rapidly take off as much of the unwanted material as possible, which I do using any or all of these tools with the occasional addition of a rasp or larger block plane. Katsugi are still 'small' enough that I can pin the body between my stomach and my feet to hold it stable while I plane off the corners. I usually just go out and sit on the curb, drum body held in this manner, and work until my arms are too tired and I have to stop.

I try not to gouge the body or shave any area too much. I want to take off just enough to make it round, but not so much that it weakens the finished body. Once the corners have been removed and I'm happy-ish with how round it's getting, I switch to 60 grit sandpaper. I use a standard sanding block I picked up at the hardware store years ago, and I sand against the grain of the wood. I keep at it until all of the tool marks from the planing, etc, have been removed from the body.



Once I've got all the tool marks sanded out I switch to 80 grit and change the sanding direction. I keep at that until all the cross grain marks from the 60 grit have been removed.
After the 80 grit sanding was complete, I did another pass with the grain at 100 grit. When that was finished I took a rasp to the inside edge of the body to form the lip that the head rests on.

I shaved the inside so the bearing edge was a quarter inch all around. Once the taper was rough cut I hit it with the same sequence of sanding as the rest of the body, 60, 80, then 100.

I gave the whole thing a good sanding with 220 grit, and by that point the surface was getting mighty smooth and I decided to put on the body "straps" that I had steam bent to fit the body earlier. I had left an overlap of the ends of the straps, so I did a dry fit and cut the ends flush.

An Experiment

I've been a fan of the taiko group Yamato, The Drummers of Japan for a long time now. They're great drummers and have a splendid knack for stage craft. Often when I'm looking for inspiration to motivate me to improve, I watch videos of them performing. One video in particular I've gone back and watched a number of times and I had noticed this weird little drum being played. I've decided that the best way for me to figure out what they're all about is to make one.

I grabbed some images from the video to make some comparisons and see what I could piece together about the nature of this Kimyōna chīsana daiko.

This is what I've come up with so far.
first I compared it to a drum on the stage that I knew well.

It appeared to have approximately the same body diameter as a shime.
Next I compared the ratio of body width to height.

In another frame more construction details could be seen. It looked to be basically a small okedo using the same head and lacing system as a katsugi and with body rings spaced evenly above and below the bottom and top heads.

Armed with this information I cut some staves and glued them to create my drum body.



Finally!

I know it's been a while since I've posted . . but here I am!

For a while now I've been working on incorporating temple woodblocks into my drums and performance. It took a while to come up with a design for them that I could make reliably and that I liked the tone and volume. I finally got it figured out and here's what I came up with.

They're made out of red oak, which can be a passable tone wood in certain applications. They're nothing more complex than a box with a slit cut in one side. Originally I was only thinking of a rack mounted version, but in conversations with others in our group the advantages of a hand held version were brought to light, so I pursued that as well.

The rack version is made to mount to any one of multiple stands I have in my drum set.

These are chromatically tuned, half step between each block. With them in combination with the drum like this, especially if you have two stands right next to each other, you have access to a lot of tonal values.

The hand held versions look like this:

Hold the block in one hand, a bachi on the other. With the whole group playing you can construct melodies accross multiple players, which is an effect I'm very fond of.

Finished Goat Pops!

Here's the finished product!  Three of the five of this first set are represented here, there are two more larger ones as well.

The handles were made from left over scrap redwood staves from drum bodies. A channel to fit the tang of the drum ring was cut into one side each of two pieces of wood then the two pieces were glued together. Once the glue was dry the handle was cut into the appropriate shape and planed/rasped down to create the final contour. I spent a considerable amount of time trying to figure out a way that the handles would be easily removable or even just simply removeable, but wasn't able to come up with an acceptable solution so I just glued the handles to the tang of the ring. If the hide gets torn I can cut the handle off and rebuild reusing the metal ring.

They're a lot of fun to play and I was really surprised by the quality and projection of the sound.

Uchiwa Continued

Okay. Hide sewn on ring, no tears.

Next, I cut off the string I had used to stretch the hide. Then I found a piece of cardboard (it was off of the back of an old used up notebook) and cut one end of it to match the curvature of the ring and I inserted it under the flap on the backside of the head. This protected the head as I used a knife to cut the excess hide off.

Ta Da! Finished Uchiwa daiko head. My daughter calls them goat lollypops. Set it aside and let the hide dry.

Uchiwa daiko!

That's just fun to say, isn't it?  Remember when I said "maybe a future project"? Well the future is now!

I've been thinking about uchiwa daiko for a while now, so I saved up my lunch money and had some rings made, but unlike shime rings, I had them put a six inch handle on these. I got five of them. One 8 in, one 10, a 12, 14 and a 16 in.  I figured that would give me a good place to start. I wrapped them in thread tape like I had the rings for the shime to help prevent rust

I had purchased some goat skin splits a while back. They turned out to be too thin for what I had purchased them for, but I tucked them away thinking I would find some use for them eventually. This seemed like a good occasion.

I stretched the hide on the ring in much the same way I did the shime. Once I was happy with how tight it was, I stitched the head to the ring. Uchiwa only have the one line of stitching and since I was using fairly thin hide, I used small stitches. Because of the thinness of the hide I went with a wax covered thread instead of using artificial sinew.

I was trying to be diligent about keeping the stitches tight so that the hide would wrap around the ring fully, making contact with the other side of the head along the stitch line. Unfortunately at one point I was a bit over zealous, pulled the thread too hard with the intention of tightening a stitch and tore through the head. Much swearing ensued.

I spent an hour or so trying to figure out how to patch this, sew around it, or any other method that would prevent me from throwing away all the work done up to this point, but I decided that in the long run it would just be best to take this torn head off and replace with it a new, undamaged one. I carefully removed the stitches and the stretching thread and prepared another hide.

Drum Cases

A friend of mine recently asked me if he could see some of the drums I had made. As it was a practice day, they were in my vehicle, so I invited him to step out to where I was parked and have a look. As I pulled the drums out to allow him to inspect them I noticed that the edges of the heads of my shime were getting scuffed up bringing them back and forth to class every week. By nature and design they're fairly durable critters and I'm not the type to baby them unnecessarily, but it occurred to me that these scuffs and scratches would accumulate over time and that the combined effect wouldn't be desirable.

So I decided it was time to make cases.

Determined to not spend any significant amount of money on these cases, as I've been spending plenty on all these drums I've been making, I decided to use left-over materials I've had lying around from previous projects. I had some upholstery fabric tucked away, webbing left over from various things, and my wife donated some left over flannel and batting she had from a quilting project for padding and lining.

Here's the finished product. The images aren't great, as I took them with my phone. I swear I'm going to do a real photo shoot and get some high quality images sometime soon.

The under flap has a handle on it which sticks up through a hole in the outer flap. The outer flap is affixed to the under with a strip of industrial strength Velcro, and the short edges of the outer flap also Velcro to the body of the case making the whole thing fairly stout.

As mentioned above, it's fully lined and there's padding between the lining and the shell throughout.

I made two of these on this design. I have since decided that some alterations to the design are in order. I'll let you know how they work.