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.