For the final 35 years, my companion & 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 generating 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 disappointed. 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 producing and tuning. MAN do you ever have to haul on the final 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 companion, 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 generating was great, but we had come along way to play.

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