HowToBuildadrum.com

Well The secret’s finally out! The site that I have been working on for several years now is HowToBuildADrum.com. Guess what it is about

The site arose primarily from my own experiences trying to find information on drumbuilding. I was very fortunate to have Rob Forkner and Darius Bartlett as teachers and mentors to spur my interest however my own research took me far and wide.

Tools of the trade

There are of course many resources available that deal with drumbuilding, they tend to fall into two distinct camps.

Ebooks & tutorials that show you how to attach hardware and paint a pre-made shell. To my mind and with the greatest of respect that’s mostly drum assembly.

The other type of information relates to stave shell drumbuilding where the shell is constructed from small pieces of wood that are stuck together to make a circle that is then finished on a lathe. These are beautiful drums. A lot of the informatiomn however seems to be held in the form of forum posts. We are grateful to our drum brothers at Ghostnote and Drumshed for their work in this field.

What there did not seem to be a lot of information about was making drums from laminated plywood. This is in fact the way that most commercial drums are made, drumsets, bodhrans, framedrums.  It is the same way that the ‘Keller’ shells used in the drum assembly tutorials are made.

This started out as an exercise in how to build a bodhran and of course it does not take much to realise that these shells can be used for snare drums (specfic sizes though), framedrums and any drum that uses a wooden cylinder.

As the site became subject to this kind of evolution, it is developing a somewhat modular structure. Build the shell the decide which of several directions you want after that.

The site is currently in beta mode which means that we have a lot of stuff on there but it’s not yet ready for subscription. In fact for the month of January 2011 you can get a lifetime subscription for free simply by helping out in the beta testing and liking the Howtobuildadrum facebook page

I’ll update this page with more information as it occurs but I’m delighted that the site is moving, albeit slowly!

Thanks

Paul