How Are Percussion Drums Made & Used?
From bongos to snares, drums come in a lot of different shapes and sizes and represent many different musical traditions. However, there are certain commonalities in the ways in which they are made and used.
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Construction
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Drums are typically membranophones, meaning they produce sound through a stretched skin, or membrane. Drums are made by having a skin or a sheet of plastic stretched over a wooden or metal shell. Most modern wooden drum shells are made by layering several thin plies of wood together and bending them into a cylindrical shape.
Use
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Drums and other percussion instruments produce sound by being struck. The hollow body of the drum amplifies the sound that is made when the stretched membrane is hit. Orchestral drums are designed to be struck with hard sticks or soft mallets, but hand drums like the bongo and conga are struck with the player's hands.
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Considerations
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A few drums do not fit comfortably in the usual categories. For example, some drums are played using friction rather than percussion, like the etwie friction drum, a type of African drum played by rubbing the membrane with a stick. Steel drums, which originated in Trinidad, are not membranophones but idiophones, meaning they are made of naturally sonorous material.
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References
Resources
- Photo Credit drum image by Byron Moore from Fotolia.com
