Parts of a Drum

Video Transcript

"In this clip I am going to talk to you about the basic piece that every drum has. This is a drum it is actually a tom tom, the hi tom of my drum set. It is made up of the shell which is a cylindrical piece of wood. This shell is made of plywood so each piece of wood is glued to each other and wrapped in a circle, that is how it is made. This here is the hoop and it is made out of wood, it can also be made out of metal. This is the lug which attaches the drum head to the drum shell. This is the drum head and it is made out of plastic. Back in the day they used to be made out of calf skin. Those were the original ones. But plastic is now preferred because of the sound and its durability and here is the most important part of the drum is the bearing edge. The bearing edge is the wood, the shell that is cut at an angle and the amount of contact wood has with the skin is what determines the sound of the drum. So if it is flat, if the bearing edge were flat like this the drum sound would be completely dead, you wouldn't hear anything. So they are cut on angles like that or they can be a little rounded off and sharpened like that and each way they are cut makes it a little different sound. This is the tom holder right here. This is to hold it up and that is pretty much it for the drum, very simple."