The tambourine is a frame membranophone when the head is struck and an idiophone when shaken. Instructions on making tambourines can be found many places, but, having never seen one that used gourd wood for the frame, we thought we’d give it a try. Jingles can be fashioned from plain copper or bronze sheets, but […]
Instrument Type: Membranophone
A class of musical instruments whose sound is generated by striking, rubbing, or singing into a stretched membrane.
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Mighty Hourglass
Inspired by the design of a djembe, a powerful hourglass shaped drum constructed from a pair of gourds.In terms of size, this is our largest all–gourd drum. The Verbose Talking Drum is larger but has a significant non–gourd component. In this project we used fasteners and epoxy to attach two large gourds together to make a drum approximating the shape of an hourglass. With some wood accents and a black goatskin, the […]
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Traditional Talking Drum
A traditional talking drum constructed using the more–or–less traditional approach. The player can change the head tension by squeezing the lacing on the drum when played.The basic idea in designing and constructing a talking drum is to incorporate some way of quickly and easily changing the tension of the drumhead while playing. By providing room on the lacing for an arm to squeeze, the player is able to change the head tension as the drum is played. Our design is […]
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Double Membrane Drum
Modelled after a double-headed Native American drum. Constructed from a kettle gourd.This is a classic design used by peoples from all over the world. The shell is often a section of hollowed out tree trunk, especially cottonwood found in the southern USA. We made ours out of a gourd. It takes a pretty big gourd to do this project justice. We used a kettle gourd. In […]
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Gourd Bongos
A compact pair of drums that produce two different pitches, joined with a frame.Gourd Bongos are essentially two Basic Hand Drums of dissimilar size that produce two different pitches, paired in some way to imply that they are a set. When entertaining ideas for building a new instrument or a novel approach to constructing an existing one, solutions to constraints that do not involve the mechanism of sound […]
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Gourd Snare
A gourd snare drum constructed by integrating a sound generator into a double–layer head.The Gourd Snare is one possible answer to the question, what kind of modifications can be made to a drum’s membrane such that it still produces an interesting sound? And if one were to attempt to assemble a drum kit made from gourds, a gourd snare would be requisite. The gourd snare shown in the featured […]
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Basic Hand Drum
The principal gourd drum design. These simple drums, when built with care and good materials, are attractive, durable, excellent–sounding instruments.Basic Hand Drums are typical entry-level instruments in the craft of gourd percussion instrument making. They are frequently constructed using a calabash (a.k.a “bottle gourd”). A calabash, Lagenaria siceraria, is a member of the Cucurbitaceae, or gourd family, to which cucumber, zucchini, a variety of melons, the venerable pumpkin, and many other plants that look like […]
