I recently got an order for a purple heart doundounba. I love building these and they always turn out nice. I thought I'd document the process for those that are interested.


First thing is that I have to get the rough lumber. A lot of places sell purple heart wood as craft wood, already smooth, square, and even. Not for me. I want the rough stuff. I like the process of planing down the wood, squaring it up and getting each staved just right. It gives me more control over the process. So I got my rough purple heart lumber and started cutting to length when it dawned on me that the process might be of interest to others, so I grabbed my camera.

If I have a really wide piece, I'll rip it on the table saw first, then I cut the boards to length. It seems to be easier and that I make less cuts when I cut the wood to length before I rip it to the width.

Bellow are all of my purple heart staves for the doundounba. They have been cut to length and have all been ripped to the exact width I need for a 17" doundounba. I've got high hopes for this drum. These staves are really tight grained and some have a nice swirl that will really pop on the final drum. This is the point where I start getting really excited! I'm building a purple heart sangban along with this doundounba... so you can see the smaller staves for that at the end of the table.







The next step once I'm happy with the roughed staves is to put an angle on the staves. The angle to the edge of the staves is what makes them join up perfect to make a round barrel. This angle is crucial! Just a TINY bit off here, and you're whole project is done. The angle of the bevel is determined by the number of staves you have... really simple. Cutting these for an ashiko is a whole other story as there are far more complicated mathematics that go into those angles. So there are 360 degrees in a circle. If you have 18 staves each with 2 sides that makes 36 angles. Well these angles have to match up to a circle (360 degrees) so you simply make the angle 10 degrees on each side. The width of the stave will determine how large the diameter of the drum will be. This calculation is a little more tricky and takes into account the number of staves... here you go...

2*(Diameter/COSINE(PIE/Number of Staves)/2)*SINE(PIE/Number of Staves)

Do I do this math for every drum.... HECK NO!! I've put all my formulas in a top secret excel document that I can just plug in what size drum I want.. and whalah!! I have my answers!

So for this doundounba my diameter is 17" my number of staves is 22, so each stave will be just under 2.5 inches. I never like my staves to be too fat. A stave much larger than 2.5 will be very hard to make round.. too much work. So ...add more staves, lessen the angle of each and with width of each to make the drum more round. The more staves, the more important you get that angle just right!! This tool works like a charm!

You can make this cut on a table saw, if you have a nice blade. I find the jointer to be much more accurate and give a very smooth face which helps make the find drum solid. I love this machine. It is the heart of the staved drums that I build. I keep this baby tuned up and inside. One little booboo on seting the fence angle or with the settings of the blades, and I've got to get back to the drawing board. I could still use the staves for a smaller drum... but I like to make sure I build the drum that has been purchased.... and build it right. Keeping the blades sharp and nick free are essential to having a good solid glue up.

Here is the stave after I have ran it through the jointer at the specific angle. Just 22 more to run through and I'll be ready to glue up this doundounba!

While running these staves through I check very carefully to make sure the angles are smooth, level and most of all that the staves stay consistant. I keep the first one I run through, and make sure all the other staves are the same width. Having a perfect angle doesn't do very good if the width of the staves is different. Slight warping in the wood can cause dips in the bevel, so I might have to go over a piece more than the others... this is why I usually have 2 or so extra staves. Another issue that hits every once in a while is chip out near the end of the stave. Running it through slower helps with this, but again, it's good to have a few extra just incase they dont all turn out perfect. And if they do, you've got some extra wood for your next drum. Because, well... there will be anther! :)

After all my staves are just perfect I lay them flat on an even surface and determine which wood will look good next to each other. Sometimes the grain can match up so that a certain pair of staves just look great together.... so I play around with this for a bit.


After I get them how I want them, I flip them all over and start gluing up the staves... once they're all glued I stand them up and use a rachet clamp to pull all the staves in tight. I think I've used a bit too much glue on the sangban here... no worries though, I sand the shell down a lot, so in this case it's better to have a bit too much than not enough.



Here you see the glued up djun-djuns (the doundounba and it's smaller brother the sangban). I let the glue dry for at least 24 hours. The glue I use is stronger that the fibers in the wood. It holds 80 percent of it's strength up to 1/64 of a gap. So a tiny bit of play is good... but the better your angles match up the stronger and more solid the shell will be. 1/64 is pretty small margin of error... so check your angles before you glue up!

The other photo shows the djun-djuns all cleaned up, rough sanded and ready to be shaped and have a bearing edge slapped on.

For the bearing edge I use these:

These raps are great for shaping the bearing edge. The remove a lot more wood that a sander and really let you fine tune the shape. It takes a lot of rasping to get a good bearing edge... but it pays off spending some time on the edge as your sound will be much more warm and pure.

After sanding down the shell and shaping the bearing edge I coat the shell with oil. Sometimes BLO (Boiled Linseed Oil) and sometimes Danish Oil. I just depends on what else I plan on doing with the shell. I use Danish oil if I just want a few coats to protect the wood and darken it up. I use the BLO if I am going to put a top coat of poly-something. I usually like the wood in it's most natural state, but sometimes the polyurethane look is nice. Depends on my mood, what the customer wants and what woods I'm using.

Below is the completed doundouba shell, with a few coats of Danish Oil. I added a sound hole (I do this for the doundounba and sangban as it gives them some more volume and livens up the sound. Watch out for my next posts when I start the heading process... it's just as involved as building the shell!!!

Well it all started with an idea, as most things do around here. This idea was to have a huge drum with a Rhythm House Drums logo on it to take around when I'm out and about playing everywhere that I play. I wanted something unique to the African Percussion world, and something that people will remember, both for construction and sound. My plan was to have a set of 3 bass drums to carry melody (such as the Djun-djun also known as dunun). I'm a rather tall guy so and wanted to play them ballet style. Traditionally the djuns are played on a stand, one drum per person, playing the head with a stick and playing the bell on top of the drum with a little metal striker. When the African ballets started coming to be, there wasn't enough room on stage for all three set up this way, so they adapted. They put one fella in charge of of the djun section and turned the three drums on end so they can all 3 be played, similar to a drumset.

It's been my experience at drum circles that LOTS of people bring hand drums, mostly djembes and ashikos. These are great drums, but where there are 20 of them each hearing their own rhythm... the music can turn muddy fast. Having a solid set of djun-djun with a solid player will keep the rhythm on track and keep everyone on beat. These things are essential to keeping the rhythm alive. So.. naturally, I'm going to build a set, special for me.. with my own little twist.

Being 6'2 I opted for a long doundounba (largest of the 3 djuns), because the one I have from the Ivory Coast, is short and I have to bend over to play it ballet style. I wanted the shell to be 18x36" and I wanted the Sangban (middle djun) to be in a specific ratio to the Doundounba, and the Kenkeni (smallest) to fit in the ratio as well.

I love the sound of walnut, and it's a wonderful wood to work with. I decided to go with walnut shells and head the djuns with cowhide. So... the shells are built, though not headed. I wanted something special. I wanted a deep, pure, tone without any overtones or ringing. I decided to turn the doundounba into a drum that acted more like a sub woofer than a drum. I used some speaker calculations to figure out what size port would work well with the volume of the shell, I also decided I'd stuff coat the interior walls of the dununs with a some fiber fill.

Sound is produced by the air inside the shell heating, fiber fill slows the heating making the air inside the shell think it is in a bigger shell. This is why smaller sub woofers use a bunch of stuffing in the box, it makes the speaker appear to be larger in sound.

The fiber filling will also help absorb any funky overtones or rings that might be produced.

So about a month ago I finished up my doundounba / sub woofer drum. When the skin was wet and had a lot of flexibility and vibration, the drum sounded awesome! Lots of low end, all the good stuff with none of the bad stuff. I was super excited. As the skin dried, it also tightened up and lost flexibility (as they always do). Since I used such a thick hide, I had a drum that was exactly what I was after. It was a short burst of bass... and I hated it! I realized very quickly that the sound I was after all along.. wasn't the sound I wanted. I want a drum, not a subwoofer! I've played around with it mostly in dissapointment for the past bit, and finally tonight decided it was time to do something. My shell was solid, and I was extremely hopeful of getting a killer bass drum out of this. With some new knowledge under my belt, I started the horrible process of taking the heads off the doundounba. (these types of drums have the heads attached using a style of pulling rope and using specific knots) It's not as easy as loosing a few screws...

With the head off I made these changes:
I re cut the bearing edge to make it not as steep.
I thinned the bearing edge a tad because before the rings were too tight on the shell and it was hard to tune.
I gutted all the foam out from inside the shell (well not all the filling but at least 90 percent of it)
I soaked the skins to make sure they were flexible and would sit down right with the new bearing edge shape.

I was soaking the skins for about 3 hours... while I was working on the shell. One other thing I did was switched out this super fat rope with some thinner rope I had. I wanted the fat rope for the visual aspect, but it was too stretchy and didn't hold up well. The new rope was MUCH better. I pulled the skin down on the shell super tight in hopes that when the it dries out, it will thin itself out just a bit. I'll probably have to loosen up the head once the skin is dry to get a nice low end, but I think the pressure will help even out the hide some.

So far it seems that this drum will be what I was after. It's hard to tell with a wet hide, but I have high hopes. I'll be able to tell in the next few days if this was worth the remake. Once I get this drum done successfully, I'll start on my sangban and kenkeni in the same style so they match sonically.

Here is the shell of my doundounba...