Troubleshooting Your Drum

Whether you have just received your drum or have worked with it for awhile, there are a number of things that can affect your drum’s voice. Fortunately, most of them are easy to fix.

1. The sound is flat or thumpy. The head may look wavy or lumpy. The head feels soft and you can move it with your finger. The holes and lacings are intact.

This is caused by moisture. Like your own skin, rawhide loosens when it is damp and tightens when it is dry.

It can happen when the rainy season starts, before you have turned on your heat,

in Spring after you turn off your heat,

during shipping if the drum is exposed to high humidity situations,

when the dew falls when you are outdoors,

cloudy days,

long, hot showers,

near an ocean or river,

pretty much any time the humidity is high.

This more commonly affects thin hides, especially deer, goat and thinner horse. This does not hurt your drum in any way and is easy to resolve. Your drum just needs to be dried. You can use a gentle heat source such as a hair dryer. Keep the warm air moving over the surface and keep checking the voice of the drum, it usually only takes a few minutes. If you are outdoors, you can heat it near the fire or above your stove, just keep an eye on it and turn it frequently. Sometimes just waiting overnight and checking it the next less humid day will resolve it.

This can be mitigated by keeping your drum in a fabric bag or blanket, or even wrapping it in a sealed plastic bag. It is part of the life cycle of the drum; if it were laced so tight as to not go flat under wet conditions, it would be at risk of breaking during low humidity conditions.

2. Damage from Low Humidity situations. THIS CAN KILL YOUR DRUM!

Getting too dry can kill your drum. Rawhide tightens and keeps tightening when it gets too dry, sometimes so much that the hoop or the rawhide itself can’t stand up to the pressure. Thicker hides like Buffalo and Elk can easily break hoops. Thinner hides will tear, break lacings or holes as they get pulled past their maximum strength.

Signs that your drum is in distress:

The normal tone of your drum seems high or tinny. This is the first warning of dryness.

Pops, creaks and other sounds will come from the drum while it is not being played. This shows that it is undergoing too much stress. If you catch it at this point, you should be able to re-moisturize it and keep it healthy (see below).

A sharp crack or bang is never good news.

Low humidity situations don’t just happen in the Summer. Hard freezes are just as hard on drums.

When you turn your heater on in the winter, it removes moisture from the air in pockets depending on heater vent placement. Don’t place your drum on or near a heater vent or anywhere that warm air blows.

Fireplaces also remove moisture from the air in a fairly large area around the fireplace. Also, the area behind a fireplace can also get very warm & dry.

Sunlight also removes moisture. Keep your drum in a place that never gets direct sunlight.

Any sunlight going through glass is magnified. Never EVER leave your drum in the car, or on a glassed-in porch, etc.

Heat rises. It is warmer (thus drier) nearer the celiling.

Protecting your drum before it breaks:

The trick is to keep the humidity up in the area of your drum. This can be done by spritzing the drum a few times a day with a spray bottle of pure water, putting a damp towel in the back of the drum (inside a drum bag, blanket or plastic bag works best). We recommend a humidity gauge for the area where you are going to keep your drum, and if you have frequent low humidity (as in the desert or mountains), we recommend a humidifier for your drum room (your skin & sinuses will thank you as well).

Drums can break in a variety of ways.

A. The sound is flat or thumpy. The head may look wavy or lumpy. The head feels hard and you can’t move it much with your finger. The holes and lacings are intact.

You have likely broken your hoop. Thick hides, such as buffalo and elk, have a massive amount of strength as they compress. The hoop is most likely to break at the weakest section, which is the overlap or tang, where it is glued together. For this reason, we recommend maple hoops for the thicker, stronger hides,, as these are multi-ply and much stronger than our hand wrapped cedar hoops.

So long as the rest of the drum is intact (head & lacing), you can repair this yourself if you are so inclined, see the info on Repairing Your Own Drum.

We also do drum repair for those who don’t want to tackle it themselves.

B. The drum looks misshapen but still sounds pretty good.

A hoop that does not break can taco or deform under great stress. If it has just happened, soaking the drum in cool water and letting it dry again may bring the hoop back to a normal shape, but in most cases the hoop needs to be replaced. Again, this is something you can do yourself if you buy a new hoop. Centralia Fur and Hide carries maple hoops in various sizes, or you can send it to us for repair.

C. The Lacing or the Holes in the Drum Head have snapped.

With thinner hides, the hide itself is more likely to break when put under stress. At this point, replacement of the head and/or lacings is required to bring your drum back to life. Centralia Fur and Hide also sells pre-cut (but not punched) drum heads, or you can send it to us for repair.

D. If the hoop, holes and lacings hold, extreme dryness can make your actual drum head split because the tensile strength of rawhide is so extreme.

3. My Drum is Buzzing!!!

This one has nothing to do with the weather , and is instead caused by several different things.

The most common, especially in Horse & some Buffalo & Elk, is created by a little piece of flesh on the underside of the drum which has come loose and is vibrating against the head. To find these, play the drum and notice the area in which you are hearing the buzz. Run your hand over the bottom of your drum head and look for anything that is loose. Pull it off or carefully cut it off. Listen to the drum again, repeat until the buzzing stops or you can’t find any more loose pieces of flesh. This is by far the most common cause of a buzz in your drum.

The lacings very occasionally will vibrate on each other or the drum head will vibrate on the hoop. To fix this, spray the drum head and lacings with cold water, wiggle them around as much as you can, play the drum around the edge and sides, and let the drum dry overnight. The objective here is to release any adhesions that may have happened. You can do this as many times as you like, it won’t hurt your drum.

If you absolutely cannot find the buzz, you can send it to us with return shipping and we will resolve it for you.

4. My drum has an area that I can see through! Is it going to break there?

The dermis (outside layer) of the animal’s skin gives the strength to the drum head & lacing. Skin that has a fat layer below it is opaque (not see through), skin with no fat layer is translucent (light passes through it, you can see through it). Since the fat layer makes no difference to the strength of the hide, translucent parts are just as strong as the opaque parts, and make lovely patterns on a lot of the hides.