Homemade: Stu's DjunBasket

Do you need a nice loud drum circle drum, but don't want to invest in(and lug around) a big heavy djun djun? Or perhaps you need a nice inexpensive drum to practice freehand on? The DjunBasket is for you. It's easy to make, very light in weight, and versatile enough to find a range of uses. One can play it with sticks or with hands, depending upon the situation and the tuning..

LISTEN to stu's DjunBasket
(played with sticks, as above right. Hand drumming examples to be posted soon.)

The djunbasket is one of a family of homemade drums, which we will eventually present in it's entirety, with whole sets of rhythms and practice exercises to help teachers using homemade percussion with their students.

Ingredients

1. One aluminum bushel basket - Of course, any kind of metal pail will make a drum, but for several reasons, we urge you to consider this particular type of aluminum bushel basket..

2. Approximately three radiator hose clamps, enough to encircle the basket in a connected chain.

3. One goat or calf skin, 20 to 22 inches in diameter. If you choose calf, try to get one that's not too thick. (If it is thicker than the lip around the edge of the basket, you may have some problems getting the ring to hold.)

4. A razor or X-acto knife, needle nosed pliers, screwdriver

Are you set to go? Okay, let's make the drum..

1. take the skin, and soak it in lukewarm water in the tub, until it is quite pliable, but not so long as to make it thick and flabby; about two or three hours for goat, perhaps a bit longer for calf.

2. while the head is soaking, get the rest of it ready, Join the radiator hose clamps into a circle, end to end, and tighten them down, just enough to make the ring of hose clamps about two or three inches bigger than the diameter of the basket.

3. Place the wet head on the basket and center it.

4. Place the chain of hose clamps down upon the head, and pull down around the skin and basket. Tighten slowly and carefully most of the way, allowing a bit of play for pulling on the skin. At this stage, if you have a friend to help you pull the head down on all sides as you continue to tighten, that will help. It's a little tricky, because tighening anywhere on the ring of clamps will tighten all the way around. Finally tighten it all the way down; you don't want it slipping later, when you are playing it hard with a stick. Put it up and let it dry overnight.

5. Your drum is now playable. You'll want to play it a bit before trimmming off the excess skin, test it out; when you are satisfied that you won't need to resoak and remount the head, take the razor knife and CAREFULLY trim off the excess skin.

Chris Bittner of www.drumworksbychris.com made this wise suggestion: "The skin will shrink under the clamp when it dries, so make sure and tighten it one last time when it's dry, to take up any slack." You want to make sure it doesn't loosen up under the stickwork.

6. To make this drum better next time we intend to do the following:

The hose clamp is a tiny bit wider than the space between the lip around the top edge and the handle mounting; it diidn't quite fit in there perfectly. Next time, we'll take a dremmel tool and take off just a tiny bit of the width of the hose clamp chain where it meets the handles.

Since I am planning to use it for a djun djun substitute, we'll do the next one in heavier calf. For hand use, we'd make it goat, and pull it tighter when applying the head. We may do a double headed one in goat, but I need to buy a grinder first.

We haven't mentioned decorating it, but that would help to personalize it a lot. We purposely left this one plain.

Anyway, please send feedback. Thanks for looking..

stu