caring for your drum
Caring for your Shamanic Drum
Your drum is a living being. It will become your teacher, your healer and your friend. As such, you will want to look after it and care for it properly. When it is cared for, your drum will want to sing for a long, long time. Having a hide drum, it is necessary to consider where you store your drum, how you transport it, where you play it, and how you look after it.
Transporting your drum
When traveling with your drum, be sure it is wrapped up and covered up to be protected. If it is going to be traveling in your hands or on your lap the whole time, you may just want to wrap it in a scarf or blanket. Many people, in order to take their drum to drumming circles or groups, will make a bag by lining or modifying a pillow case. Often, you can find Irish Bodhran bags that will fit the Shamanic Drums and, as the Irish drums are typically deeper, this allows plenty of room in the back to carry other medicine tools that you want to keep with your drum.
Drumming outdoors
Just like our skin, the skin on the drum will become taut or slack as the temperature and humidity changes in the place that you are drumming. If we are drumming for the sunrise on a cold and damp morning, for example, we are going to find that drumhead will start going slack andit makes the sound of the drum go flat. Later on that warm and dry day, we will find that the drumhead will become taut again and the drum is singing beautiful. However, as we move into the afternoon, drumming under the hot summer sun, the drumhead can become extremely taut and the pitch of the drum becomes very high pitched, and somewhat tinny. We need to take care of our drums in these extremes of temperature and humidity and there are a number of ways you can do this.
1- When you are not actually drumming, you can place your drum in its drum bag to keep the damp of heat from it. It is not a good idea to leave a hide drum in the damp grass.
2- Alternatively, and preferably, hug your drum, keeping it close to your chest, even underneath your coat. This way your body heat will help keep the drum head warm.
3-When drumming around a fire, you can hold the drum head towards the fire until it is taut and singing once more. Do not, however, place your drum on the floor next to the heat of the fire – just as our skin burns when placed next to a fire, so will your drum. 4- On a hot and sunny day, it is a good idea to have a small water spray to keep the drum head from getting too dry and tight. Avoid leaving your drum out in the sun for too long – try and find some shade regularly.
5- If your drum is cold, warm it gradually. If your drum is hot, cool it slowly. Be patient in restoring your drums tone before playing.
Storing your drum
At home and indoors, it is much easier to keep our drums at a comfortable temperature
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1- Keep your drum somewhere cool and dry in your house, where it is not going to experience these extremes of temperature. Shamanic Drums are best kept somewhere in the house, off the ground, wrapped in their blanket or their bag.
2- Avoid storing your drum above a heater or in front of a south facing window; don’t leave it in the conservatory or in the damp corner of the shed.
Storing your drum somewhere safe is important. If a drum is stored somewhere where it gets extremely hot, like being left in a car, it could damage your drum to the point that the drumhead become so tight that it breaks the wooden hoop, after which the drum would need to be remade. By leaving a drum in the car, the hide on the drum head becomes stretched to the point that, at normal room temperature, it will soundflat. A drum left in cold damp conditions for a very long time may become so flat that it is rarely playable. It takes a very long time after this to reacclimatize the drum.
Most people st
