Tongue Drum

Very Cool Micheal! I’d love to hear it.

Neet.. Who uses those? Is that a native instrument?

Michael that is very very nice. I love the carved sun sound hole. I have a grand daughter that would love one. Would you share your pattern?

Way sweet! If you’re sharing your pattern or blogging the process, I’d like to know too!

-- "Bordnerizing" perfectly good lumber for over a decade.

Nice work I understand paydauk has great tonal qualities also.

Jim

-- Jim from Heirloom Woodshop, custom furniture ,maker, woodworking school, heirloomwoodshop.com

beautiful!

-- ~ Debbie, Canada (http://www.execulink.com/~yohan)

Thanks for all the kind words. I edited the project. Added the design sheet that I used. If you can capture the picture and print it out to scale, you should just glue it to a piece of wood and cut it out. The dashed lines represent the interior lines of the box below. Make it as deep as you like, it should be 4” or deeper. I also found that if I used felt circles for feet, I could get a better sound out of it. If you put hard feet on the drum box, if jumps around on the table and makes a terrible noise:)

-- Micheal, Boise, Id

What sort of research did you do on lengths and tuning? I would be interested to know so as to figure out how to tune/change the design?

Ok, Here you go for length and tuning I found this to be the best information I could find;
The width doesn’t have much effect, but the thickness and length do. Removing wood from the tip of the tongue makes the pitch higher, from the base of the tongue makes it lower. If you want to get a close to a particular tuning before tuning the thickness, you can calculate the lengths. Every 3% increase in length makes the tone lower by one semitone. So to get a pentatonic scale, you make six bars by multiplying the length of the longest by the following percentages: 94, 87, 82, 77, 71. Alternatively you can work out how long the middle pair of bars will be, halve it, and multiply that by these percentages: 84, 89, 97, 103, 109, 119. Then build the three pairs as 84&119, 89&109, 97&103, and tune it by removing wood from underneath. For a vibrating string it’s about 6%, but vibrating bars don’t work like that. This answer is theoretical only but should work. The length of the tongue should determine the pitch produced so first thing is to both determine the pitch you want and find something like a tuning fork, piano, synthesizer or oscilator which can produce it at will. Then make a single tongue and see how its pitch compares to you source pitch. Just keep cutting bits off till you get it right. Measure the length of this tongue. Now a tongue twice as long should have a fundamental frequency half that of your first tongue or an octave below. Now you have the information you need to convert length to pitch. You will have to visit the Internet to find the intervals in the western music system because the 12 notes in western music are not linear steps like the 21 in Indian or Asian music. Then all you need do is convert musical intervals to mm and cut away.
Hope this helps.

-- Micheal, Boise, Id

COOOOOOOOOL. My grandkids would love this.

-- Jerry--A man can never have enough tools or clamps

Sweet!

-- Dennis Zongker

I love this, Me and my son just made some and they sound sooooooo cool i can play for hours…

-- Wood and Glass they kick (well you know) Have a great day - Dug

that is way cool, but how do you play it with your tounge?

-- It's not a sickness, i can stop buying tools anytime.

That’s really nice.
There’s a guy that’s been doing these forever who has plans and templates available.
Magical tongue drums, with all the tricks to get the cool harmonic tones and all that.
Dialing in the sound can be tricky, and this is the key to the kingdom.
Check out http://tonguedrum.com/construction.html