| Project by bobasaurus | posted 84 days ago | 798 views | 2 times favorited | 7 comments |  |
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This is a tongue drum that I made while taking a basic woodworking class in college. It’s made with a padauk soundboard, hard maple for the box, walnut splines, and a baltic birch plywood bottom. The side joinery is mitered (with splines), though I left a square section extending up on the longer sides to hold the sound board firmly during and after tuning. The bottom is held in with rabbets. I put considerable effort into tuning this drum, but it resulted in failure. I carefully planned surface area ratios of the tongues ahead of time to hopefully be on a pentatonic scale, then I carved/chiseled out the tongues while measuring pitch with a microphone and spectrum analyzer program. I managed to get about half of them on a scale when the soundboard was off the box, but then the overtones were too much to tune the rest. By the time I glued the thing together, the pitches had completely changed (lesson learned: tune with the soundboard on the box). I had lots of fun making this instrument, and I’ll likely make more in the future. Woodworking class was like a little vacation during my intense 19 credit hour final semester. Now I’m slowly building up a stock of small tools to continue making great projects in the future.
Bigger versions of these pictures:
http://imgur.com/QGYjf.jpg
http://imgur.com/wO6Ox.jpg
http://imgur.com/Lcozm.jpg
http://imgur.com/Q9OLN.jpg
http://imgur.com/mUEBa.jpg
http://imgur.com/hNQ9J.jpg
7 comments so far
tomakazi
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246 posts in 183 days
posted 84 days ago
Nice work, I’ve seen these tuned but I don’t know how they did it. I am a drummer and we never cared too much about being in tune, as long as it sounds good.
-- I'm not here for your amusement. You're here for mine - Johnny Rotten
stefang
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1656 posts in 234 days
posted 84 days ago
Very interesting. I’ve never seen one of these before. It looks like you did a beautiful job on the construction. Unfortunate about the tuning, but that’s how we learn. Thanks for posting.
-- Mike, American in Norway
huff
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1630 posts in 185 days
posted 83 days ago
Nice job on the drum. I didn’t realize you could tune on the them…... I thought you just cut the design out in the top and that was it. Very cool.
-- John @ Myrtle Beach
Matt Vredenburg
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48 posts in 314 days
posted 83 days ago
Bob. Nice job. This is going to be a bit sentimental for me because I am in my forties now and have been working with wood for since my first experience in shop class as a 6th grader. My first project, back then, was making a tone box (slightly different then yours – straight slots vs. curved). Mine was made out of mahogany and I my mother to this day remembers driving around town looking for mahogany (she realized they didn’t carry it at the local lumber store). Everytime I visit my mothers home, she still has my tone box on display and my daughter, nephews and nieces all play it and seems to enjoy the it a lot.
I know you think what you made is a tone box, but from my experience you’ve made a heirloom that you can look back at and will remind you of the start of a wonderful hobby/career called Woodworking.
-- Matt, Arizona
a1Jim
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17211 posts in 477 days
posted 83 days ago
Looks great the Tongue drums I’ve seen have great tone .
-- Jim from Heirloom Woodshop, custom furniture ,maker, woodworking school, heirloomwoodshop.com
Philip
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6 posts in 713 days
posted 82 days ago
Great looking even if it isn’t tuned.
Do the inlaid dots have any effect on the tone?
When tuning, does it make a difference whether or not the tuning cuts are jagged or smooth?
bobasaurus
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16 posts in 84 days
posted 82 days ago
The inlay is just for decoration. It doesn’t affect the tuning (at least, I don’t think it does). As for the chisel marks, I hadn’t thought about it. Maybe smoother cuts would have a cleaner sound, but I had already sunk a good 10 hours into chisel-tuning at the point where I gave up… maybe next time if I’m feeling really ambitious.