What Items Do I Need To Make A Hand Drum?
How to make a simple hand drum that children will love and have a ton of fun with! When I found out we would be going online with piano lessons I decided to do this fun project with my students so that we could use the drums to tap out our rhythms during our online lessons. My first stop was Amazon and the the Dollar Store!
Any bowl will seriously do! Kids can even grab an old, unused bowl from home. Because I had almost 40 drums that we needed to make I bought smaller, shiny, blue bowls from the Dollar Store. The only other thing I really needed was clear packaging tape. I ordered 3 rolls and used 2.5 of them for 36 bowls. Then you can’t forget the decorations which was colored duct tape and stickers.
How Do I Make My Drum?
Once you have your bowl and tape then the project begins. You take your bowl and put one piece of tape across the top vertically starting on the edge. Pull the tape tight and continue putting tape across the bowl and overlapping 1/4 of an inch until tape is all the way across. Now you will do the same thing but go horizontally over the other tape to reinforce the drum head.
To decorate the bowl a bit we used red duct tape to go across the middle of the bowl. This thicker tape also gives it a different sound. When we tapped on the clear tape and the duct tape they both produced different sounds. My students also loved using the different color tape to put their initial on on the drum.
More Fun With Your Drum
Stickers are also a fun way to decorate a drum. A few of my students had stickers from home that they wanted to spruce up their drums with. Stickers can also be added in between the the layers of tape to protect the stickers. For a nice surprise add beads to the inside of the bowl which would make it a shaker as well. Lastly don’t forget to make drums with different size bowls to explore different sounds.
Have fun exploring different ways to decorate! Above all have fun tapping out rhythms! Music is fun!
In the picture on the left the students decided to make the bowl a hat before we made the drums!
For more information on online lessons please visit us at www.BidwellSchoolofMusic.com
