Almost every drum experiences the winter blues. Is your drum so tight that it hurts your ears? Cats scream? Windows break? Lol This has nothing to do with lack of vitamin D but rather Drums really hate low humidity. And most houses in the winter are bone dry and your drum is just longing for spring rains.
You see, the skin on every drum expands and contracts with the level of humidity in the air. High humidity: skin grows tone gets deeper and Low Humidity: skin tightens tone gets higher. Most heated homes live between 30 to 40% humidity which drums hate. We always pull our drums with a tension so that your drum will sound great in more humid situations, which is where we ‘tend’ to play our drums…outside around the fire, late in the evening etc. That is when you want your drum to sound perfect in those situations. If we pulled it so loose that is sounds nice a low in tone in the winter…that same drum skin will grow, absorbing humidity in rainy situations and go completely flat…flop flop flop.
We always recommend a leather bag or blankie for our drums. But leather is really magic for helping a drum resist high humidity changes…it doesn’t really help low because over a couple days the humidity inside your leather bag will match the humidity in the rest of your house.
Sort of…bear grease will help your dry drum skin maintain suppleness and flexibility. So definitely bear grease will extend the life of your drum. But it doesn’t help tune a drum.
The best trick for lowering the tone of a drum in the winter (or in the desert come summer). Find a towel large enough to entirely wrap your drum. Moisten the towel substantially although NOT dripping. Wrap you drum in the damp towel for about 20 minutes. Pull out your drum and test it. Feel free to give it a couple nice hard hits…you will hear your drum go from pine pink to boom boom. It might take another 15 minutes but this is the secret. You can not just add water directly to a skin because the hide will absorb the water very quickly and the skin membrane will can crack.
Years ago we were at a powwow on a terribly hot July day. A group was playing on our of our big drums and some ‘dumb dumb’ thought they were ‘honouring’ the spirit and reached over the drum and poured a bottle of water on the drum while they were playing a song. Next honour beat….the drum exploded. Slow and steady is the trick for adding humidity to a skin and you can literally tune your drum.
So as we approach what might be the coldest weekend of the year (here in eastern Canada we are expecting -35). Don’t go outside this weekend but rather tune up your drum and have some fun….imagining days of humidity to come!! Please note that your drum will dry out again in short order, so this tuning technique is for every time you need…
