Making Heads for Shimedaiko Part 1

This article will be in three parts, posted consecutively here in my blog. I would try to do it all in one post, but I'm not sure if I can fit all the photos into a single entry. If you use these instructions, I'll be happy to hear your feedback and I'll try to make any additions or corrections that you might point out to me.

Anything that humans can do is a thing that can be done by any human who is able to take all the steps in the right order. That’s my message, even if you aren’t especially interested in making your own Japanese drums. Some tasks in any person’s life can seem daunting at first, but it always comes down to two decisions, then a third and so on. The first decision is whether you want to do a particular thing. Next is knowing the first step to take, then the next step and so on. Armed with that knowledge, never be afraid to try anything that you want to do. It’s only a matter of working through the steps.

The first step, as in most projects, is to gather all of the materials and tools you’ll need. Here’s my list:

A hoop made of round steel rod and welded or forged solidly (for the style and type of shime I’m making, I use a 14 inch hoop made of 3/8 inch rod. You could use ¼ inch rod for a decorative drum or one that won’t be played hard or ½ inch rod if you’re really hard-core)

A piece of rawhide (cow skin) at least 4 inches larger than your hoop—in this case, an 18-inch round. For a decorative drum, any hide will work. For a drum to be played lightly, you can use 4-5 ounce hide. For a drum to be played wadaiko-style, use 6-8 ounce or heavier hide with no holes or weak spots.

A tub large enough to soak the hide without bending it much, filled with…

Water. Use COLD water only and no additives. If the tap water in your area has a lot of chlorine in it, use a few tablespoons of baking soda to neutralize the acidity.

21 pieces of ¼ inch dowel about 1-1/2 inches long with one end rounded smooth.

A ½ inch wood chisel

A hammer—your constant companion during all phases of this project. Be comfortable with your hammer.

A disposable piece of plywood or paneling that you can lay the hide on to cut slots with the chisel.

About 20 feet of heavy twine. The right twine should not a) break no matter how hard you pull it apart with your hands or b) cut into your hands as you test it by pulling.

Teflon tape or smooth-finished water-resistant duct tape (I use white duct tape)

KY jelly—doesn’t need to be spermicidal for this purpose.

That’s all of the “phase one” supplies, but phase 1.1 will be done right after phase one, so have all of THIS stuff ready as well:

A fine-point wood punch/ awl

About 18 feet of artificial sinew—“natural” color.

A heavy-duty sewing needle with an eye big enough to thread it with artificial sinew.

Your hammer and disposable plywood working surface from phase one.

Tough hands or leather gloves on your strong hands.

The patience and determination of some mythical drum-making creature. This project will take most of an 8-hour day. Dry hide is very difficult to work and hide that has been kept wet for too long will begin to mildew or worse. Don’t start this project unless you have the time to finish it.

It starts with wanting a new shime head and not wanting to pay the big bucks to buy one from someone else. Making shime heads is a very labor-intensive job and people want to get paid for their work, so shime heads can be expensive if you buy one from a professional shime head maker. You look at a shime and you see its elegant simplicity and you say to yourself “How hard could this be?” You’re about to find out…

The next step is shopping for rawhide. I’ve gotten some good hide from Tandy Leather Factory, but not every piece of hide I’ve gotten from them has been very good. From some suppliers, it is better NOT to buy it without looking at it first. If you buy hide from Stern Tanning, they understand drum-making and you can count on getting the good stuff. Specify the weight you want when ordering. Rawhide weight refers to the average number of ounces an average square foot of the hide will weigh. Taiko-grade rawhide will weigh at least 6 ounces per square foot, but heavier is better.

Then…waiting. While you’re waiting for your hide to arrive, either make or have someone make a 14 inch steel ring out of ¼-inch to ½-inch smooth round steel rod. I use 3/8” rod and it works well. If you make your own, the length of the rod is this:

14-inch diameter multiplied by pi (3.14)

I give this common formula for two reasons: you might want to do a custom size—for a bigger or smaller shime or an okedo and you will need to determine the spacing for your pulls and the length of the piece of sinew you’ll use to stitch the hide onto the ring. And because you’ll need something to do while you wait.

I’m waiting right now, so I’m writing out these directions. My 18-inch round is soaking right now and it isn’t quite pliable enough yet. It takes a good 24 hours of soaking for heavy hide to get soft enough. It should be as pliable as an udon noodle. You should be able to fold it back on itself in a tight loop without ANY pressure. Do not bend dry hide! It will crack.

Properly soaked hide will be about twice as thick as it was when dry. Oh, one more thing: Natural rawhide is much stronger, more durable and thicker than bleached rawhide. I always use natural because I want my drumheads to last as long as possible. My group is pretty rough on drumheads. We hit HARD. I want all of our drums to be as strong as I can make them, so we can play as hard as we want.

I might be going on a little too much about soaking, but…natural rawhide will usually have some small variations in the density and these will show up during soaking as lighter and darker areas. If it’s well-soaked, the whole piece should be uniformly opaque—you’ll be able to see through it. If it has some spots that still look whitish and non-opaque, it will need to soak a little longer. Soak time for heavy rawhide will be at least 20 hours, but not more than 30 hours. Your actual soak time will be determined by pliability and opacity, not really by time, but keeping it wet too long can cause mold, rot or other unpleasant things. Keep curious dogs away from rawhide at all times. Dogs understand snacking, but they don’t understand drum-making.

Once your round has soaked completely, you might notice that it has grown slightly and it may not be as round as it was when it was dry. That’s normal. That’s also why I told you about calculating a circumference and why the next step is done after soaking.

You’ll need to mark out some evenly-spaced holes for the places to pull the hide tight onto the ring. If you’re making a 14-inch head (for a shime with a 10-inch body) the measurements I’m going to give will work. Otherwise, multiply the diameter by 3.14 and divide that product by something between 2.5 and 3 until you get something close to a whole odd number. I mean an odd number without a fraction.

I decided in advance that 21 pulls would be about right for a 14-inch head and that they would be spaced about 2-7/8 inches apart. My hide started as an 18-inch round when it was dry and grew to 19-1/2 inches wet. 19.5 times 3.14 equals a circumference of 61.23 inches. If I divide that by my pre-selected 21 pulls, I know I’ll have the center of a pull every 2-7/8 inches around the circumference and I can mark these out with a Sharpie like this:

Note: It does need to be an ODD number of pulls so that you can tie the end of the pulling twine back to itself.

Wipe the excess water off of the hide so you can make marks on it. Pencils, crayons and ball-point pens won’t make a mark on wet hide at all, so I use a felt-tip permanent marker. The outer edge will get trimmed off later. Look at both sides of the hide. One side is smoother than the other. The smooth side will be the outer side on the finished drum; the smooth side is the playing surface. Keep track of which side is which during the next few steps.

A note here on how I like to work: I make my calculations and my marks before I do any cutting for a very simple reason. I don’t want to handle too many tools or do too many separate operations at the same time; while I’m marking, I only want to handle my tape measure and my marker, then when I’m cutting, I only have to concentrate on my hammer and chisel. For this reason, I do only one step at a time. That keeps it simple and manageable for me.

With that in mind, after I mark the spacing of the slots I’m going to make, I mark another set of lines about 3/4 of an inch off the edge of the hide, so that the two marks—in a T shape—tell me exactly where to place my chisel each time. Using pieces of dowel to tension the hide onto the ring is my “innovation”. The articles I’ve seen about making shime heads have said to merely put the twine through the hide, but I find that most twine will rip the hide if I pull it very tight. One article even said to use fishing line to pull the hide tight onto the ring. Ouch! I do not recommend using fishing line for this job at all. I use ¼-inch twine made of a cotton/poly blend and it doesn’t hurt my fingers to pull on it. I don’t believe in hurting myself to make a drum.

Once I have all my marks, I use my hammer and wood chisel to cut a pair of slots at each place I’ve marked. For this particular head, I make these slots ½-inch long and ½-inch apart. The slot needs to be about twice as long as the diameter of the piece of dowel. Since I’m using ¼-inch dowel, I make ½-inch slots. For 3/8-inch dowels, I’d make ¾-inch slots.

After all the slots are cut, I begin pushing the dowels through them. I start from the smooth side—with the hide back in the soak-tub so that the slots are nice and slippery. With the smooth side up, I push a dowel into one slot, then back out through the next slot ½-inch away. They should fit snug, so it will be kind of hard to push the dowels through the slots. The water helps; so does giving the dowel a little twist on the way through. Sometimes I put the hide against the edge of the tub to help me push. Just 21 of these dowels to push, then I can move on to the next step. Once all the dowels are in and the hide is once again resting in the soak tub, the smooth side should look like this: with the ENDS of the dowels protruding, while the rougher side should look like this: with the back side of the hide-loop and the middle of the dowel visible. To continue, click the link that says "next post-- making heads for shimedaiko part 2"

Making Heads for Shimedaiko Part 2

At this point, I’d like for any drum-maker to notice that the instructions I’ve given so far could be applied to several different kinds of drum. I’m going to continue with shimedaiko directions, but you could easily make a different type of drum by using the same methods, but putting the hide on any sort of hoop— wood, plastic, metal, whatever, as long as it’s a STRONG hoop—then securing it to the hoop in an appropriate way. I’d like to make these directions useful to anyone who wants to use them, so I want you to notice the adaptability of the methods.

For simplicity’s sake, we’re going to refer to the piece of dowel through the slots in the hide as a mimi. That’s Japanese for “ear”. It’s easier to use one word for these pull-points you just made. Lacing the mimi to tighten the hide to the ring is going to sound more complicated than it really is, but I’m going to give some explicit instructions about how to do it because if you get it wrong, you’ll have to undo it and start over. Following the complex instructions makes the actual work simpler because you’ll get it right on the first try.

Tool-pile at the ready. Bring on the hide... ...dripping wet.

Lay the hide on your working surface with the smooth (outer) side down. Place the ring on top of it so that an even amount of hide shows all the way around the perimeter of the ring. You can coat the ring with your water-soluble lube first or just squeeze some on the ring, hide and all. It will wash out later.

Take the section of the hide that is furthest away from you and fold it inwards over the ring. Call the first mimi that you grab “mimi number one”. (These directions are for a 21-pull head. Adjust as needed) Put the looped end of your pulling twine between the dowel and the hide to the left side of mimi 1 with the knot of the loop locked under the dowel, but the loop itself hanging free. Loop it clockwise (or start at the right and go counter-clockwise. All that matters is that you continue in the same direction once you start) around the mimi. Starting with the one you just looped (actually HALF a loop) count mimis clockwise until you get to number 12. Pull the twine (not tight yet!) to the right side of #12, loop it around clockwise to the left side, then go back toward the first one, but this time loop around #2. Keep going in a clockwise pattern until you have the twine around every mimi, crossing from one side of the drumhead to the other each time.

Here is the numeric sequence just to make sure you have it right, but really if you start right and you don’t skip any, it’s hard to do it wrong. Start at 1, then 12,2,13,3,14,4,15,5,16,6,17,7,18,8,19,9,20,10,21,11, then back to 1. Put the end of the twine through the loop you left at mimi number 1 and tie a temporary knot.

Numbering the mimis might make it sound over-complicated. All you’re actually doing is going from one side of the head to the other and back again, always in the same direction; in this instance—clockwise.

Now you can start pulling it tight, in the same pattern. I’ll tell you my method for pulling and hopefully it will make sense. I pull the slipknot right up against the first mimi, then go to number 12. I grasp the mimi with two fingers of one hand while I have the twine in the other hand. At the same time, I pull the mimi toward the center of the drumhead and the twine toward the outside, such that I am pulling my two hands away from one another, as if I was trying to pry an elevator door open. I keep the mimi that I’m currently pulling near the center of my body so that I’m pulling in both directions away from my center. I can get pretty good leverage this way. To clarify, the movement I’m talking about is just like this: make fists with your hands and hold them out in front of yourself with the backs of the knuckles touching. Then pull them apart—right hand to the right, left hand to the left. Now do the same with a looped piece of twine between them. Now do the same with the looped twine attached to a piece of hide. Congratulations! You’ve just learned to do something most people would be afraid to do! It really isn’t all that hard. Well, it isn’t the EASIEST thing in the world either, but…

Once you have one section tight, you “lock it in” by wrapping it around the mimi. You’ll be keeping the tension on the twine with one hand throughout the process. You may have to work your way around the drumhead two or three times to get all the slack out, but with practice, you’ll be able to weave the twine in one pass, then tighten it in one more pass.

After you get all the way around—back to the loop at mimi number one—pull all the slack through the loop, make one last pull and tie a secure knot. Look at the folded edges of the hide. Most of the time, there will be an area that isn’t pulled in as much as the rest. Take some small pieces of dowel, put them between the two sections of twine that go to and from the mimi that needs to be pulled more and twist the twine together. Be careful not to scrape the hide much. I always round the ends of my twist sticks so I don’t inadvertently cut any hide—mine or the drum’s.

At this point, you can decide whether you’ve tightened the hide enough or not. It should feel fairly taut and it might even make a low tone if you tap it with your fingers (never hit a wet drumhead with a stick!) If it’s still too loose, you can twist more sticks into the twine, tap the mimis inward with a hammer and a small piece of dowel as a driver, grasp the edges and twist from playing-head-side to underside, pull on the twine more or any or all of the above. The wet hide will seem much looser than it will be after it dries (or you could say that after it dries, the finished drumhead will be much tighter than it was when it was wet) so at some point, call it good enough and slide the whole thing back into your soak tub, have a bit of tea or sake and get ready to stitch.

Making Heads for Shimedaiko Part 3

By now, we have a strong piece of thoroughly wet hide tighly stretched onto a steel ring. There are only three things left to do before we can call it a shime head: stitching it to the ring, trimming the excess hide off--the part that has the mimis--and cutting holes around the perimeter so it can be laced to a drum body.

This is my very first time making shime heads, although I've built other drums, including chudaiko, so I didn't get all the details right on the first try. Such is life. Hopefully we all survive a few mistakes and we learn something through our efforts.

The main challenges of stitching are that--to get a stitch through the hide, you have to make a hole in the hide to pass the needle through. After the stitching is done, you don't want to have a bunch of big holes where the stitches are. I made a couple of choices about stitching based on this basic compromise: I do the stitching while the hide is still wet and I use a punch to make the holes. If I used a drill, I would be removing little bits of hide where I drill. By using a punch, I make a hole without removing any material; the punch just pushes the hide to the sides. As it dries, a punched hole closes itself back around the stitch.

That led to another compromise situation. A punched hole in wet hide doesn't stay open for very long, so I punched, then stitched each stitch one by one. Punch, stitch, punch, stitch, repeat. I didn't count all the stitches, but it had to be a good 200 or so. The first head took over three hours to stitch this way. For the second one, I had it down to just over two hours.

A shime head needs one strong row of stitching close to the inside of the ring, but that row can't be TOO close to the ring or the front and back parts of the hide won't draw together. The width of the ring will keep them apart (no editorial comment here about wedding rings doing the same). The distance between the inside of the ring and the outer row of stitches should be approximately equal to the thickness of the ring i.e. since I'm using a ring made of 3/8-inch steel, I have to make my first row of stitches 3/8 of an inch away from the inside of the ring.

Two other factors come into play: this same area where the stitching is will also have the holes cut into it for the ropes to go through to tie the head to a body. The ropes need to be close to the edge without cutting through the stitching. The other factor is that this 14-inch head will go on a 10-inch drum body, so the distance between the outside of the ring and the outside of the body will be two inches all the way around (10-inch body+2 inches on all sides=a 14-inch overall diameter).

So...there's room for stitching and for a drum body with pull-ropes, but there is JUST ENOUGH room; neither too little nor too much.

I use artificial sinew for stitching because it's very strong for its size and it comes in big rolls so I can use a piece that's long enough to go all the way around without making any unnecessary extra knots. I punch the first hole, then a second one about 1/4-inch away





I cut a piece of sinew about 18 feet long because I know it will take about three times the circumference of the head by the time I double each stitch. I tie a slipknot it one end of the sinew and put a small piece of dowel into the loop of the slipknot so I can pull it tight to the hide without losing the knot. I make the first stitch from the back side of the head, then back through the second hole (front to back) then make another punch on the opposite side of the first stitch. After that, I punch/stitch in a continuous line so that from the back side, I skip a hole each time and loop each stitch back on itself from the front side.

When I make my next shime head, I'm going to make a clamping ring/stitching guide to hold that outer edge together firmly while I stitch, but I haven't done that yet, so I can't say much about how it's going to work except that 1) it has to make the job easier and faster, not slower or harder and 2) it has to be something I can construct for myself because I'll want an exact size for it.

Anyway...stitching is the most time-consuming phase of making a shimedaiko head and also makes for the most boring photographs. I hope these diagrams will be useful. I'm basically just doing a loop stitch each time and putting all the knots on the underside of the head.

After stitching close to the ring, make another row of stitches--but these can be a simple in-and-out "weave" stitch--about 1-1/2 inches away from the outside of the ring. At that point, you can take all the pulling-twine and mimi-sticks out of the operation, then trim away the excess hide--just to the inside of the inner stitching--with surgical scissors. Other heavy-duty scissors will work, but surgical scissors are the best.

Then make ten evenly-spaced 1/2-inch diameter holes around the edge between the inner and outer rows of stitches. I used a punch that came with a grommet-kit for this part. Be careful not to cut through any of the stitches--the holes will be VERY CLOSE to the stitching. Keep those hands steady!

Let the whole thing dry for two or three days before doing anything else to it. Haven't you done enough already? Once it's completely dry, ream the punched holes with a 1/2-inch drill bit, again being careful not to cut the stitches.

After all that, you can tie the thing to a 10-inch shimedaiko body and hear its lovely, bright, happy voice; a voice YOU brought into being.

That's the fun part.

Enjoy!

Making Heads for Shimedaiko Part 4

...a few more photos, some missing info, a couple of corrections.

I didn't include a photo of the finished product! Sorry. Here's one:

...and here it is laid out to assemble two of them to a drum body. I'm using a piece of 10-inch heavy-duty drainage pipe for this drum. The piece is 5-1/2 inches long, the most common size for this type of drum.



You can complete this part of the project with or without a helpful cat and the cat can have a name or can be Nameless.



For this size drum, it will take about 25 feet of rope to tension the heads to the body. I'm using 3/8-inch rope to go easily through the 1/2-inch holes I made in the edges of the heads. Thick rope is better because it's easier to pull--shimes are usually left loose for storage and are only pulled tight just before playing. The heads last longer if they aren't kept tight all the time. Thicker rope LOOKS better too.



Start by tying a loop in one end of the rope (NOT a slipknot; a solid loop) then thread the plain end of the rope from inside to outside through one of the holes. Pull the rope all the way through until the loop is against the inner part of the head. (Maybe it's time to FEED the cat...)



Continue threading each hole (10 on each side) all the way around, always from inside to outside.



Almost there...



Once you get all the way around, thread the loose end of the rope through the loop and pull the rest of the slack out. Once the "ups and downs" are done, you can wrap the rope around each of the adjacent sets of ropes and pull them together to tighten them even more. I didn't take a photo of that because it's a two-handed job and I'm the photographer AND the drum-maker on this job. But it looks like this after it's all done:



Did I remember to mention that the hide must be COMPLETELY DRY before you tension the heads to the body? I didn't? Oh. The hide has to be dry first for this kind of drum. Next step: take a couple of sticks and PLAY! I love a happy ending!