How small of a djembe?

[rachelnguyen]

Hey Tokapelli,

I didn't think my Toca sounded bad either... until I played an actual djembe, LOL. Then, once you play the real deal, the pseudo djembes just won't do anymore.

Marc, if you do want to get a small drum, you might at least get a good quality African one. I have seen some really nice ones from Mali that are small. Since they have nice shells and African goatskins, they sound much better than the mini Tocas or Remos. I have also seen a djembe that was normal height, but had a narrow 11 inch head. It was headed in cowskin and the thing SCREAMED. Super loud and high pitched. It was a great drum, but on the smaller side. I wish I had taken a picture of it.

[Michel]

Here is a picture of Wassoulou-drummers. You get a good idea of the size of djembe's over there. In our language we have a saying that says translated: it's better to have a small one that rocks than a big one that refuses. But that's what I wanted to say about the drums. I don't seem to be able to upload the pictures in normal size. Anyone has an idea???

[rachelnguyen]

Michel,

I think you have to reduce the size of the image before you upload it.

Rachel

[the kid]

Thats a nice photo there Michel.

It goes to show us that djembefolas in africa play smaller drums than we expect
In the past everybody probably played a small djembe for solo as with the old techniques for skinning up a small head will give higher pitch. Interesting photo duga posted over in the ksingksing tread showed soloist playing smallish djembe and bass djembe was huge

Now a days we all expect 'performance' instruments which probably didn't exist in the past.

What i've noticed about small djembes that i encounter is that there are usually not carved with the same effort as larger drums so the inner bowl is poor which leads to ok to poor sound. I reckon if they were carved better they'd be alright.

[Michel]

Thanks Kid,
The picture was taken in Sanankoroba, the village of birth of Sidiki Camara, who is originally from the Wassoulou region in Mali. We were there with some other toubabou's during a workshop.The funny thing was that we took our drums from Bamako because over there were too few drums for us to play. The drums we took everybody would describe as typical Malian drums. But when the village drummers came they brought these small djembe's they were used to play on, they heated them by fire to tune them. But when you visit other areas in Mali, like the region around Kayes, you can find huge djembe's, tuned low. And ofcourse, the djembe's we play on didn't exist untill the 1960's because there were no good ropes and iron rings.... So every djembe must have been much lower in pitch. Here a picture of an ancient Wassoulou djembe ( a small one like the former picture)(and because I am a digibete still in huge size, almost realtime):

[e2c]

michel - try Googling the phrase "resize photos." There are lots of free sites where you can resize pictures online - you upload them to the site, it resizes them for you, and then you can dl them to your computer.

I think that would work better - give it a try!

cheers,
e.

[bubudi]

i have added a bbcode so you can resize the pic. you need to right click on the oversized image, copy location, then paste it into a message (either same or a new one will do), between the 'thumb' bbcode tags.

here's what it should look like:

Code: Select all

[thumb]http://djembefola.com/board/download/file.php?id=1189[/thumb]

which will do this:

[rachelnguyen]

Michel,

Now that we can see it, (Thanks Bubudi!) it is a fascinating drum. It looks like it is a ring system (rather than stitched) but with ropes instead of metal rings. How tall was it?

[Michel]

It was a ring system, only the rings weren't welded as we know it, it was, as you can see when you have a good look, two hooks to give the rings the right round. And the size was the Wassoulou size as you can see in the first picture. A small djembe.

[e2c]

Michel - thanks so much for the photos and info.! It's really helpful.

I think it's very interesting to see how djembes in certain areas have changed form, while others seem not to have changed. (Which makes me think that Western influence is one of the main reasons that form has changed... but that's another topic entirely. Congas went through similar developments once they'd been brought to the mainland US.)

[michi]

i have added a bbcode so you can resize the pic. you need to right click on the oversized image, copy location, then paste it into a message (either same or a new one will do), between the 'thumb' bbcode tags.

here's what it should look like:

Code: Select all

[thumb]http://djembefola.com/board/download/file.php?id=1189[/thumb]

This sort of works, but not too well. The thumb isn't really a thumbnail, but a scaled-down version of the real image. This means that the photo appears smaller, but the page load takes a long time because the full-size image is downloaded and then scaled down for display. It would be more effective to either have a real thumbnail that points at the full-resolution image, or to down-size the image before uploading it.

Cheers,

Michi.