We went drum shopping today. Real life shopping for Native American drums is one of those things that is somewhat hard to do because of the difficulty in finding local resellers. There are music stores in the area, but mostly they just have modern instruments. We went to a really nice drum shop in New Hope last year and figured that would be our best bet. A little after noon we hopped in the car and headed out there.
It was humid, and although the temperature only got into the mid 80s, walking around New Hope was sweaty work. We were unable to locate the drum shop, which we’re pretty much convinced has moved or closed down because it wasn’t where we remembered it being. We walked around New Hope a bit, visited a couple “Native American Trading Posts” neither of which had what we wanted, and what they had in stock had prices that scared us out the door (I was expecting to spend a few hundred for a couple drums and blankets, but not as much as they were charging!). We probably should have expected such high prices and tourist-oriented things (not real drum-circle type drums) in New Hope. Still, it was a disappointment.
We left New Hope and tried to think of other stores in the area. We were both tired and stopped at Starbucks before deciding to head to George’s Music in North Wales on the off chance that they’d have something. They didn’t, and the guy we asked had no clue what we were talking about when we explained “uh… definitely not in stock, but maybe something we could special order?”
At that point we had pretty much given up, we’d just shop online.
But it was disappointing, so I suggested we take a small detour on our way home and check out what the lovely shopping town of Skippack had. Our hopes weren’t high, but as we drove in we saw a sign for a store called Dreamcatcher. We stopped and parked.
What a wonderful store it is! It smelled lovely, and had a decent selections of the exact drums we were looking for! I picked out a big, nice-sounding, thin-skinned drum, and Michael picked up a smaller thicker skinned drum. We also wandered in back where they had some really pretty (and quite affordable) woven blankets.
So we walked out of there with 2 woven blankets, the two drums, and a couple drumsticks. Plus we picked up a couple fliers for drumcircles that they hold, and other special events. Nice! We didn’t know that Skippack had such a community, it’s only 5 miles from our house!
And now for pictures:
Caligula almost immediately claimed one of the blankets for himself
Large drum
Medium drum
Apparently the size and thinness of the large drum causes it to be particularly sensitive to humidity, oops. Within about 20 minutes of being inside our humid house the skin started to loosen. Michael assured me that this sort of thing was normal and that it can be put back into playing condition with a hairdryer, and of course he was correct, I looked online for other care tidbits and found this:
Natural rawhide drums loosen in times of humidity and tighten when heated. The native people heat the drums in front of a fire before using, to ensure maximum sound quality. The tighter the hide, the stronger the sound will be. In a modern setting, a hair dryer is the quickest and easiest way to dry a drum for
use. Simply start in the center and work toward the edges of the drum. It only takes two minutes, restores the hide to the proper tension and can be repeated as often as necessary to be enjoyed for many years.
Hopefully we’ll be able to attend a drum-making class in October, it’d be fun to make our own too.
I’m so excited!
Gosh it’s been a busy weekend. Going to veg out to some Red Dwarf now.