Drum Building Guides

Nagado-daiko

• Stanford Taiko has put together an excellent guide to building a nagadō-daiko, based on techniques used by Tony Jones of Zenshin Daiko in Maui, Hawaii. Go here to check it out.

• J.D. Andrade chronicled his experiences creating a nagadō-daiko on his blog, The Lonely Drummer.

• Members of Stockton taiko have created a website dedicated to building taiko – to be more specific, nagadō-daiko. Visit maketaikodrums.com to check it out. It also inlcudes links to other drum making websites. Additionally, they’ve created a video about the process:

  • VIDEO - Make Taiko Drums

Shime-daiko

• The Shime Project - J.D. Andrade detailed his 6-week shime-daiko-building project on his blog, The Lonely Drummer.

• Drum Building Tutorials - ShinDaiko has written a two-part series explaining how to make an okedō-daiko, as well as created videos to accompany the articles.

Practice Drums

• The Genki Spark's albums - Making Practice Drums! - The Genki Spark has documented their adventures in making practice okedō-daiko, uploading the results to the group’s Facebook page.

• How to Make a Taiko Practice Drum - Tatsumaki Taiko Studio has uploaded to their website a guide for how to make a practice taiko drum from a car tire.

• VIDEO - SECRET to Making a Cheap Practice Drum - Six part series from Walter Tsushima

• DIY TAIKO - DIY Taiko is created by Chung Wan Choi (Chung), who is frustrated with the limited access to practice instruments, which is essential to one’s taiko learning.  Tire drums are easy to make and plays well for beta style (upright). However, they are bulky for storage and difficult to imitate the proper naname (slanted) angle and height.  To solve these problems, Chung researches and designs effective practice instruments made of simple materials found in recycling centers and hardware stores.  Her most recent projects involve making of shumoku, also the original Q-moku, which enables low volume atarigane practice.

Tying a Shime-daiko

Perhaps one of the hardest yet consistently over-looked taiko equipment-related items is the method for tying a shime-daiko. In order to assist you in figuring this process out, we have gathered materials shared by various artists on the internet. 

• My Favorite Shimedaiko Tightening Method from Eien Hunter-Ishikawa. Here are ten pieces of advice about shimedaiko tightening  learned from Suzuki sensei

• VIDEO - How to Tie a Shime from Stanford Taiko

• VIDEO - Yokojime for students - Yokojime is the method of two person tuning and tightening. This video presents one of various ways to perform Yokojime on a #3 (San Chogakke) shime taiko drum. 

• One-person Tying Technique With Clamps - Jan Andrzejewski posted to the Taiko Community his one-person tying technique that involves using clamps. He recommends using Irwin Quick-grip XP600 clamps. 

• VIDEO - Shime daiko tying-- shidara residency from Megan Chao Smith

• VIDEO - How to tie a shime from Yukai Daiko

• Shime Tightening With Kenny Endo from kaDON - In this two-part series, Kenny Endo teaches how to tighten a shime daiko.  Please note that these videos can only be viewed by kaDON subscribers.

The TIASOU Method

Kris Bergstrom, of the Los Angeles Taiko Institute, has creating a one-person tying method he calls The TIASOU Method. He has distributed a series of PDF guides for the method according to the Creative Commons “Share-Alike” license, and has given us permission to upload the PDfs here.  Please note that the contact information found within these PDFs is out of date. If you have questions about The TIASOU Method, you can contact LATI here the LATI Contact page.

• Part I – TIASOU Method Introduction

• Part II – Preparing the Drum

• Part III – Tightening, Stage One

• Part IV – Tightening, Stage Two

• Part V – Advanced Techniques

• Part VI – Drum Repair

• About Kris’s TIASOU Method Workshops (**note:  this page is included for documentation puposes, but may be outdated.  We have reached out to Kris and will update accordingly.)

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