Basilisk drum head, for klezmer music • razofz.se

A fairly common occurence in established bands is to have a bass drum head with the logo, band name, etcetera on it. Together with a couple of friends I have a band where we play klezmer music (the band is called Klezmerkalaset, more about it can be seen here, here, and here), and we started talking about buying a head like that. I like to understand how things are made and like to create things, so I figured that it would be more fun to try to do one myself. And, with a little help of a friend, I did!

Another background fact that’s good to know is that I had already built a light system into the bass drum, that flashes when the drum is being played (with some additional modes). This can be seen ~~here~~ (soon, hopefully!). With that in mind, I wanted to utilise and enhance that lighting effect.

First steps

First things first. To put an image onto a drum head, I first needed to have an image. A friend and former band member, Gunnar Weibull, is a very talented drawing artist. He has made several really nice drawings for and of the band before this, e. g. this:

I especially liked this one. The energy in the basilisk thrashing around is very nice. When my friend drew this picture he said that:

“This is how it feels to play klezmer music.”

On the treatise of basilisks

For those of you that don’t know, a basilisk is a mythical creature. Many people know the name from the Harry Potter series, but the OG basilisks were said to be able to do things like strike people dead with a look, being so venomous that it leaves a path of venom behind, split stones with its breath. It looks like a combination of a snake and a rooster. Another name for it is the ‘king of serpents’. There are only a few methods of actually killing a basilisk; most noteworthy is a rooster crowing (it was said that people travelling through basilisk-infected lands would carry a rooster with them for this purpose) or the “effluvium” of a weasel. In other words, the stench of weasel piss. Apparently this is so horrible to basilisks that they straight up die.

More reading here.

Backing out of the mythology hole

My wish was to have a basilisk in the style of the image above, and also utilise the effect from the lighting system already in the drum. The general idea to achieve this was to have a basilisk drawn, but on the drum head fill in everything but the basilisk, so that when the lights flash the light would be in the form of a basilisk. A side-effect I hoped for was that in a low-light venue this would result in basilisks being imprinted on the eyes of the audience.

After some brainstorming and a few iterations, this was the result:

Veeery nice.

From digital to physical

So, how to get this image into the physical domain? If one would buy a drum head professionally made, the image would probably be printed on the head. Needless to say, not feasible for me. There are other techniques, for example hydrodipping. I’d love to try hydrodipping, but then I would need a lot of extra things and the process seems a bit messy. Living in an apartment (and being a student) I took the easier, cheaper way out.

I scaled up the image (in Photoshop if I remember correctly), and used centimeter units, matching the diameter of the black circle to the diameter of the physical drum head. I split the image so that each split part fit and could be printed on a single A4 paper. This made the printing step very easy, I could use a regular printer. When printed, I cut out the circular shape, aligned the sheets and taped them together:

I then taped the reconstructed image onto the backside of the drum head. Speaking of which:

The drum and its head

For reference, this was what the bass drum (and band) looked like before:

The bass drum head in that picture was included with the drum kit, and had two negative qualities: it wasn’t of a high quality, which made it sound.. not very good, and maybe more relevant for this project, it was a glossy sort of plastic making it hard to attach or draw permanently on it. To mitigate both of these issues, I bought another head, which had better quality and tried to mimic a calf skin head (the type used on Western drums pre plastic), giving it a slightly rugged texture. A close-up of it:

Transferring image to head

The last part of the method. I decided to use black permanent markers. I bought one with a fairly thin tip, to do details and edges, and a thicker, in the shape of a squashed rectangle, to do large areas where no finer detail was needed. To see where to draw, I taped the reconstructed paper image onto the backside of the head, and put a light underneath. This way I could see the image from the front part of the head, but still be able to draw (fill in). If I had e. g. used a projector as a drawing reference, I would:

have been in the way of the projected image
have had issues with alignment: if I moved the projector or drum (accidentally or no) I would have to re-do the aligning
have to acquire a projector..

The set-up looked like this:

One issue was the Evans logo, which I didn’t want to be visible in the finished product (or in the way of the basilisk). What I did for that was to rotate the head on the drum so that that logo would be in an entirely black area.

Drawing!

So it finally comes to the drawing part! Here is a work-in-progress picture, with most of the basilisk contours outlined:

All the basilisk contours drawn:

Trying to cover the Evans logo:

Looks better without camera flash..:

I had to draw (kind of) freehand, which is not my most practiced skill. But, many small imperfections could be forgiven considering that most people will see the head from a distance and in most cases fairly poor lighting. Add to that the head being lit up from behind by the lighting system, and the anxiety level for mistakes was lowered considerably.

Some action footage from the drawing phase:

Aaaand: the finished product!

The Evans logo that I wanted to hide is visible from up close, but as I wrote above the majority of people will never see the head from such a short distance.

Another view, with more of the drum as well:

And the head, backlit by the working lamp:

Epilogue

The band with the finished head:

And in use:

Thank you for reading! /raz