Hand Drums Darbuka

Hand drums made in Kyiv. Handmade ceramic darbuka.

The Difficulties of Making a Handmade Drum

We lost three drums during production. One during the printing process, one during the drying process, and one cracked during the last glaze firing. And this is very painful, because each drum requires a lot of resources: both time and effort with materials. In general, you need to understand that the darbuka hand drum is the largest and most complex product that we have encountered in all 10 years of working with ceramics. Only pendant lights are close in complexity. Such a hand drum required the greatest skill from us, and what can we say about working with ceramics, we still had to buy and take a course in leather. And we did this to create perfect ethnic drums that sound incredible.

Ceramic darbuka and the path to its creation

This is a story about a great passion – a drum for playing with hands has always been something desirable and fascinating for me. At the level of ceramics in this life, I only love music. So it so happened that through the festival I got into the right group of percussionists and it was a matter of time how quickly I would come to the idea of ​​making my own ceramic drums, because authentic darbukas are made from ceramics (one of the first percussion instruments of mankind was ceramic). Something similar happened with coffee and coffee pourovers. Already during the war I realized that there was nowhere to postpone and started developing. Professional percussionists were involved (Vanya Pukh, Ptah), who know better than others how drums for playing with hands should sound. Six months later, the first tabla stood in front of us and we were amazed to tears by the purity and depth of their sound. By the way, the first copies were made of goat skin, now Pakistani ones are already used, because it is even better and softer.

Darbuka, tabla or dambuka (dumbek): which is correct?

Attention! A moment of linguistic turn! It’s correct to say both darbuka, tabla, and dumbek, because after watching a bunch of videos I realized that it is called differently depending on the region. So call it whatever you want, the main thing is to play the percussion and talk about it. In general, this is a popular story, when percussion in the form of an ethnic drum has a bunch of names and also slang nicknames.

Djembe or darbuka: which is better?

The eternal question. It would be fair to shout that “both”. Ahah, but no! Djembe, as a rule, is made of wood, because the word “djembe” itself is translated as “tree”, and cheap darbukas are made of aluminum and, frankly, they seem worse to me than a good wooden djembe, because they somehow strangely “squeak” too much. But a ceramic darbuka is complete authenticity and incredible depth. Therefore, if your instrument is called a handmade darbuka, then you know for sure that it is better than any djembe, because it is deeper, more trance-like, more powerful and respectable. You don’t even have to touch it much – it seems to want to sound by itself, it vibrates by itself… It’s really a thrill and any percussionist who has encountered ceramic hand drums will understand me.

A drum as a gift: how difficult is it to play?

Not difficult. To fully play the darbuka, it will be enough to learn three basic beats: dum, ka, tek, sak. You can learn more about them in our tabla course from Vani Pukh, who created an entire program, teaching percussionists with our handmade drum. In general, we are happy to consult each client and provide free access to paid courses, because it is very important for us that you play and develop on our darbukas, because our drums are also suitable for professional levels.