How to Play the Buffalo Drum

Posted in Learn | Last Updated on October 4, 2018

Although you can learn to play this awesome instrument autodidactically, I want to give you some useful ideas of how to play the Buffalo Drum. If you are looking for immediate drumming success, and you want to learn to play the easiest kind of instrument, your choose of the Buffalo Drum is perfect.

As said, it is easy to learn, music will evolve instantly in a circle, and it has a tremendous healing effect on your body and soul.

This Drum will Make you Find your Rhythm! Although the frame drum is one of the simplest and oldest instruments on earth, you can play it meditatively for relieving stress, you can dance while playing and get into contact with your inner child on a natural basis.

The Drum

The great Remo sound will make you delve into the play, as you develop over a long period of time a strong sense and ability of rhythm and tempo, which is the basics of all the music played worldwide.Playing Buffalo Drums will accompany you in finding your life purpose as you develop your musical and human abilities. You can play them everywhere, with hands or mallets: lying or sitting on the floor, sitting on a chair, standing, walking and dancing. They are easy to hold and to clean, they won´t react as sensitively to humidity as natural skin drums – They still sound in the rain! They are light weighted and therefore suit best long played rhythms in a circle, drum meditation, or hilarious dancing fun.

How to Hold the Buffalo Drum

Take the drum with your non dominant hand in the mid of the backside, where the three strands of the rope meet, and hold the drum as shown in the picture above. Letting the frame touch your body will shorten the decay of the sound a little bit, but you will be able to hold the drum for a longer time. For exploring the full range of the sound, hold it as close to your body as possible, without touching it. The other way round, if you want to achieve a very short sound, like knocking – which can produce a tremendous sound with the big 22″ Buffalo Drum – push it into your belly as deep as possible.

Take the mallet with your dominant hand and start beating the drum close to the middle of the playing surface. If you are new to mallet playing, click here to explore an efficient handling of mallets, that will enrich your play with multifaceted sounds drastically.

Play Around!

Move your beating slowly from the centre to the edge, and back. You will discover a quieter and a higher, clearer sound when you are beating at the edge. Drumming near the middle of the playing surface will produce a vibrant sound with the full bass tone. Beating exactly on the middle will make the vibrations of the skin eliminate one another and produce a duller, cavernous sound.

Check it out!

If you wish to emphasise the polarities of high and low sounds, you can beat the edge powerfully. Check out the difference between strong and soft beats, all over the whole playing surface. Buffalo Drums are very expressional instruments. As you delve more and more into the play, you will be astonished by the great amount of sound producing possibilities. Tip: Always breathe when you play. Try not to lose the awareness of your breath. This will keep you drumming with the greatest of ease!

Playing on the Floor

You can put your Buffalo Drum on the floor, which will fully reduce it´s fundamental bass tone when you play them, so there will remain the higher frequencies only, which can also produce nice sounds. Check it out!

The benefits lie on the hand: For one thing, you can drum both handed, and for another thing your little child has full access to the drum. It can climb on it, don´t be afraid: Buffalo Drums are built very stable, they are definitely designed for durability. Sitting crosslegged on the floor you can put the drum on your knee and your thigh, balance it out and start playing. Again you play both handed, and the drum will sound much better than lying on the floor. The less the frame of your drum is going to be touched by anything, the longer and fuller it will sound.

Dance and Play!

Dancing with the drum isn´t only great fun. 30.000 years ago people built the first animal hide drums, and they danced playing the drums as an expression of living joy and gratefulness to creation.