Melodic Tongue Drum
The tongue drum is one of the world’s oldest known instruments. They’ve been a part of many cultures for thousands of years. The idea behind the tongue drum is simple — a hollow box, or “sound chamber” reverberates when the individual tongues, or soundboard, are struck.
On some tongue drums, the tone the tongues produce is varied by making each one a different length and width. On this design, I opted for form over function and made the tongues symmetrical in appearance. The tone is varied by removing material from the back face of the toe or heel of each tongue. I’ll talk more about that later.
SOUND MATERIAL. One of the fun aspects of a tongue drum is that different wood species can produce distinctly different sounds from one another, based on the wood’s density. So it’s a good way to experiment with exotic woods you may have leftover from other projects. I used quilted maple and mahogany for this drum.
A pair of custom-made mallets rounds out
