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More than one way to skin a djembe
Aug. 26th, 2008 07:57 pmThe head on Nancy's drum split a few weeks ago during a class. I had successfully re-skinned my own a few months earlier, and was feeling cocky, so I volunteered to fix hers as well.
Here's what I learned:
If you put the new skin in water to soak and then take apart the old drum and find that the rope is too worn to use, and it'll take a few days to get some new rope, you don't want to save time by just leaving the skin in the water for those few days. Because before too long, that skin will achieve a more... natural state. As in, it will start to behave much like the skin of a dead animal. Which is to say: there will develop... an odor. A rather strong one.
I also learned that if in a fit of overoptimism you decide to try putting it on the drum anyway, hoping maybe the smell will fade after the skin dries, three things will happen: One, the odor will become much, much stronger. Two, it will fill the entire house. And three, the process of working with the skin will transfer the odor indelibly to your hands, which will continue to smell like rotting goat even after OCD-quality scrubbing with soap, lemon juice, baking soda, or bleach.
(The skin will also, incidentally, not so much work as a drumhead, because it will be covered with tiny bubbly pinholes. I don't want to think too much about the chemical and biological processes involved there.)
And finally, I learned that if you go with your smelly rotten-goat hands to pick fresh tomatoes at the farm, your hands will smell like fresh tomatoes with an undernote of rotten goat, which is an interesting -- if repellent -- combination of odors. If you then eat some too-salty snacks in the car on the way home because in the course of the day you never got around to eating any real food, and then you happen to forget what you're doing and lick the salt from your fingers... well, you don't want to do that. You really, really don't want to do that.
That has been today's lesson.
Tomorrow I will start again with a new goat skin.
How was your Tuesday?
ETA: Oh, hell, I nearly forgot; this post is dedicated to![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
osirusbrisbane, who when I mentioned that I'd been up all night wrestling a rotting goat, responded: "I hate to be the one to tell you this, but the Olympics already ended."
Here's what I learned:
If you put the new skin in water to soak and then take apart the old drum and find that the rope is too worn to use, and it'll take a few days to get some new rope, you don't want to save time by just leaving the skin in the water for those few days. Because before too long, that skin will achieve a more... natural state. As in, it will start to behave much like the skin of a dead animal. Which is to say: there will develop... an odor. A rather strong one.
I also learned that if in a fit of overoptimism you decide to try putting it on the drum anyway, hoping maybe the smell will fade after the skin dries, three things will happen: One, the odor will become much, much stronger. Two, it will fill the entire house. And three, the process of working with the skin will transfer the odor indelibly to your hands, which will continue to smell like rotting goat even after OCD-quality scrubbing with soap, lemon juice, baking soda, or bleach.
(The skin will also, incidentally, not so much work as a drumhead, because it will be covered with tiny bubbly pinholes. I don't want to think too much about the chemical and biological processes involved there.)
And finally, I learned that if you go with your smelly rotten-goat hands to pick fresh tomatoes at the farm, your hands will smell like fresh tomatoes with an undernote of rotten goat, which is an interesting -- if repellent -- combination of odors. If you then eat some too-salty snacks in the car on the way home because in the course of the day you never got around to eating any real food, and then you happen to forget what you're doing and lick the salt from your fingers... well, you don't want to do that. You really, really don't want to do that.
That has been today's lesson.
Tomorrow I will start again with a new goat skin.
How was your Tuesday?
ETA: Oh, hell, I nearly forgot; this post is dedicated to
osirusbrisbane, who when I mentioned that I'd been up all night wrestling a rotting goat, responded: "I hate to be the one to tell you this, but the Olympics already ended."
