Getting the most out of your Cooperman frame drum
In The Groove - The Important Functions of that Simple Cording
It’s easy to underestimate the role of the cording that encircles our frame drums where the drum head is mounted to the drum shell, but the cording has four significant design functions.
Natural Color Variations in Cherry Wood Drums
Cherry is our “go-to” wood for most of the frame drums and tambourines. It has a smooth, tight grain that finishes beautifully. Newly sawed cherry has creamy, pinkish-brown hue, which darkens over time, with exposure to air and sunlight, to a warmer caramel brown. Cherry wood develops a renowned, lustrous patina.
Nomenclature - You like tomato and I like tomahto
By definitions, frame drums seem to have a beautiful simplicity - a hoop with drum head, a diameter larger than its depth. But...of course it's way more complicated than it is simple. Leaving aside the nuanced specifications (bearing edges, shell materials, head materials, diameter, depth, etc.), and all the possible accessorizing (jingles, bells, snare strings),the names for similar drums played cross-culturally can be a quite confusing and slippery thing. Daf, Daff, Duff, Deff, Tar, Bendir, Bodhran, Dayre, Daire, Doyrah, Riq, Riqq, Reqq, Rik.... Tar(Arabic) (Bahraini)/(Ma)Tari or (Ma)Twari (Swahili). It's so easy to make a "mistake." Early on, Cooperman started using the arabic...
Something from the archives
cooperman drum Frame drum women drummers
In the early 1990's we worked closely with Randy Crafton to develop our line of frame drums. Randy was a close friend of Layne Redmond, and soon enough the Layne Redmond Ancient Image Series was created. A "Windwand" was also made here at the Cooperman shop. We travelled over to the Widow Jane Mine (1996 I think) to hear Layne and The Mob Angels perform with the Windwands. There was a table and we sold the drums and windwands. The drums were a single thin ply of Ash with the image screen printed on a goatskin drum head. There were...
Some background history of our artist endorser program
The first Cooperman frame drums ( circa 1976) were 18” bodhrans, mounted with goatskin drumheads. Pat Cooperman Sr. had a friend, Tom Callinan, who had purchased a bodhran during a visit to Ireland, but the drum head had torn from shell during the flight back ( likely due to plane cabin's the low humidity). Tom asked Pat, who had just recently opened a rope drum building workshop in Centerbrook Connecticut, to replace the drum head. Pat was certain there was a better way to secure the head to the shell than simply tacking it with upholstery nails, so he rebuilt the...
