It all starts with the song I’ve decided to handle next: Loki’s Song composed by Mikal the Ram.
As you know, I’ve been having trouble with my lack of musical instruments and some other things. While driving a 16 hour trip home from my father’s, and thus having been saturated with my culture for a week, I was thinking about Loki’s Song as I have chosen it to be my next project. I began to hear it in my head with a soft drum beat. And more of it began to flesh and suddenly I remembered: I can do a small drum!
This has come with all sorts of excited feelings. 1. I already have 2 tambourines that I have meant for future music but couldn’t hear them in the songs I’m doing in order to want to use them. and 2. I’ve been allowed to drum with the drummers at a powwow here and there and through my life have always found I took more naturally to the drum than any other instrument. Oh, and 3. How exciting that I can use my native instrument to do what I want to do and not have to use another culture’s instrument.
That last revelation isn’t a racist statement. You see, my people the Brotherton don’t have powwows just yet and we don’t have any famous performers like the Cherokee and other tribes do. If I pick up the drum,. I’m more than honoring my people. I’m helping to restore it. We’re very small in numbers.
So excited to have realized what was so obvious, I’m impatient to get moving with something. Alas, I don’t know how to make a drum and will have to buy one. They’re slightly more expensive than the xylophone that I am still coveting. -_- Still.
We found one place in Georgia that has made two of the drums I’ve run across… they have one section where they say “this drum is fit for women” because it’s lightweight. I’ve decided that if I buy from them, I’m going to make it a point NOT to buy the one fit for women. I want a drum for a specific sound in my head, not for some silly stereotype conception. But that’s neither here nor there.
I’m going to try to work with on of my tambourines in the meantime, even though it needs a new head. Which means I have to create a makeshift drum stick. LOL. My husband is out buying me hopeful parts now.