My improvised drum kit ... Part 2 ... frenzy continues ...

Well … the excitement lasted some days … and I was banging away … and Abhinav had taught me the roll, but I couldn’t do the roll with the combo I had … the magic of the drum roll slowly started building up inside me … during classes, twice every week, I really couldn’t indulge in doing things I wanted to do, which was to do the drum roll … we are well into doublets and double bass beats and interstitial beats and so on … and it takes a lot of concentration to get these going … if I’d get the beats right, I’d goof up on the rhythm sometimes … so, it takes a whole hour to get one pattern right … no time for indulgence, then …

I wanted a crash cymbal, where I could go dishhhhhhhhhh … I checked music stores online … all bloody expensive … but what do I do with a crash cymbal when I don’t have the tom drums (the ones on top of the bass drum…) … how do I roll?  Just snare (or whatever I had as a substitute…), which doesn’t make any sound (it is a practice pad, remember…) and a crash cymbal is no good for a roll … as I was pondering over this intense dilemma, another bulb lit up … I had a set of bongo drums that I shanghaied as a gift from Shruti long long ago … yessss … I could use them as tom drums … 

and there was a music store in Secunderabad, Music Cabin, where I could get a crash cymbal that wouldn’t be too expensive …

I was in a sort of frenzy now … I went to buy that crash cymbal, without thinking about its stand … that chap asked me if I wanted a stand too … when I heard the price for both, I demurred … no, I said, only the cymbal … now all thoughts were on where to fit in the cymbal … I tried my camera tripod … na, won’t work …  doesn’t have a pipe or rod … I knew I could do something, but if only I knew where I had kept that stand … it was another of those experiments when I had bought a really low priced note stand after Shruti had bought me a guitar (again shanghaied … Shruti can be termed as the really long-suffering wife, who has to put up with her husband’s delusional musical aspirations … one day you will see me on stage, Shruti, even if I am 60, at least for 10 minutes, playing the drums …)

I began hunting for that long neglected and discarded note stand … after three days, I found it under the cot, all dusty and lint-clinged … one if its foot was dodgy and I strained to remove the rivet and put in a screw and nut … but it had a sort of rod which was bent at right angles at the top to accommodate the sheet tray … it couldn’t hold the cymbal … short of breaking it off, I tried everything … 

then I tried switching the tripods … I removed the cowbell and put in the crash cymbal … it wouldn’t stand, so I put in a used ball pen shell into the pipe and with the help of a nail created a sort of stopper which would prevent the cymbal from slipping down … 

and now I fitted in the cowbell to the bent rod … it sat awkwardly … it is supposed to be fit in horizontally, the the flat surface parallel to the ground ... now it sat sort of vertical ... very shakily ... I feared it would fall off … but somehow it held on …

Phew … that was something … I now had substitutes for the snare drum, the hi-hat, two toms, bass drum, and a crash cymbal … of these, only the crash cymbal provided the original sound … the snare drum was more or less silent, the hi-hat gave off a cowbell sound, the bass drum resonated with the sound of a cardboard box … and the two toms sent out bongo sounds … but what the kangaroo, I had all elements except for the floor tom!!  I was really excited … I could do some kind of roll now … and this is how my cut and paste drum kit looked like at that point …

Looks like Samuel Johnson's description of Metaphysical Poetry ... "heterogeneous ideas ... yoked by violence together," no?