Tribal Drums

The powerful rhythm being played by the drum group reaches deep into your very core to move you. It seeks to merge with the beat of your own heart and echoes it. Your body begins to sway of its own volition, giving itself up to something greater. The patterns intensify working themselves up into a joyous crescendo. The drum is a member of the percussion group of musical instruments. In the Hornbostel-Sachs classification system, it is a membranophone. Drums consist of at least one membrane, called a drumhead or drum skin, that is stretched over a shell and struck, either directly with the player's hands, or with a drumstick, to produce sound. There is usually a resonance head on the underside of the drum, typically tuned to a slightly lower pitch than the top drumhead. Other techniques have been used to cause drums to make sound, such as the thumb roll. Drums are the world's oldest and most ubiquitous musical instruments, and the basic design has remained virtually unchanged for thousands of years.