Lockdown Challenge: Father’s Day and the sound of drums and trumpets

At the start of June, business leaders urged the government to make our post-Covid-19 recovery green. The same week, both Boris Johnson and business secretary Alok Sharma suggested that investing in the green economy was a priority for the UK moving forward.

Even if you can’t go out and buy an electric car this week or fit solar panels to the garage roof, what you can do is keep your plastic, cardboard and tin cans, clean them up and make them into something fun, useful or maybe even downright ridiculous.

Everyone likes a surprise, so if it's Dad who’s the engineer, maybe give the kids a few pointers to help them organise themselves and then set them to work in the shed, garage or their bedroom, with a big ‘Dad Keep Out’ sign on the door.

Some pointers

• What recyclable materials do you have? E.g. cardboard, plastic, paper, tin cans.
• What is recyclable and what is not?
• How will you fix them together – sticking, cutting, something else? Do you have the necessary materials to do this?
• Will you need any additional materials, which you'll have to buy?
• What does Dad really want or need, other than refills for his empty beer bottles?

• Make a bird feed container out of an old jar.
• Paint some old beans tins, plastic boxes and cardboard kitchen roll inners and turn them into ready-made containers to help him organise his office, garage, the kitchen greenhouse, den or ‘Man Drawer’.
• Cut a hard plastic bottle into a DIY pooper scooper for the cat litter tray.
• DIY lighting for the garden using wine bottles and battery-powered light.
• Turn scraps of cloth and carpet into a headband or scarf.

It’s loud! It looks like a drum! But sounds like a trumpet! Is it a drum or a trumpet? No, it’s a ‘Drumpet’! Welcome to a wonderful world of musical instruments that you can make yourself. You can join both the Brass Section and the Percussion Section of the Philharmonic Orchestra simultaneously. 

You’ll need to find pieces of pipe of some kind, like plastic drainpipe, something 50mm or more in diameter and anything from 70mm to a metre or more long. Anything with an open end, even a baked bean can will do. You will also need a short length of clean smallbore pipe (clean, because you are going to blow down it). Maybe plumbing tube, or plastic electrical conduit tube, 15 or 20mm or so in diameter. Finally, balloons and elastic bands for the drumskin.

Making a Drumpet is straightforward: you just stretch a balloon flat over the open of the big pipe and then hold it on with an elastic band, doubling the elastic band to hold it firmly if needed. It’s tricky for one person to hold the balloon stretched over the pipe while you get the elastic band, so two people are needed. You will find, until you get used to it, that you sometimes push the balloon off the pipe when you blow. You can tape over the elastic band to stop this.

Now it's time to test out your first Drumpet. Take your small pipe and blow down it while pressing the other end gently down onto the Drumpet balloon drumskin. As Lauren Bacall might have said to Humphrey Bogart, “Just blow, Steve, don’t purse your lips like you are playing a trumpet, just blow.” Vary how hard you press while blowing and suddenly "TaranTaraTarAAAAaa"! Your Drumpet will come to life!

Now get an audio analysis app for your phone: a sound meter or a frequency analyser like the Frequensee. Many of these are free. Check out your Drumpet frequency and power. You might get up to 100dB, at frequencies from 200Hz to 2000kHz (that’s bass notes to operatic soprano top notes).

Things to try

Bass notes are trickier, but persevere – they are nice. Try pressing the tube onto different parts of the drumskin when you blow and angling the tube a little. Press your fingers on the drumskin gently. Try shorter and longer, narrower and wider pipe. Try tighter drumskin, looser drumskin – you may need a bigger balloon for that. What about a single rubber skin or double balloons?

The Vacuum Foghorn

And now for the Ultimate Drumpet… the Vacuum Foghorn. The Vacuum Foghorn gives you lots of great low bass notes that are difficult if you are just blowing. You will need a vacuum cleaner, of course, and a larger tube is probably best. You can use suck or blow. Ideally, run the vacuum cleaner on a low or half-power setting, if it has one – you really don’t need full power. 

Now just let the nozzle up to the drumskin and then pull it back until – "Screeeeech RoAAAAARRrrr!" –you get a note. Play around with the distance and angle of the nozzle so that it doesn’t just suck the balloon hard against the end of the vacuum cleaner tube. It’s a bit easier if you are using ‘blow’, but you still need to adjust. Rather than holding the nozzle itself, you can feed the vacuum cleaner hose up inside a long foghorn resonator pipe, adjusting it against the drumskin for a good note.

You will see the drumskin go all fuzzy in the air. It is actually going to and fro many times a second. If you have a slow-motion camera, you can maybe get a video which you can speed up to see what is really happening. The ways a drum can vibrate is complicated – look it up on Wikipedia, where there are some nice slow-motion images.

Challenges

• What is your loudest note, as judged by your audience or the sound meter?
• What are the lowest note and highest note you can get?
• Can you actually play a tune? Start with something simple. Beethoven’s Fifth maybe (da-da-da-durrr), or a horn call.
• Make two Drumpets or Vacuum Foghorns: can you play harmony?