Nathaniel Hall has been making hand drums for almost three decades, and he still sees, and hears, a unique quality in every drum.
Nathaniel co-founded Everyone’s Drumming in Putney in 1994 with the help of a partner.
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They were a couple of young hippies, who were good at woodworking, and they started experimenting with a design that used northeast hardwood for the drum body and traditional animal skin for the heads.
“The idea was to do something that we loved,” he said recently inside his shop. “We both enjoyed drumming. We both enjoyed making the product to sell."
He said the idea wasn't to get rich.
"It’s kind of a niche market," Nathaniel said. "So it’s not like, you know, making paper towels for every household who wants to have them.”
They sold the drums locally and at festivals around the Northeast. After a few years, they went to a national music trade show and the business took off.
“We went in a phone call from testing at a couple of stores to nationwide," Nathaniel said.
"At this point I consider myself a master craftsman at this, at 28 years of making drums. And, I guess that’s what I strive to do is to make drums that are aesthetically are beautiful, but also functionally, just sound incredible." - Nathaniel Hall, Everyone's Drumming
At one point they had eight employees, and Everyone’s Drumming produced upward of 5,000 drums a year, each handmade in a tiny woodshop in Putney.
Their drums were shipped all over the world, and some of them ended up in front of some pretty high-profile musicians.
“Locally, in the state of Vermont, we have Phish. John Fishman and Mike Gordon both have many of my drums,” he said. “Members of the Grateful Dead, Mickey Hart, Bill Kreutzmann, Phil Lesh has one."
The business cruised a long for a while until cheaper imports from Southeast Asia undercut their product, and they couldn’t compete on a national level.
Eventually, they closed the shop and Nathaniel’s partner left.
For the past decade or so Nathaniel has been making drums pretty much on his own, focusing more on quality, and selling to a customer who’s willing to pay more for a higher-end product.
“As you came in today there’s a big pile of shavings sitting right out front,” he said during a recent visit to his shop. “So I was planing up this pile of curly maple, right here. I get all my wood locally, from local wood suppliers, using all woods mostly just from the Northeast. So we use ash, maple, cherry, you know, black walnut, bass wood, and other woods, you know, by request."
Nathaniel walks over and switches on his dust collector and then his table saw.
“So we make the drums with a stave construction. So, it’s like a barrel,” he says, lifting a finished drum from the side. “So they’re cut on a saw for the angles. Then they get glued together. Then they get turned on a lathe and rounded out.”
It takes just under a week to get a drum body ready, between cutting the pieces, waiting for the glue to dry, turning the body on a lathe to get it smooth, and then staining the wood.
Then Nathaniel takes the drum body upstairs to a second floor workshop where he stretches an animal skin on top.
“This is an African hide, a goatskin,” he says, lifting a skin with long brown hair still attached. “And those take a little more to process because you have to hand shave the heads.”
Nathaniel clips the long hair off of the dried goatskin with a scissors and then soaks the skin in water overnight to soften it up.
The softened skin is draped over the drum body, between two steel rings as Nathaniel starts tightening the head with string.
“So there’s a steel hoop in the center of the drum and two on the top,” he says. “One with knots, and one without. You’ll hear it get tighter, each pull.”
With the head firmly in place Nathaniel starts to shave the dried goat hair off of the now tightened drum head.
“I use this straight razor, which is very, very sharp,” he says as he scraps the blade across the tight head. “And you want to go kind of against the grain of the hair, so you just kind of pull it across.”
Flecks of dried goat hair drop to the floor. Nathaniel carefully scrapes the razor across the skin, which is slowly turning into a drum head.
“So it’s partially done, you can hear it’s a little brighter,” he says, as he hits the almost clean head.
Nathaniel estimates that Everyone’s Drumming has sent out about 40,000 drums in almost three decades and this one is about ready.
It might be sold at an upcoming festival, or maybe go to a school kid through one of the educational accounts Nathaniel has.
Over the past few years Nathaniel has been making drums on a part-time basis, while he worked a full-time job maintaining the grounds at a nearby school.
At 53, Nathaniel says he’s getting back into drum making full-time. He even has a few festivals lined up this summer.
“You know at this point I consider myself a master craftsman at this, at 28 years of making drums” he says. “And, I guess that’s what I strive to do is to make drums that are aesthetically are beautiful, but also functionally, just sound incredible."
He says no two drums are the same.
"Each drum has its own voice, and I find that’s really interesting to bring that out of all of these different materials we use," Nathaniel says.
Nathaniel gently lifts the finished drum off of his work table and puts it off to the side. He’s not sure where he’ll sell it, or when, but he knows that at some point soon someone will be drumming out a rhythm on this instrument he’s made.
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