Got a New Tongue Drum? Start Here

Step 1 Check your tongue drum

Start the microphone and play one note at a time: the dial names the note and how many cents sharp or flat it is. Audio is analysed on your device and never leaves it.

Check it — a tongue drum is not meant to be retuned

A steel tongue drum is tuned at the factory: each tongue’s pitch comes from its length, width and thickness, and there is no peg or screw. So the tuner’s job is to verify. Strike the largest tongue first — almost always the root, the note the drum is named after — then each of the others once, firmly but not hard, and write down the letter and the cents. Read the number a beat after the strike, once the note has settled.

Every tongue about 30 cents flat?

Then the drum was tuned to A = 432 Hz rather than 440, which some makers do deliberately. It is perfectly in tune with itself and will sound fine alone; it will not match a piano. 440 vs 432 Hzexplains the difference, and the tuner’s settings can be set to 432 to match. If only one or two tongues are off while the rest are close, those tongues have a genuine fault.

A dead or wrong-sounding note

Before blaming the drum, make sure nothing is touching the shell: a drum sitting on a soft surface that presses against a tongue reads wrong and sounds dead. Lift it onto a stand or a ring. The magnets that come with many drums lower a tongue’s pitch when stuck near its tip, and can always be taken off again; raising a pitch means grinding metal away and is a job for the maker. The tongue drum tuner page has the rest.

Step 2 Learn the layout

Most beginner drums come with numbers stuck or engraved on the tongues, and those numbers are scale degrees: 1 is the root, 2 the next note up, and so on to 7, with a dot above a number for the octave higher and a dot below for the octave lower. It is the same notation kalimba tabs use, and the songs below are written in it.

The strip above is not a picture of a drum — makers arrange the tongues in different patterns round the shell — but your drum’s notes in pitch order, each with its number and letter. Pick the scale your drum was sold as, tap through it, then find each number on your own drum. The sound is this site’s kalimba tine model, because a tongue is the same kind of steel bar clamped at one end; it is close to a drum, not a recording of one.

Step 3 Your first five songs

Easiest first: the library marks each tune easy or harder, and within that the songs covering the fewest notes come first — on a tongue drum, range decides more about how hard a tune is than speed does. Every one is a public-domain melody.

Each tab is written for an 8-note C major drum, the large number is the one on your tongue and the letter is under it; a dash holds a note another beat. Press a song under the strip in Step 2 to hear it and watch the notes light up. More tabs in the same numbers are in the kalimba songbook, on its 8-key shelf — an 8-key kalimba has exactly these eight notes.

Step 4 A seven-day plan

Ten minutes a day is enough, and the same ten minutes every day does more than an hour on Sunday. Tick each task as you go; this page remembers where you got to.

Sizes and types of tongue drum

Two things vary: the scale and the size. The scale is printed on the box or the drum — C major, C major pentatonic, D Akebono and D minor pentatonic are four of the commonest, and the strip above has all four. A pentatonic drum leaves out the 4 and the 7, so any combination of its notes sounds good together, which is why so many are sold as meditation drums; the price is that tunes using a 4 or a 7 will not play on it. The songs below say which ones do.

Size is mostly about range and volume: small drums around six inches across usually have eight tongues or fewer, and bigger ones eleven, thirteen or fifteen, adding notes above and below the same scale. A handpan is a different instrument — two hammered shells with tuned dimples rather than tongues cut into one — and the online handpan plays one.