I did it! I did it!

I tied my own shime--and it sounds great!



Of course last Saturday was the day the digi-cam decided to go MIA. I actually wanted to take pics so I could get a look at the before shots in case I got stuck and needed to figure out what it looked like before I made a mess of things. Oh well.

First off I need to say that I wouldn't have even dreamed of buying my own shime, much less tying/tightening it if it weren't for Kris Bergstrom's excellent TIASOU method instructions. They used to be online at tiasou.org, but have mysteriously vanished off the face of the internet. I personally wouldn't have attempted this just by the written directions alone. Not that they're bad directions, but I'm one of those people who needs to see and do (under strict adult supervision) before I venture off and try to do things on my own--well something as seemingly complicated as tying my own shime anyway. So I took his workshop at the Taiko Conference, and with that experience under my belt I decided to just dive in and do one of the scariest things I could do to the drum: take all the rope off and put it back together again.

Before I started, I did something geeky, which was to make recordings of both sides of the drum so I could have an audible "snapshot" of my progress. I figured if the drum sounded higher than when I started, then I would count it as a success. I'm not sure how tight Asano tied the shime when they sold it to me, but I assumed it wasn't really super tight.

Anyhow. The TIASOU method suggests specific lacing directions and my drum was laced in the opposite direction, and since I wanted to follow the TIASOU's suggestions, the first thing I had to do was completely take all the rope off. It was both scary and liberating to have the drum in 3 pieces on the living room floor. I got to see the beautiful inside of the drum and Asano's markings on the drum heads. That's not something you get to see every day. Plus it smells fabulous in there. Ahh, wood.

"Stage 1" of the tightening process begins with getting the rope on the drum, removing the slack, and making sure the heads are centered on the body of the drum. Easy enough if you just follow the diagrams. Plus my drum heads are perfectly suited to the size of my drum body, eliminating most of the worry of off-centering the heads--that's what 400 years of craftsmanship will get you! Tightening the rope with my hands alone was one thing, but when I had to apply the agebatchi, that was something else. An Agebatchi is similar to an ax-handle, and it looks like what your Odaiko bachi would look like if you stuck the tip of it on the train tracks. Flat. You take the flat side and use it to pry up the rope to create the tension that pulls the heads together to make that beautiful shime sound.

Now, I know that Kris' philosophy with the TIASOU method is to create a painless, efficient and even aesthetically pleasing process of shime tightening, but if you saw me on the living room floor Saturday you would say that I looked the complete opposite of that. I know I was making mistakes, and I even started over a couple times--sometimes because I thought I was doing something wrong, or could do it better, or both. I even lost all of the precious tension I created because of a sloppy temporary knot, and I felt like those kids you see who get ice cream cones and lick the ice cream part off and start crying when they realize they're holding the cone but the ice cream is in a puddle at their feet. Live and learn. After several attempts, I finally figured out how to handle the agebatchi better and how to hold the tension effectively, but you should have seen the sweat pouring off of me. I don't even sweat that much when I run! I think part of it was just being a little nervous. I also got some serious rug burn on my knees and actually wore two holes in my knees--nothing a little Neosporin and a band-aid can't fix.

"Stage 2" tightening was way funner than Stage 1. In Stage 2, you bind the zig zag laces of the drum in pairs, and for this part you get to actually stand on top of the drum while pulling the rope. Kris put a lot of emphasis on how to do the pull safely and effectively, and I tried to follow his instructions as close as I could. Stage 2 is when your shime really gets tight, and I think I did a pretty decent job. After binding all the pairs together and tying off the rope, I did my geeky testing again, and it sounded way different than before. Now my baby has nice high pitch--higher than what the shimes at the dojo sound like right now.

So you're supposed to tighten the shime only for when you play it, and release the tension when you're done. Most people don't do that. But Kris was talking about how the heads can only sound good for a certain amount of time before they wear out, and he even loses sleep if he has to tighten the heads the night before a gig he wouldn't otherwise have time to tighten the shime for beforehand. I don't know if I would necessarily have the time to tighten the shime between the time I get home from work and have to go to class. But I think I would like to get to that point. He says it can be done in 20 minutes. I took 4 hours. But that included restarting and thinking and do-overs and whipping the ends of the rope (I tied twine around the ends of the rope so the rope doesn't unravel). Maybe I could tighten on Thursdays and play on Fridays and Mondays and release after class on Mondays? I should try that.

Anyhow. This whole shime-tightening thing was a good experience, and I would recommend it to anyone who plays a shime. I feel more connected to mine after this! Now I just need to whip those other shime into shape . . .