About Steel Drums

Made from 55 gallon steel drums, the only new acoustic instrument of the 20th century originated on the Caribbean island of Trinidad in the 1930s and 1940s.

The bottom of a steel drum is carefully pounded into a concave dish with a sawed-off sledgehammer. This stretches the metal so it will resonate, much like a rubber band will make a tone when you stretch and pluck it. Then individual note areas are "grooved" into the surface with a chisel. Smaller areas will produce higher notes, and larger areas result in lower notes.

Each area is then painstakingly tuned, again by pounding and shaping with a hammer. Skilled tuners will tune the primary note near the center of its area, and then tune harmonics in the corners of the same region. The added harmonics give the best steelpans their distinctive "ringing" quality.

There is a short article about the origins and evolution of the steel drum at the IDBAmerica website. A longer, more colorful article called "From Drums to Tamboo Bamboo to Sweet Steel" by Selwyn Taradath is at PanTrinbago.com. You may be surprised that it was not necessarily a peaceful evolution.

Just as the bands competed in more ways than with music, there are also competing claims circling around who is credited with "inventing" the pan, and who should be credited with development of the "modern pan". It is an area rife with politics and debate. A series of interesting articles about the origin of the steelpan at PanTrinbago.com tries to sort some of this out.

Panmaking and tuning is still evolving today. Tuners are using new techniques even within the last ten years, while some builders are even taking a more scientific, large-scale production approach and using 55-gallon drums manufactured solely for making these instruments. But most pans are still made by craftsmen who pound them out and carefully refine and tune the instruments one pan at a time.

PanJava - Play a pan on your computer

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