My "Dragonskin" Hedwitschak GPS

by Stephen Ingraham (c)2007

My Christmas present to myself this year was a GPS (Guido Plüsche Special) bodhran from Christian Hedwitschak's Art Bodhrans.

I purchased it from WhistleAndDrum in Colorado (the second drum I have gotten from them).
This is not my first drum. It is not even my first good drum. I have an excellent tunable 18 inch Paul McAuley with a Lambeg head, and a 14 inch Claddagh by Michael Vignoles with a double skin. I learned to play on the McAuley and the Claddagh was my trusty travel drum and kept my wrist in while putting on 200,000 plus air miles a year. A few years ago I bought a why not for a $100 EMS tunable 16x7 just to see what a deep shell was like. Not a bad drum either…once I taped it around the edge it was at least good enough to show the potential of the design.

Still, I have always wondered what a really good 16 inch with a semi-deep shell would sound like, and I have become increasingly interested in tool-less tuning (in direct proportion to the difficulty of getting a tuning tool on to an aircraft). Then too, the Lambeg skin on my McAuley was not shaved down as thin as many makers are shaving them today, and I wanted to try a thinner, more supple, skin, besides it was just time for a new drum!


First, let me say, the Hedwitschak GPS is an absolutely gorgeous drum. If any of you have ever envied the guitar, or bazouki, or the fiddle player their lovely wood, or the flute player his silver or blackwood elegance, this drum will cure your envy. It is the kind of thing you want to leave out in the living room, it is so pretty!

But more importantly, the Dragonskin resonates more clearly and precisely than any other drum I have played. Wherever you strike the head it rebounds in a perfect circle, centered, and the whole head moves somewhat like the cone in a good hi-fi speaker, as a unit, with a lot of motion in the center, and less towards the edge. It really looks like a bass speaker pumping...it moves that much, and yet it remains coherent even under complex rhythms. I think that's what gives it the clean, clear sound...the punch in the bass, and the clear harmonics.

Maybe this is common in thin skinned drums, but I've never seen it this pronounced or this clean.

The DragonSkin is also very alive with a lot of motion and sound for very little striking force. I have to get used to that since I mostly played my Vignoles 14, which had a double head, and fairly heavy skins at that. You had to hit that goat (or those goats) a good solid whack to get much sound out of it. The DragonSkin is not a hard skin as some lambeg skins are...it is as soft and pliant over its whole surface as the striking point on my McAuley Lambeg head is after years of playing…and yet, it is not mushy like the over-processed skin on the EMS.

And, of course, the liveliness means it doesn't take much pressure from the left hand to alter pitch...it is more a touch to divide the wave into upper and lower harmonics, than it is a an actual stretching of the skin to raise pitch.

I can still get the hard, tap shoe like sound I liked (on occasion, when the occasion calls for it) on the Vignoles by hitting the backside of the skin with my thumb just as the Tipper falls...and of course all kinds of pops and clicks with my palm against the skin, especially high up near the top.
The DragonSkin responds very differently to different tippers than any of my other drums. While the bass is deeper and louder with a heavier and longer tipper, I can still get a good solid bass and good volume with my lightest and shortest ebony. The GPS likes a small area of contact between the tipper and the skin: a thin stick or a tear-drop at most. Balls sound just slightly mushy and muted, especially on the higher notes…though I will keep my ball-end tippers for those occasions when that muted sound is appropriated to the music.

Christian recommended his ME4 tipper for this drum: ebony, heavy for its size, and just flared out from a slim center to a kind of torpedo shape on both ends that puts the most mass just behind the striking point. I am learning to appreciate it.
I wrote to Christian to ask if he aligned the skin in any special way on the drum…if there was, in his mind, a preferred orientation for the drum and a preferred strike point on the skin. (I had already discovered what seemed like the sweet spot to me and was just checking to see if he had made it as easy to find as it was.) He replied that indeed, he attempts to align the skin on the drum so when the strike point is in the traditional Kerry position, the join in the shell sits in your lap. Mine was right on! That speaks to the level of craftsmanship and care that goes into the Art Bodhans.
The tuning system on the GPS (whoever originated it) is, in the Hedwitschak implementation, nothing short of elegant! Each of the 8 tuners has a little knurled wheel on the end. They turn smoothly and easily through the likely tension range and seem to have enough adjustment range to account for dramatic changes in humidity and climate, especially as the Dragonskin seems uncommonly stable in the first place. And the Tuner apparatus itself, the part that attaches to the rim, looks designed and built for the job rather than adapted from a plumbing fitting (you will know what I mean if you have looked at many tunable drums).

Again, maybe all this is normal in a professional level drum, but I certainly appreciate the effort and craftsmanship that is required to produce this kind of results.