Craftsmanship:

  All our drums are made of the highest quality hardwoods on the planet. No softwoods are used.

  There are basically two categories here:

  The first is standard construction, called solid stave, offered in maple, cherry, walnut, flame maple, figured cherry, lacewood, mahogany, koa, jatoba, and bubinga. All solid stave drums are available with a bottom cap of walnut or purpleheart, and/or an inlay strip of walnut, purpleheart, ebony, or paua shell abalone at additional charges.


   The second type of construction is called bookmatched stave, in which we specially select certain unique pieces of wood which meet multiple requirements involving grain, color, and dimension to be consecutively sawn into slices and laminated to a maple core. This type of consecutive sawing creates uniform grain, color, and figure all the way around the drum. We are happy to bookmatch unique pieces of wood of any of the species we use for solid stave drums, as well as zebrawood, myrtlewood, narra, purpleheart, and pau ferro. All bookmatched drums come standard with a bottom cap of walnut or purpleheart. Inlay of walnut, purpleheart, ebony, or paua shell abalone come as an option.

  It is important to realize that bookmatching is best used with unique GRAIN, not necessarily unique species. A piece of wood with unique grain (uniquely wild, uniquely even) would have to be consistently grained and large enough to get 12 quite similar looking staves out of it. This is rare. But when we bookmatch, we can focus on parts of boards, where the grain is most inviting, and saw the wood in such a way as to create unique symmetrical grain patterns from stave to stave. This type of matching is the mark of the highest level of woodworking, and just as it adds art value to furniture, so it does to drums. Bookmatched Handmade Rhythm Ashiko drums truly are in class by themselves.