Tabla Shop in Brooklyn

Today I turned my bedroom into a tabla shop.  I busted out all my tools and I set about the task of re-heading two of my tablas in anticipation of the Iowa talk. What was really cool, was I got a little stuck trying to see if I could put a 5 1/2 inch head on a 5 5/8 inch shell, so I decided to call Anwar in Varanasi and see what he thought about it.  He gave me some good advice, and then when he was having dinner, he decided to skype me back.  I gave Salmaan some more tech support and they helped me with my drum.  I was holding up to the screen saying, "See here?  It's too high here.  I'm not sure it'll come down."  Anwar would reply, try putting the tuning pegs on it, that will hold it in place.

Ultimately, it didn't fit and I had to redo everything with different heads.  It turns out you might be able to squeeze onto a shell that is a 16th of an inch too big, but an 1/8th of an inch makes too much difference.

It was really fun.  In some ways I felt like I was back in Banaras.  In this weird virtual way.  They were sitting there eating and hanging out (it was almost midnight their time) and I was working on drums and we were just chatting.

I've been calling about once a week or so lately.  I hope I keep it up.  It's great for my hindi and I know they get a kick out of getting calls from America.  "What time is it there?" is still kind of a crazy thing.  I also know that Salman has been able to do a lot more online from what little I have been able to help him with - so that's good too.

I think the work today will be good for the Iowa talk too.  Now I can show one tabla that was made more or less by a master (i put the head on and certainly not as well as he would have done) and another one that I made (with lots of help).  You can definitely hear which one is which, so that's cool too.