HAPI Steel Tongue Drum options For Kids and Teens
What age is appropriate for our drums? Not recommended for kids 5 and under. Kids 6-7 years old should use either our Trinity or Mini Drum as the Tini is too small. We generally find that kids 8 years and older have good motor skills to play all our drums.
Are more notes better? More than 8 notes on one drum will be a lot harder to play due to a complicated note layout to memorize. Also, other drums in the market with more notes (not HAPI Drums) have discord and poor resonance with dead sounding notes. These metal tongue drum makers are trying to cram as many notes in as possible, but they are sacrificing sound quality to do so. The notes are not accurately tuned which affects the overall sound of the instrument. Every HAPI Drum we sell is hand tuned to perfection in our workshop. Satisfaction guaranteed.
Which scale is best? The answer depends on your goal. Pentatonic scales are the best choice if you want a drum that is easy to play. All the notes share more harmonic tones and free form playing sounds great. If the goal is to learn music then diatonic (full scale) drums that come with many songs are better. Diatonic scales have a lot more songs written for them. Kids can learn about musical notes and how they relate to songs. As an option, the Trinity Drum comes in a pentatonic scale and also has just a few songs included so you can achieve both goals.
