![](http://photosounder.com/blog/2009/03/bongo_full.png)
While attempting to create a whole drum kit by hand using Photoshop a few months ago I created this bongo drum, which sound I find quite satisfactory. It was accomplished by loading a few bongo drum samples in
Photosounder to see how a bongo drum typically looks like, and then recreating what I saw in Photoshop.
A handmade bongo drum
There are 3 main features, as shown on the picture to the right : a few carefully spaced horizontal lines that give the bongo drum its characteristic metallic ringing sort of sound,
![](http://photosounder.com/blog/2009/03/bongo_detail.png)
two short bright blobs placed at the beginning of the sound under the two lowest lines which give the sound its initial punch, and finally a darker snare-like haze which give the initial slappy-almost-clicky start and evolves in vertical span and intensity to sound like the ringing from kicking into a barrel. Of course on top of it all we find a black rectangle which overlays the first half of what we drew as to give our sound its sharp attack. The 3 separate features as show on the image sound like this (played at 205 pixels/second) :
Full original multi-layered Photoshop fileLabels: experiments, image synthesis, instrument creation