Motherland Music Drum Service & Repair

Motherland Music specializes in quality West African drum repair including djembes, doundoun, talking drums (aka "tamas" in some cultures), peg-tuned drums, batá, doumbek, darbouka, tombak, and many other types of world percussion instruments. If you have a drum with a broken skin, we will be happy to give you a quote on fixing it. We have a full-service workshop with a very-experienced, knowledgeable, helpful staff of drum mechanics. We will help you access the full potential of your musical instrument and give you options on what repairs or improvements will be best for your budget. We look at the structural integrity of your drum, wood density and thickness, the cut of the body and shape of the sound edges, ring sizing and fit, and the tuning qualities. We personalize each job we do by giving your drum a special sound in tune with the music it was made to play. Our customers often say that their drum after we fully overhaul it, looks and sounds substantially better than when they got it.

If you can bring or send your drum to our workshop in Culver City, California, USA, we guarantee that we'll fix it and make it sound better than ever. We are able to fix cracks or replace whole sections of a wood drum body (shell), fix or replace tuning systems, carve wood shells to a smooth and even thickness and help you determine what thickness and type of skin will produce the sound you want. In effect we don't just repair drums; we remanufacture them.

For more than a decade, we have helped local professional and amateur musicians in the Los Angeles metro area maintain and make improvements to their drums, kits, performance setups, and baggage. We have a reputation of high-quality workmanship at reasonable rates and fast turn-around time. E.g. skin replacement and tuning for goatskin djembes usually takes about 5-7 days (this may depend on the weather—e.g. we rarely "pull" [tension to playing pitch] drums when it's humid outside) or workload. For cow skin djembes, dunduns, congas, batás, and tombaks, skin replacement and tuning usually takes about 6-10 days due to more-involved technical requirements. We're proud of our workmanship, but we realize that most musicians aren't rolling in money these days, so we also strive to keep our pricing as competitive as possible, plus we want to help those just starting out (and everyone else) to afford the best-quality genuine hand-crafted instruments at student-friendly prices.

For detailed pricing on repairs and custom design/build work, please click here. We do appreciate your business and we realize that our reputation has grown from and depends upon the positive word-of-mouth referrals of our satisfied customers. We consider our role in the African drumming community to be here for you, whether you only play occasionally for fun, or you are a top professional in need of that extra edge.

Our entire workshop crew thanks you very much for your continued support. We're eager to help you take your drumming to the next level.