steel drum

The steel drum is a twentieth-century variety of percussion vessel, analogous to the gong, that originated in Trinidad during the Second World War. Of simple construction, it consists of an ordinary fifty-gallon oil drum stood upright, with one head divided into sections of different sizes by means of punched grooves. Each section is tuned to its own pitch, so that one head may produce as many as twenty-five or even thirty pitches when struck with a rubber-tipped...