This was one of my favourite and most playable musical instruments that I’ve built so far. Although it looks like a traditional PVC pipe drum, it has a lot more complexity both in sound timbre and design. On each pipe there is a small leather drum head attatched to the top, using the same techniques from the fabrication of other leather percussion instruments like the Bongo, the Atabaque, Djembe and many others.

The drum head allows the performer to play the instruments with their bare hands, fingers and drum sticks, applying less force than the necessary on a traditional pipe drum. Also the sound generated from the leather is much richer than rubber sticks on the bare PVC, and each head can produce additional overtones when using the right percussion technique.

The pitch of each drum is determined by the extension of the pipe. It has a clever fine-tunig mechanism at the end of the tube, compensating for variations on the air’s humidity and temperature. An advantage of closing one of the ends of the pipe with leather is the difference on the physical boundary conditions of the tube, influencing the acoustic properties of the air inside. The resonace frequency of the tube will be one octave lower, which reduces the required length of the pipes significantly.

Trilobita has its name due to an interesting causality. During a rehearsal of the Uakti group, the instrument fell into the ground. While it was falling, a passerby shouted “Look out! the Trilobita is falling!”. This person was never seen again.

Unfortunately, this model was dismantled in 2017, since the MDF degraded and rotted by moisture, and was unable to hold up the tension from the leather.