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Add a Puppet Drummer to Your Repertoire

This past week, we introduced a puppet drummer to our Junior Church to accompany the songs we were doing. He went over great so I thought I’d share with you how we did it.

To start with, we purchased a child sized drum set from Puppets from One Way Street and built a shelf for it to fit on our puppet theater.

The puppet came next. We decided to use two puppeteers to work the puppet; one to work the hands and one to work the head. The drum set came with two plastic drum sticks that needed to attach to the puppet’s hands.

To attach props to our puppets, we use yarn that is colored as close to the puppets skin color as possible. It takes trial and error to get the sticks set the way you want. Try to set them up so the person working the hands can actually drum with them without having to raise their own hands too high.

In our first performance, the hands weren’t quite right, so the puppeteer’s hand was visible a couple of times.

To work the puppet, one person works the head and focuses on maintaining proper height and keeping the puppet’s mouth closed unless it is singing. The other person works the hands and actually drums along with the song. If the person doing the drumming has the ability to keep a beat the drum and cymbal sounds add to the program.

It will take a bit of practice and work to determine the best positions for the puppeteers, but it is well worth it. A puppet band is fun to watch and adds excitement to your program.

We started out with a guitar and next will add a keyboard. Give it a try and see what happens.

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