The Complete Handbook of Hand Percussion Bags & Cases

Chapter 1: Understanding Hand Percussion Bags & Cases

You are a working percussionist. It is Tuesday evening, and you are packing your djembe into a bag for a rehearsal across town. The bag cost you $80 when you bought it used three years ago. As you sling it over your shoulder, you notice a new seam starting to give where the handle meets the top. You think, "I should have bought the better one," but you are not sure there was a better one, or what would have made it better. This handbook exists to answer that question.

This is not a buying guide with a list of "top ten best bags." This is a reference manual for a category of equipment that is almost universally under-considered. Hand percussion bags and cases are the interface between a valuable, often irreplaceable instrument and a world of loading docks, taxi trunk floors, airplane cargo holds, crowded stages, and damp storage closets. They are first-line defense. But unlike the instruments they protect, they are frequently bought on impulse, with little understanding of what a bag can and cannot do, and why two bags that look identical can have a 400% price difference and an even larger difference in useful lifespan.

A hand percussion bag or case, at its most basic, is a container engineered to hold a specific instrument or family of instruments, to allow for safe transport and storage, and to mitigate the physical insults of travel and handling. But the "how