A Tuvan drum begins as a strip of larch or cedar, steamed and bent into a hoop, over which a single hide is stretched and lashed. Nothing covers the back. Instead the maker fits a cross-brace inside the frame, and it is this that the player grips, so that the whole weight of the instrument hangs from one hand and the free hand holds the beater. On many drums the vertical member of that brace is worked into a figure with a head, shoulders and a face, and the horizontal member carries iron rings, cones and small pendants that answer every stroke with a rattle of their own.
The result is not a clean drum tone. It is a layered sound, low and dry from the head, bright and continuous from the metal, and it carries a long way in open country. Where a drum is painted, the design is usually laid out in registers, figures set above and below a dividing line, and the ethnographers who collected such drums read those registers as a diagram of the world rather than as decoration.
The beater is a separate object with its own name, a spatula of wood or antler faced on one side with hide or fur. It is not treated as a stick. A drum is made for one person, is not lent, and among older practitioners was not stored with ordinary household possessions.