Albert Alfonso is visiting the Philadelphia Irish Center to show off his newest bodhráns and tippers, and to lead a clinic for Delaware Valley’s Irish drummers. It’s just the latest stop on a summer road tour that will take the master bodhrán maker to several U.S. cities.

I arrive early, hoping to add to my arsenal of tippers before all the other drummers get there and pick them over. (A tipper is a stick used to play the bodhrán, the traditional Irish frame drum.)

Alfonso’s drums are stacked like checkers on tables along one side of the Irish Center’s Fireplace Room. On the other side of the room is a single table where Alfonso is preparing to display what looks to be 30 or 40 tippers, using one of them as a straight-edge to neatly line up all the others. He looks like a Las Vegas pool shark racking up for a game of 8-Ball. Also on the table is a small electronic scale with which buyers can weigh their tippers before purchase. Albert is seriously into precision.

This is the first time I’ve met Albert, a Queens-born son of a Cuban émigré who improbably wound up playing bodhrán in Dallas in his mid-20s. He’s maybe 5-foot-10. His dark hair is cropped short, with granny glasses perched on his beaky nose and small gold loops hanging from his earlobes. A wavy salt-and-pepper rectangle of a beard adorns his chin. His personal dress code is casual: shorts, sneakers, and a roomy T-shirt with a kind of Celtic mandala on it. 

Albert is widely known for making and selling drums that many devoted fans regard as being at "the top." He knows what he's talking about. Anyone who has noodled around for years with a cheap bodhrán, who then steps up to one of Albert's, can tell the difference right away.

I'm not in the market for a new bodhrán at the moment, but hey, if you find yourself spending time in a new car showroom, don't you just want to take their zippiest sports car out for a spin?

The drums are in a variety of sizes, and each one seems to have a different character, some a little bassier than others, some perhaps a bit brighter. All of them, of course, built more solidly than Fort Knox. I'm almost afraid to play them, not because I'm afraid I'll break them, but because I'm afraid Albert will hear me. I don't want to embarrass myself.

Local player Tim Hill is coveting one in particular: Albert's. But that one's not going anywhere. So Tim contents himself by playing all the other drums. He sounds brilliant. He does, anyway, but on these drums there is a solidity—and a warmth—to the tone, as well. The skins seem unusually responsive to every move of Tim's left hand.

Anyway, I've soon got Albert on the subject of his tippers, which is really why I came. They look more like Harry Potter’s magic wands than any tipper I’ve ever held. (Perhaps there are phoenix feathers embedded in their cores.) Most are slender. Some of them are straight; many others are vaguely spindle-shaped at the upper end, comfortably resting in the gap between the thumb and forefinger, tapering down into slim, delicate cylinders. Most are made of diamondwood, a few of cocobolo or rosewood. All but a few have been polished to a colorful gem-like finish. Using these dense woods produces a lightweight tipper with unusual strength. They’re also pretty cool to look at.

Crafting tippers probably sounds like a fairly safe enterprise. Not so, particularly when working with cocobolo. Back in 1998, Albert was poisoned by, of all things, cocobolo dust. The dust is particularly irritating, particularly among asthmatics. But breathing the dust can also cause paralysis.

"It hit my ankles, knees, hips and elbows. I felt really bad for three weeks, and then it improved a bit, but I still felt pretty bad for three months," Albert says. "I went to see the doctors, and their solution was to cut open my hands and to essentially scrape my tendons."

That didn't sound like a great idea to someone who relies on his hands for his living, so he waited. A chance encounter with an alternative medicine specialist two months later led to an amazingly quick cure.

Since then, Albert has vastly improved his shop ventilation and he's had no problems. (He also wears a surplus Israeli gas mask when he lacquers.)

Now, much of Albert's painstaking handiwork is arrayed before me. I'm looking for a few new tippers to add to my stash before my trip to compete in the 2006 Fleadh Cheoil na hEireann in August. I’m drawn to three in particular—two of the spindly types, and one thicker and heavier model, like a miniature broomstick handle. If having hot tippers could make me a champeen bodhrán player, I'd be all set. Sadly, I'm pretty sure it doesn't work that way.

Each tipper is one of a kind. “I don’t have a pattern. My drums aren’t made from a pattern, either,” says Albert.

These days, many bodhrán players—particularly those who focus most of their banging on the top end of the bodhrán skin—are playing as melodically as they are rhythmically. They tend to prefer a thinner stick. But there are still a lot of us who play in the so-called traditional or “Kerry” style, using a two-headed stick. (For you non-drummers, that’s probably about as “inside baseball” as you want to go.) Albert’s plan was to cater to both.

“I’m making them so they’ll be OK with ‘top end’ or traditional,” he says. “I wanted to do a compromise without compromising.”

No compromise: Albert Alfonso wouldn’t have it any other way.

(Note to readers: Albert can also reproduce exactly any stick he makes.)

• View photos
• View as slide show
• Read The Bodhrán Diaries: Part 1
• Read The Bodhrán Diaries: Part 2
• Visit Albert's Web site