"We have this custom. You go out after Christmas chasing after this little bird, trying to frighten him. . ." Doubt is flickering across the polite face of the German tourist. He has signed up for a four-hour crash course in the playing of the bodhran - not in the wielding of a sacred tool in a primitive initiation ritual.

We nervously tuck our goatskins between our knees and our oxters, a little group of about eight, in a classroom in Waltons New School of Music in Dublin. The tutor, Brian Fleming, reserves for break-time news of some of the more lurid shapes the ancient drum can take: "I've seen one made from a jinnet skin, with cat's blood smeared on the outside - black hair and black blood - it was satanic looking. They can be made of calfskin and deerskin. There's been some made out of greyhounds. Then there's the different ways people get the skins. A guy I know goes out and chases the goats with his dog and kills them with a Stanley knife."

We grip our sticks by first holding them as you'd hold a pen, and then turn our hands inwards. Reel time, 4/4: BOOM, boom, boom, boom; Jig time, 6/8: BOOM, boom, boom, BOOM, boom, boom. And the bodhran can use the time in different ways: there's your simple up, down, up, down, there's your uppity, uppity, and there's your up, down, tap, down. The initiation ritual analogy deepens as the tight little circle of drummers begin to beat together, and to beat ever faster; I feel it is only a matter of time before one of us utters a bloodcurdling yell and bursts out of Walton's to go on the rampage through Joy of Coffee. To curb this excess, Brian asks us to do something completely unreasonable: to beat in time with music. He puts on a CD, and the magic flute of the late, lamented Frankie Kennedy spirals into the air. What an amazing form of immortality, I muse, in the way one does on an afternoon off, when Brian asks us to take up our drums. "In traditional Irish music, you follow the lead instrument, not the percussion. . ." And with these words, Frankie's flute music is battered to death by eight bodhrans. There's definitely more to it than meets the eye. Brian, who leads a percussion group called De Jimbe which does African and Caribbean music as well as traditional Irish, has also played with groups like Anuna and Anam, and has been drum master for Macnas. He copes with the whipping boy role of the bodhran in Irish music by having better bodhran jokes than anyone else: "How do you know a bodhran player is sitting on level ground? He's got equal levels of drool coming out of his mouth."

Tuneable bodhrans, with little drum-tightening taps at the side, are "the way things are going", he says, but in the meantime he teaches us how to section off little pieces of the drum with our hands to make two different pitches on one drum: tap, tip, tap, tip. And he keeps slathering the drums with water to keep them flexible in the heat: "A few weeks from now, if you've been doing your practice and you get into a session, you'll want to have a glass of water beside you. It should have water every day, or else it could tighten and burst. But if you leave something wet on it, it rots."

Brian has been doing the summer crash courses since last year, every Tuesday and Thursday. The courses were thought up to woo the tourists - there is also a tin whistle crash course - but Irish people are often in the majority, as they are on my course. There is a group of three women who are in a choir together, and want to learn the bodhran so they can contribute something at parties: "At parties, everybody gets up and sings. If you haven't got a solo voice, you feel awkward," explains one. You wonder how their fellow choristers will take it. One minute the savouries and sherry wine are being passed around, as memories of a triumph with Vivaldi are shared; the next, two perfectly reasonable housewives with grown-up children and one student are advancing on them as a phalanx of drummers.

Some have quieter ambitions in doing the course: "I play myself the double bass, explains the polite German tourist, a GP travelling with his daughter. "I'm interested in deep instruments." Deep? "Boom, boom, boom", he replies, on the bodhran. "I am interested only in the rhythm of it and how it is made."

You can learn the basics in four hours, but the secret is following it up, emphasises Brian: "When you're doing your one-and-a-half or two hours' practice every day. . . Did I say something funny?" He insists there are no hopeless cases. The one woman whose stick keeps flying into the air when she gets excited eventually harnesses it to her hand.

"I actually have never found anyone who wasn't able to do it," insists Brian. "One of the worst cases I ever had - he couldn't get a single thing on the course - I actually saw him playing really nicely in a session afterwards."

Waltons New School of Music can be contacted at Tel: 01-4781884.