The face of a Sámi drum is covered in figures painted on the hide in a red dye made from alder bark, and the arrangement is not decorative. Northern drums, made on a frame, and southern drums, made from a hollowed burl of birch, organise the field differently, but in both the figures constitute a picture of the world the drum was used to consult: people, dwellings, herds of reindeer, wild animals, boats, churches, and the beings of Sámi cosmology in their places. Drums differ from one another in detail because they were made by and for individuals, so the corpus is a set of related personal statements rather than copies of a standard.
The drum was consulted by moving a marker over that field. A ring, a piece of bone or a bunch of brass rings was laid on the membrane and the drum was struck with a hammer of reindeer antler until the marker travelled, and where it came to rest, in relation to the figures, was read as the answer. The drum was also the instrument of the noaidi, the specialist who dealt with the beings of the other world on behalf of a community. Both uses are recorded, and the second is described almost entirely by outsiders who regarded it as diabolical, which is a serious limitation on the record.