It’s a dog. Eating from a metal bowl and then fighting with the blankets, he sounds like this.
If you’re in NYC and you’d like to meet this or other instruments-of-the-day, check this out.
I’m going to continue with the instrument building, one a week for as long as I can stand it. If you wanna keep up with the noise, bookmark or subscribe to my homepage. Thanks for putting up with the cacophony!
I found the box in the garbage while walking the dog yesterday and I knew I had to make a fiddle. It looks like it was a chunk cut out of a cheap veneer door or something. This was my most ambitious instrument-a-day, coming in at 6 hours.
The bridge is cut from poplar, the strings are nylon guitar strings, the bass bar and sound post are garbage wood, and the neck/fingerboard is, of course, a rotten stick. This fiddle actually leaves mildew on your left hand when you play it.
The bow I made yesterday literally disintegrated overnight - the screws unscrewed themselves and the hairs fell out! So I played the fiddle with a rosin-coated popsicle stick. Bear in mind that (1) this is a horrible, horrible fiddle and (2) i have no idea how to play a fiddle, before you listen to the sound sample.
Today my ebay order of mongolian horse hair arrived! So I made a fancy horsehair bow. It’s an awful bow, of course, and I have no idea how to use a bow anyway, but what the heck: here’s what it sounds like on the rotten stick tension guitar and the rotten stick electric guitar.
(I got to spend some time combing horse hair. Instrument making has more in common with My Little Pony than I knew!)
Yes, it’s another rotten stick! But no walnuts this time. It’s a saxophone of sorts, using reeds made out of coke cans, subway passes, and whatever else I had lying around. Here’s what it sounds like with three different reeds.
Construction details: I cut the stick in half the long way and chiseled out a rectangular trench in one half. I clamped the two halves together while I made the mouthpiece (which is coated with lemon oil and olive oil to protect it from spit) and tested the first reed. Then I glued the halves together and drilled the finger holes, and made a bunch more reeds.
Bart Hopkin calls it a boo - a tongue drum made from a tube of bamboo or a box. It might not seem complicated compared to some of my earlier instruments, but for me, cutting and attaching these five pieces of wood was like brain surgery. Notice that no two sides are the same length, and the notches for the tongue are all slanted. Anyway, it goes a little bit like this.
Ever since I saw it in the instrument collection at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, I’ve been obsessed with the trumpet marine, a giant one-stringed instrument that’s supposed to sound like a trumpet. Besides its monstrous size, the most important characteristics of the trumpet marine are that it’s fingered at the harmonics and played with a bow (like Glendon’s harmonic violin) and that it has a buzzing bridge that gives it the brassy sound of a trumpet. The bridge has to be carefully balanced to get it to buzz, which is done by adjusting the tension on a string called the guidon that tugs the main string sideways. (You can see the guidon in the closeup shot.)
My instrument with no bow at all is a pretty poor imitation of a trumpet marine, but it does sound a bit salty. In the sound sample, you can hear as I fiddle with the guidon to get a buzz that I like. On the last four notes in the sample, I supressed the plucking sound in software to simulate what it might sound like when bowed. (And I cranked the reverb way up.) It does kind of sound like a trumpet!
What was I saying about making stringed instruments too big for myself? This one is over seven feet tall.
Continuing to explore the variable tension theme from yesterday: the rotten stick tension guitar uses a hand lever to stretch the string and thus set the pitch. I had that bit of coconut leftover from the banjo, so I used it as a sound radiator. The walnut on the other end is for comfort when you prop the guitar up against your belly (the recommended playing posture).
I thought I’d try changing the pitch of a guitar string by pulling it with a solenoid - thus “tension guitar.” I thought I’d be able to get multiple pitches by turning the puller on and off very quickly (PWM) but that didn’t work well, so I was stuck with just two pitches. That was boring, so I added a little finger that frets the string. With the combination of the two, it can play four pitches. Over and over and over, thanks to the automatic strummer. Like this. There’s also video of the various moving parts here.
In my junkbox I found this vintage 1977 (or so) 76477 synthesizer chip- this model used to be used in arcade machines. It was gonna be another Matchbox Synth - you can see I have the case all prepped - but, whether because it’s old and broken, or because I wasn’t using it right, I couldn’t get any sounds out of it except for these.
Still, you may not have seen and heard the last of Syntho ‘77!
The scraper-shaker has a graduated series of notches, an aluminum sound cone, and, of course, a walnut shell full of steel washers. It sounds like this.
It’s kind of surprising how much the little sound cone amplifies the sound.
I was inspired when I saw coconuts for 99c at the bodega, but when I got home it took me half an hour just to get all the delicious meat out of the nut.
I keep making instruments that are too long for my short arms to play comfortably. You’d think I would’ve learned from the rotten stick guitar.
The frets are bamboo skewers - I tuned them by ear so the tuning is kind of shaky. I might add more frets later. Note how the bamboo bridge rests on a point on the membrane (architectural vellum)- this helps to transfer the vibrations of the string. The pick is made of two layers of vellum glued together.
Hammered aluminum, old bbq fork with corks stuck on the tines to discourage autodisembowelment. If I’d known how much work it would be to hammer the thing and that it would turn out to sound like this, I wouldn’t have bothered!
Gambang kayu is a xylophone used in gamelan orchestras. This thing isn’t really that much like a gambang. It’s made from rotten sticks (my favorite ingredient!), string, and a bamboo windchime that was on sale at Rite-Aid for $3.49. It sounds like this.
Yesterday’s Thing was a breath controller- blow into it to control the volume of today’s Thing: the Fish Organ, so named because the box used to contain smoked fish. And it sounds a little something like this.
The keyboard is copper tape cut to shape. It’s tuned (approximately) to the twelve tone Just scale based on 2’s, 3’s, and 5’s. When the little red plug is plugged into the "No breath" jack, the thing plays at full volume without the breath controller.
I added a fingerboard to the rotten stick electric guitar for easier fingering– it’s still only long enough to play about 5 notes. And I made the worst bow ever from another rotten stick and some waxed string. Together, they sound like this.
Today’s instrument is a recurved brass horn with a plastic reed made from a drinking straw from these instructions. It looks so pretty, but it’s my solemn duty to inform you that it sounds like this.
It’s not very complicated, but it’s one of my favorite instruments-of-the-day so far! I found this piece of glass– I think it was a coffee table once– in the garbage. Suspended from jute and struck with a rubber mallet, it sounds like this. (Use headphones or good speakers if you can - the stereo effects are great.)
I think I should tie it to a frame in three directions so it doesn’t swing around so much.
