At my office there is 500 or so blank floppy disks that no one has any use for. I was going to make floppy disk beaded curtains to divide between my office and the onw next door, but I started to make it and realized it was stupid. So, this is one strand of an aborted attempt.
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.
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.
The coconut banjo sounds like this.
He was so pleased to master a “real” figure. The first few times I had to hold strings down on his thumbs… they’re pretty little thumbs. But once he got the hang of it there was no stopping him.
He was equally as pleased to invent his own figure. I can’t remember now what this was, but he would be able to tell you exactly.
