The first day of my vacation, I woke up. Then, I went downtown to look for a job. Then, I hung out in front of the drug store. The second day of my summer vacation, I woke up. Then, I went downtown to look for a job. Then, I hung out in front of the drug store. The third day of my summer vacation, I woke up. Then, I went downtown to look for a job. Then I got a job keeping people from hanging out in front of the drug store...
-- Cheech & Chong, "Sister Mary Elephant" from the album Big Bambu
I've had a desire to build musical instruments since at least high school, when, in my sophomore or junior year, I came across a book called The Physics of Music, a paperback binding of some Scientific American articles on the subject. Simultaneous with its fomenting effect, the book also told me I couldn't possibly build instruments, as the pages were interspersed with mysterious squiggly mathematical symbols that supposedly meant important things to anyone smart enough to build musical instruments (I was one of those kids who believed I sucked at math). Four or five years later, I found myself working for a piano restorer, eventually learning to rebuild player pianos, but even then I believed I didn't have what it took to be a "real" piano technician because I hadn't learned to tune pianos -- something that, again, at the time seemed utterly esoteric.
In the four decades since my first thrill at the thought of making instruments, I've discovered that most of what I believed about my shortcomings was bullshit -- I'm decent at math and I can train my ear to hear anything below the range of my tinnitus -- and, perhaps more importantly, have come to believe that if you want to do a thing, you should just do it.* Whether you're good at it or not doesn't really matter if it's meaningful to you.
Still, even with that understanding, circumstances have been such that instrument making hasn't been logistically feasible for me -- until very recently. As a result of a surprise largesse earlier this year, my wife and I decided to make some significant quality-of-life investments in our home: we built a garden for her and a basement workshop for me. Suddenly and unexpectedly, the dream of instrument building has become a reality!
In early July, I made plans to take the first full week in August off from my practice. I'd spent my spare time since June building workbenches and my wife and I had organized the basement (she did the lion's share of that). For Father's Day, I received an excellent book on musical instrument design. Serendipitously, a musical instrument kit company I like had a sale, so I picked up a couple of kits. By the time I started vacation, everything was set up and I could spend the week futzing about the workshop, making sawdust, gluing chunks of wood together, and getting shellac all over my fingers. Pure joy.
My efforts produced two objets de musique: first, a bowed clock chime (my own design) and, second, a kalimba (the first of the two kits). I'll write about those in more detail in separate posts (see links). Also arising from this recent burst of inspiration was a piece composed for and performed on those instruments; I'll post about that separately, too.
My fantasy has reified into fact. I have ideas for several instruments in the queue: a bowed psaltery (the second kit), a multistringed monochord (a zither-like instrument with many strings all tuned to the same pitch), a single-string, very long monochord (like 10 or 15 feet), aeolian harps of various sizes and design, didgeridoos, a very large spring reverb (like 10 feet -- technically not an instrument but an audio effect), and others. Over the balance of my life, I hope to build many instruments, to make music with them, and, with luck, to share them with the local music community. However the project goes, I'll be posting updates and developments here.
*Within the limits of harm, of course.
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