Build it and they will drum

I picked up a cheap Typhoon darbuka* and have started learning the strokes (my doum and tak are...okay...but the dak or left-hand tak is going to take a bit to develop. Unfortunate, because it's the rolls I need for the song I'll be working on soon). The sound is a little too...bright? Metallic? Anyhow, it doesn't seem right for the Gue piece I'm trying to record now.

I want yet another drum. Something like a 12" side drum that's 4" deep and has a goatskin head. I could build one... but it turns out the techniques of bending wood appropriate for guitar and ukulele are different from those best for bending drum shells. So much for building a drum as a learning project on the way to building a uke.

Thing is, do I want to build a uke? That's the real question.

It's a strange place to be. Way back when, I started making music on keyboard and rack-mount synthesizers. You'd compose something for, say, violin and guitar and piano, but you'd play it all on a keyboard, capture your performance as MIDI data, and plug that data into a machine that made sounds like violin and guitar and piano.

I talked to musicians and read about orchestration and the thought started even way back then that you'd get better results with that keyboard and those rack modules if you had experience with the "real" instrument.

Meanwhile I was in theatre, and learning how to make things that looked like they were made of polished wood and solid brass but were really plywood and styrofoam and paint. And instead of making things that worked, we made things that looked like they could work and then faked it with fishline, hidden lights, sound effects, re-purposed toys.

My paychecks improved enough over the years to where I could actually afford a decent computer, and make the move to Software Synthesis; the same electronically-created guitar sounds, but without so many trailing wires.

I still dreamed of getting my hands on a real trumpet or even a real violin, but that was a dream that seemed financially out of reach.

Meanwhile the Maker movement was changing the options. I welded for theatre but TechShop offered the chance to work metal in an entirely new way.

I did pick up a ukulele along the way. The face of mass production was changing in the electronic age, and there were starting to appear $40 instruments that actually played.

Yeah, I'd owned a recorder for years. A couple of them (recorders are cheap, as long as you stick to the higher-pitched members of the family). But the uke was an eye-opener. Your first experience with a guitar is going to be buzzing frets and painful grooves in your fingers. A uke has such a light action it doesn't do that. You can start chording the first day. And gain the confidence to face that full-sized steel-string later.

The Maker movement was growing, with processes formerly used only in big companies moving to the small shop and the individual maker. And thanks to the VA, I got a membership to the local TechShop and was able to try some of that myself.

This changed utterly how I looked at prop construction. Sure, I could and still did fake it with styrofoam and paint when appropriate, but I could now actually build out of "real" materials. Metals and hardwoods and so forth were no longer out of reach.


And then I got a day job. The title is a lot less prestigious than "Resident Sound Designer" but boy does it pay more.

That revolution in production was still going on. I took a chance and blew a couple hundred on an electric violin. And that opened the gate. As the paychecks kept coming in, I realized I was able to afford, first, a Chinese-made trumpet, then, an actual German-made student-quality acoustic violin.

And I was learning enough in the process that I could take the risk of cheap instruments and trust I could fix them or work around them anyhow.

I went back to the composing bench with the idea of doing the synthesis-based stuff I'd always been doing but folding in a part or two from a real instrument to improve the articulation and realism.

But then it occurred to me I'd collected enough instruments by this point to actually be able to play all the parts. And that was a really attractive idea.

The prop-building was still going on and the revolution in electronics led me to lean more and more on computing power; "fix it in the mix" works for props as well as it does in the recording studio (or, rather, on the DAW.)

Thing is, I already came out of sound design where altering real sounds to new purposes was a central part of the game. I'd long been exposed to the variety of a similarly utilitarian approach to music, from the washtub bases of various folk music traditions to the experiments with vacuum cleaners and air raid sirens of composers like John Cage to the hectic and oft-compromised business of live sound where often you had to improvise some combination of mic placement and board EQ to get the sound that was musically appropriate for that night's show.

So it really shouldn't have taken the arrival of a jointer-planer at the shop I work at to make me think of making musical instruments -- leveraging the available processes and skills in working real materials other than styrofoam and paint -- that could be used in a musical way -- leveraging here the skills both in playing technique (on "better" instruments) and in musical understanding of how to make use of those sounds and, of course, the electronic tools that could warp and shape the result to fit into a final composition.

There's an element of experimental archaeology in this (going along with my renewed interest in history) as well as ethnomusicology. And that's a dangerously attractive road; not only does every instrument have a playing tradition and an idiom that the composer can learn either to mimic or to learn from, instruments also have a building tradition that the luthier could chose to learn.

My own Shetland Gue is a visual mimic of Charlie Bynum's museum replica, down to the stick bow and the twisted-fibre tailpiece. But I was entirely happy to use power tools to build it.

And that's where I am now. I am conflicted musically, as I want to go in so many directions and finding the hours to practice becomes increasingly problematic (heck, finding storage space is becoming problematic!) I wish I could do as a composer friend of mine did and pick a dozen sounds (yes, on the rack mount synths, but the principle still holds) and just work within their sonic possibilities.

And, yes, the "bardic cover" idea is still amusing. Doing not just acoustic covers of existing music, but doing them with archaic instruments whenever possible, seems like both long-term fun and a decent "brand."

But I like all music, and all instruments excite me. I'm not the type to just do guitar, do everything on that guitar, and, yes, admittedly get very good on that guitar. I'm not cut out to be an ace, but rather a jack.

And same goes for instrument building. As attractive is the idea of getting deeper into tonewoods and sinew and hand-axes and natural materials -- and the concurrent idea of recreating ancient instruments -- is the idea of finding ways to laser-cut and machine and electronify and create things that are unique. And, yeah, to find how the available technologies, both the newest CNC mills and the old theatrical standbys, could be used to make things that look one way and play entirely different.

Like...a playable Goddess Harp.

* Darbuka, doumbek, dumbek, tarbuka, tabla....the closest thing you'll get to an agreement on what to call the "Middle-Eastern Goblet Drum" is that the "Turkish" style with the exposed tuners should probably be called a darbuka.