I originally thought to build this crazy thing to be hardy enough to withstand Seattle winters. The stainless steel base would be impervious. The xylophone keys had lived outside on XyloVan for more than a decade without much worse wear than a little tarnish. The kick drum is an old paint bucket, and the hardware …
The voice of an acoustic bass (I learned though copious reading) is born of two primary factors: vibrating strings moving the wooden face, and the resulting sound waves escaping its body. A standard bass sings through scallopy-looking F-holes. So – ever fond of tradition (and/or fancypants elegance) – I traced an F-hole pattern that I …
Everything is (finally!) built, and any four musicians can step up and jam. And, of course, everything will change. With all the instruments in place, I want to start fine tuning the structural issues: Cut a sound port in the table top to allow the bass and kick-drum tones to rise up through the high-end …
I love buskers. Anybody playing an instrument on the street or the subway platform always gets a buck or two from me straight into their hat. We need more random, live, human-generated music – not more of the overproduced, auto-tuned, beat-synched megaproductions ruling the AOR airwaves (“quantized, pitch-corrected, overly-inspected,” as Henry Rollins once riffed). There’s …
One must marvel at the gorgeous form and function of a double-bass viol’s body; Those sexy curves and f-shaped holes, rendered in fine varnished wood, are explicitly designed to sing sweetly when the strings are bowed or plucked. But I’m just a brutish carpenter, so instead I made a box. The Jam Table’s architectural requirements …
One does not simply walk into Mordor. Nor does one simply create the neck of a double bass. This Jam Table component does a *lot* of heavy lifting for this very complicated type of instrument, so it has a lot of structural and material requirements in order to work properly. Full disclosure: I am not …
The acoustic bass is a pretty simple instrument, mechanically speaking: Strings stretch across a resonant box, making deep notes when plucked or bowed. You can make one out of a washtub, a broomstick, and a nylon string if you like. For the Jam Table, I would rather build something that any fool can fool with …
So, I decided after the Tube Bass failure to try something more orthodox: an electric slide bass. Jack White’s demo in “It Might Get Loud” – slapping together an electric slide guitar and wailing on it within about 10 minutes – made it look almost simple. I used a slab of salvaged oak for the …
The table needs a bass. I have no idea how build that for a melodic bottom end; something anyone can plan, something that can survive Seattle weather like the other instruments can. I knew exactly how to build the xylophones and propane tank drum for the Jam Table because I had built them before. And …
The second instrument I installed was the easiest to build: I pulled a set of keys from XyloVan’s Keyboard 3, the treble set that used to live on the van’s sliding door. C4 to Eflat5. I wanted to shape the array to flow better visually with the circular table top, and speak to the position …
The kick drum had to come first. Since it is embedded in the table base and I’m going to have to figure out all the other instruments on the table top one by one, I wanted to get it out of the way. My goal has been to build everything out of salvaged materials: An …
I never thought about tables much – until a friend opened a door in my head: She wondered whether artists might enjoy building table tops to go with the fancy stainless-steel table bases that her friend had salvaged from a dumpster. And suddenly for me, it clicked: We gather at tables to eat, chat, and …
I’ve dreamed of installing XyloVan‘s big xylophone (8’x3’) in front of the house ever since we moved in five years ago. My son and I finally picked up all the instruments from storage in LA and brought them home in January. I have another project in the works using keys from the other big keyboard …
The audacious Long Now Foundation is working to redefine how we see time. With its massive 10,000-year clock mechanism now functioning inside a mountain in Texas, and the likes of Danny Hillis, Brian Eno and Jeff Bezos engaged, the organization has launched Long Now Labs: The goal is to extend our methods, frameworks, and lenses …
This is an audio- and touch-reactive table designed for intentional conversation. Participants spin two concentric rings to align the themes and framing they intend to focus on, and begin. The fact that the rings remain spinnable allows conversation to shift, as the participants’ discussion refocuses what’s most meaningful to them individually and collectively. As new …
At one point last year, I had this vision of a kalimba made of 3- and 6-sided planes – an instrument that would be pleasing to the eye, but fit nicely in your hands to enhance the pleasure of plinking away in the sing-songy way of kalimbas. After prototyping it in cardboard, I translated the …
I worried when I started this final phase of our 2nd-floor gut-remodel that my lighting plan was going to look corny or fail structurally. Now that it’s installed, I like the way it turned out. When I designed the remodel, I figured that we would want recessed, dimmable lighting of some kind that comes on …
The trick with scrap-aluminum gongs is that you just can’t tune them. So I built this basic array by ear (back when I decommissioned XyloVan), choosing disc gongs that would resonate well together. This past month, I upgraded the whole thing to get it ready for visitors to Seacompression to bang on and enjoy. Weather …
I spent quite a few hours finishing this for Jack, the big, friendly genius/nice guy of a home builder who finished the last major step of our 2nd floor remodel this afternoon. I engraved two gongs that sound good together, mounted them on a chunk of the butcher block that I milled from scrap left …
Long, long ago, in a city far, far away (2010, Los Angeles), I made this crazy thing with the help of my loving and endlessly tolerant family. XyloVan – the only musical instrument I know of that got 8 miles a gallon downhill in a tailwind – played and ran for many years at Burning …