Might be worth looking up "gamelan" too.
If you're into making your own percussion, there seem to be quite a few garage-gamelans out there.
(It's an all-percussion Indonesian ensemble, gongs and marimba-like instruments, which are also called "gamelans".)
I think Tom Waits called one of his barnyard-implement instruments a soemthing gamelan.
Anyway, steel drums are pretty tough to make, from what I've seen.
I looove the sound, too. Was really upset this week when one of the $1 records I picked up at a thrift store turned out NOT to be the "Beauty & the Brute Force" Calypso album it said it was, but instead contained one disc of a two-LP set of Elvis' greatest hits. (Most of which I already have.)
Calypso's the genre you want for the steel drum madness. It was really popular in the mid-late-50s. Straw hats and frayed 3/4 length jeans are what you're looking for on the record covers.
Anyway, I've taken strings off guitars and used cans filled with water for recordings before. Baby food jars filled with rice make great shakers.
And then, there's the sitar.
It doesn't resonate properly, probably because I used a soft wood for the neck and only one gourd, but it looks very impressive. Seven main strings and 13 resonators. got some guitar bridges & tuning assemblies from a friend whose dad used to own a music shop. The resonating strings are all made with fishing lead wire - light gauge copper. The main strings are either guitar, fishing wire, or banjo (that last was the idea of a friendly music shop guy - they have really long strings, banjos). The gourd was grown in my folks' backyard years back. I just varnished it and painted the inside gold.
I was working off a plan for a vina, a somewhat simpler (non-resonating) Indian instrument from an ethnomusicology textbook a friend loaned me. A vina has seven strings, no frets, and two equal-sized gourds attached to a wooden neck (as opposed to a sitar, which is often made from a single, huge gourd -- thus the hollow neck for the resonating strings). I hybridized. It's a fretless, wood-necked sitar.
Anyway, the instrument looks great, but I hardly ever play it - sounds like a quiet, altered tuned guitar more than anything else.
I was tempted to turn it into an electric instrument, but now I'm leaning towards someday stripping it down and using the components to make a kora.
(If you click that link, he's got ALL KINDS of directions for homemade hurdy gurdys and tinwhistles and stuff - top of Rothkoid's list, top of mine, too.)
[ 04-10-2001: Message edited by: grant ] |
