A Banjo for Bobby (IW#056)

A banjo player here locally by the name of Bobby is turning either 76 or 77.  It seems there is some confusion about which one, which I can understand, I suppose.  Either way, he is turning one of them soon and a family member of his approached me about making him on of my cake-tin tenor banjos, which you see above.

Not sure what that back pan is for, I found it at the flea market.  Looks good though, and holy jeebers is this thing loud.  Loud with lots of sustain, and I have the action set really low on it.  It sounds great.  Not sure if it is the Corian bridge (a trick I learned from Steve Wishnevsky) or the particular resonance of the aluminum cake tin that is the banjo head, but it really rings.  It is a lot of fun to play, and i hope Bobby (however old he is) has a hoot playing it for years to come.

Here is what it sounds like.  I painted on the lettering by hand, something I used to do a lot, though not so much any more.  It was fun to hold a liner again and do a little lettering.

The Rust O Phone

Here in Syracuse there is a brown field that for years was a railroad yard.  It has been made into a sculpture park called the Lipe Art Park, named after the man who owned the early 20th century gear factory across the street.  A few months ago the Stewards of Lipe sent out a call for proposals that said, in part, that they should address "the evolution of Syracuse as a cultural hub, emerging from the post-industrial climate that defined the city for so long."  This was my entry:

One of the things I loved about my residency at 601 Tully a while back was that it was impossible to play the piece alone, or sitting still.  Either one person has to move past all of the parts, or (even better) five people need to come together to play it in unison.  I wanted to do the same with this piece:  Make it so that a group of people would all have to come together to use it.  Using timbers from a warehouse down the street that was gutted, I built a timber framed structure, and then mounted instruments to it:  the Mega Bass, which has 1/4" and 3/8" steel rod as strings and a stainless steel sink as its sound board, the Xylophone, made of pipe from the scrap yard, and the Gongs, which are two empty fire extinguishers.

The beams laid out in preparation for marking the joints.

Joints cut and sides bolted.

The barn raising.  There was a great group of folks for this.

The barn raised!

What it looks like in the sun.

Custom engraved mallets, of course.

The Gongs.

One end of the Mega Bass.

The business end of the Mega Bass.  The turnbuckles are the tuners.

All the way through this process this piece has been about community.  It took the labor of a lot of people lifting in unison to move the timbers and to stand them up.  It takes a lot of people to play the thing.  And on May 2nd at 5.30, it is my hope that a lot of people will get together to hear it and hear some other music as well.

Here is some rough video shot on a very windy day of me playing each piece individually.  I had to balance the iPhone wherever I could, and pin it in place with a pocket knife, so it is not great footage, but it gives the general idea.

Playing Piano (IW#054 and #055)

IW#054 Mountain Slide

IW #055 Mountain Tenor

I wrote here and here about a project that I have been working on with Washington, D.C.-based company Dance Exchange.  Part of this project entailed taking parts off of a piano made by the William Gaehle company, which was active in Baltimore in the early to mid 19th century.

For this show, the cast and the choreographer and I wrote several songs, which in rehearsal I had been accompanying on instruments that I had already made (the very first slide I had ever made and the Pete Seeger Tenor).  It was important to me that I make the instruments that I play in the show out of this old piano we had.  I also play the piano in the show, playing the strings themselves with mallets at one point, with a pick and a slide at another point, and then going nuts on them with shotgun shells on my fingers, which is a trick I learned from a washboard player Newman Baker, who is the hottest damn washboard player I have ever sat in front of.  He plays with the Ebony Hillbillies, and if you are within a hundred miles of New York City and you don't go see them, that's your own fault.  They are cookin'.

The box for this one is the same size as IW#001

So I made a three string slide and a tenor guitar out of the parts of the piano.  The tenor came out of one of the legs, which you can see in the video below, and for the slide I built a box like I did for the ukes.  I made the slide the exact same size and shape of the #001 slide as a reference for myself.

The tops are spruce that came from an abandoned building here in town that got gutted, so the tenor has a couple of oxidized nail holes that look pretty great I think.  The spruce is a great tone-wood, and I braced them with maple.  Not sure if it is the maple bracing or what but these puppies both have a LOT of sustain, which is quite lovely.  As you can see in the video, they are both "stick-through" style.

You can see the nail holes toward the top of the guitar body.

They both sound great.  While I was in D.C. we had a couple of song circles, and I got to finally take the chains off of the tenor, and it really stood up to some hard playing.  Sounds good loud or soft and it is a joy to play.  I think it is going to become a "go-to" instrument around here.

Here is a little process video.  The background music is made on the tenor, and it is one of the songs we wrote for the show.

Residency Video

Hot off the presses!  This video was shot by the incomparable John Craddock and edited all to hell by Holly Rodricks.  It is documentation of my residency at 601 Tully.  The residency went really well, I had a blast and the piece came out really well.  Hearing it played and seeing people's reaction was a highlight of the year last year.  The video really does it justice.  Here it is:

Octavo Mandolin, Sorta. (IW#53)

A friend who plays mandolin has been poking around looking for a four-string something to play as an alternate, so he dropped me a line to ask if I had any ideas about that.  The result is this little cross between a tenor banjo and an octave mandolin.  The scale is right for and octavo, but there are only four strings, instead of four courses of strings.  This particular box turned out to be one of the best-sounding ones I have found in a while.  It was gifted to me in a bag full of boxes from a neighbor, and is just really bright.

I took the f-holes from an old Gibson arch top, they seemed more appropriate for a mando, somehow, and I might use them again, I think they look pretty good.  Corian bridge, again, and of course the fork tailpiece that I like so much.

Here is a little video of me playing Memphis Minnie's "hoodoo Lady" on it.  I love that tune.  Also just got a new mic that hooks into my computer so the sound quality is a little better on this one.

Fiddle (IW#052)

The peg head with a friction peg.

I have been reading a book called "One Man's Trash," which a history of cigar box instruments.  The first, apparently, were fiddles, and the earliest image of one is from the Civil War (though it was published later).  Of course before people could make cigar box instruments there had to be cigar boxes, which did not really start to be used until 1811, which is one of the first mentions of a 100 count box of "Spanish Segars."  Not that people were not making their own instruments, rather that the first specifically cigar box instruments had to wait until there were boxes readily available.

There are a surprising (well, surprising to me, anyway) number of one-string cigar box fiddles mentioned over the years, starting in the Civil War and going right through to about World War I.  So clearly I needed to make a fiddle.  Now that I have a peg shaver I am off to the races, and was happy to be able to put this little box to use that i had come across.  It is too small for anything else, really, but perfect for this.

Here is what I am able to make it sound like, but I wish i had someone here who actually plays fiddle.  I am able to scrape some notes out of it, but I would be interested to see whether a fiddle player could get decent music out of it.  So no apologies for the lack of skill, but maybe more of a warning.  You get the idea though, the sound is tolerable:

Dainties Uke (IW#051)

I had two things I wanted to try with this one:  I had seen a photo of a guitar someone made with a table leg, and I like the turned look at the end, so I wanted to try that.  I also had recently seen Tim Anderson's tapered reamer and peg shaver and really wanted to give them a shot.  One of the things that has been bugging me has been that I work with all of this found stuff and then I buy cheap tuners from China.  That sure as heck isn't found, that's bought.  Cheating, in a way.  So I really want to make my own pegs, and this is the best way I know how.



So I tried to make a cookie tin banjo uke from a little tin from the flea market.  The turning on the table leg is a bit too narrow at the nut, so it does not really work in that sense, but the pegs and the tapered hole were a success.  So as a proof-of-concept exercise it worked, which I am pretty excited about.  It sounds ok, but I think I am going to disassemble it and put a different neck on it one of these days.  I like the table leg idea, it is just too skinny for four strings.  It could work for a three string job, thouh, so that might be next.  Here it is: