A performance on the Elephant.

The three nights of performance are now over.  Three sold out shows of experimental/cross-disciplinary/non-mainstream art.  The performances were spread over three rooms and the Musical Elephant performance was in one of the two smaller rooms.  The two small rooms were therefore quite packed, making filming of the performances difficult.  However, we had a run through on the final night to allow the performers from the other rooms to see the works. Kristian Larsen captured the essence of our performance on video, with Jeff Henderson is standing in for Phil Dadson.

My work, Wili Pai Sa Sunge (something a little, it is of work) juxtaposes images from an earlier adventure travelling through Africa and my current explorations with music and sculptural objects.  The linear narrative of the african trip images provides a backdop for music played on the Elephant body, the Kundi and Marimba.

The work plays with scale.  The audience is intended to feel a certain dissonance as their focus moves between the components of the work, the trip slides, the sizeable Elephant in the room, and the music which combines ancient tradition in the form of Kundi tunes, with free improvisation which is a  modern form essentially ephemeral in nature.   My African trip was a conventionally large adventure:  my current adventures artistic expression are, to me, adventures of equal standing.

First night.

Opening night of "Bathing With Elephants and Other Exotic Reveries".  Phil the Elephant stands calm and serene while pre-performance preparations occur around him.   We are all checking that everything is still working and in place.  Last night the pre-amp I'm using for the daxophone was showing a low battery light last night and now appears dead.  I swap the battery.  Still dead.  Jiggle the battery.  Still dead, convince myself I've put the battery in the wrong way round, there's a noise, but also the smell of magic smoke, and that is never good.  I plug the lead straight into the daxophone and it works, I'll worry about the pre-amp later (checks: it is dead).

I realise at this point that I'm quite nervous.   This isn't the first time I've performed, and I have rituals and ways of working through performance anxiety.  This isn't the first sculptural object I've made - there is a rather excellent Giant Metal Owl in our garden.  This isn't the first time I've played a gig on a novel and unfamiliar instrument just after acquiring it - my first rock gig was about two weeks after I got my first bass guitar, and my first upright bass gig was the day I brought it home.  It isn't the first conceptual art/installation piece I've collaborated on either.  However, this is the first time I've conceived, and executed an installation/performance art piece on my own - so in many ways this is my first actual piece of public 'performance art'.

There may be reviews, comments, people talking about my work, and it is all on my head.

This is novel, and I have no coping mechanisms for this.

Although this is my first piece of art, I have had some necessary and excellent help along the way.    Without my brother's help, expertise, advice and power tools the Elephant would probably not be complete, or stable, and I would probably be missing some fingers.   With the excellent tusks and painting help from Nic and Nic, and the great sounding mahogany from Ivan, the Elephant is strong and mighty.

I'm not playing the Elephant on my own.  Phil Dadson is collaborating with me.  Phil is one of those amazing musicians who can make anything sound musical.  I've heard him make a piece of crumpled paper sound incredible, so an Elephant should be no problem.  Phil is also one of the main proponents and influences of scratch made instruments and sonic sculptures in New Zealand.

So, I have a most excellent Elephant, a slide show which tells a simple true story, a prepared structure for the music, and one of the countries best improvisers collaborating with me, and my partner, who has a critical eye, supports and believes in me, and in this project.

And yet, I am nervous.

I get my cue to start and prepare to blow the first note on the side blown horn.    Although this is a traditional African instrument, the sound is that of the Putatara/Pukaea/Conch which has a powerful resonance throughout the Pacific.  It is also very easy to mess up.  I've been here before, conch in hand, lonely and exposed, and I start to panic a little as I blow the first note.  Then Phil joins in trumpeting through the trunk.  I'm not alone.  I move to the harp, my fingers are like rubber, but the notes sound true.

The new journey begins.

An instagram taken by Catherine from Metro.

Pachyderm pack in, more tuning and sound samples.

Saturday I packed Phil the Elephant into the car, drove to the Civic and assembled him in the Taj Mahal room ready for the show next weekend.  Everything still fits in the car, including a computer to run the slideshow from.  It's a fair walk from the loading bay to the rooms we are performing in, and it's hot work carrying an Elephant.   I assemble the Elephant with a little help.  I can almost put the Elephant up on my own, but it really needs someone to support the front legs while I manouver the backbone in place, and support the backbone while I slide the rear legs in.  Once assembled Phil looks quite at home in the Taj Majal room.   Various people have a play on the Elephant so I can stand back and see/hear it all from a distance.  It looks and sounds amazing, and I come to the realisation that I have, indeed, created quite an astonishing musical Elephant.  

After setting up everything that can be set up, and mics attached I remove the Kundi and Marimba and come home.

Sunday I intend to have a day off from Elephant related activities, but I can't resist doing some more Kundi practice and retuning the Marimba.  The tuning was pretty good, but I wasn't quite happy with it, the whole instrument was a little sharp, and the notes weren't quite in harmony.   A couple of the musicians who played the marimba were polite about the tuning, but it was clear that the off notes were obvious.

Getting the marimba to this close has taken hours of tuning, so I had been trying to convince myself that it was OK as I was a bit reluctant to do more tuning as there is the risk of going too far and ending up with a worse tuning.  But in the end I won't be happy with tuning this bad so I bite the bullet and start tuning from the lowest note.  Fortunately I'm only trying to shave about a quarter tone off most of the notes, so it doesn't take that long.  I realise that the tuning was quite 'stretched' as I end up having to shave nearly a tone off the higher notes.

I finally have a tuning that I'm happy with.  There's still room for more fine tuning but it's definitely a lot better.

Here is a video of me playing the final Marimba, this is really the first time I've ever tried to play one of these.   I'll have to improve a bit by Thursday, although the Marimba will mostly be played by Phil Dadson on the night of the performance.

Here's a video of me playing a couple of tune fragments on the Kundi.  The first tune is the tuning melody, Wili pai sa sunge.

The words, which I am not going to sing just yet, go like this.
Wili pai sa sunge
Mu ta kundi ki bi bialeu kindi
Kuluo pai sa sunge

Which is approximately translated as
Something a little, this is of work.
One must play the harp and sing its song too.
The old things are the work.

The second piece is Nzanginza mu du kporani yo - The harp is in our village.

An Elephant is launched.

It is amazing how much Elephant there is to paint.  The second and third coats go on much more easily than the primer.

The only thing left to do is add the eyes, which are sleighbell bells, and launch the Elephant.

Team Elephant.  Nic, Nic, Cath, Raewyn, Peter and Derek.

This magnificent Elephant would not have possible without the efforts and support of the people in this picture.

The original trip through Africa in 1991 was launched with flat warm champagne from the night before, as it was dark and cold when we were drinking it.  This Elephant was launched with some rather nice French champagne, cold and fizzy, and although it is dark, it is warm outside.

I am naming the Elephant Phil, in honour of Phil Gustafson. 1945-2012. rest as you see fit Phil.

Elephant painting volunteers...

There's a lot of Elephant to paint, and it will need at least a primer/undercoat and top coat.  Painting an Elephant is a lot more fun with friends and Nic and Nic have volunteered to help.  All I have to do is find some paint and decide on paint and colour.  Prefereably a cheap paint, as this project is now quite over budget.  I have a look under the house, and find a tin of blue grey colour.  I try painting some onto a plywood off cut to see what it looks like.  While this is drying I have a look at the head, the filler we'd put on the screw holes just before transporting it home had fallen out in transit.  I go to where I last saw my tub of instant filler.  The filler isn't there, but my foot bangs into a paint bucket.  The colour is 'Fossil', which is the perfect name, and the perfect brownish/white colour.

The Elephant needs to be sanded before painting, but it is hard to dismantle on my own.  While I'm waiting to Nic and Nic to arrive I start on modification of one of the tusks into a side blown horn.   Making an end blown horn would be quite easy, but I decide on the side blown partly because it is a traditional instrument, but mostly because kneeling down and blowing into an Elephant tusk will look far too silly.  I drill a hole large enough to fit a trumpet mouthpiece.  It makes a sound very much like a conch shell but looks quite silly more like a piece of drug paraphernalia that a musical instrument.  So I chop the end off the mouthpiece, make a larger hole, glue the mouthpiece in place and end up with something very much like the traditional side blown horn.

Side blown horn.

Next step, sanding and priming.

Nicole sanding

Nic and Nic, the ace painting team.

The garden takes on a slightly surreal quality with Elephant bones drying in a daliesque fashion.

Completed head and tuned marimba.

Tuesday night, off to my brothers house to finish the head and bring the Elephant home.  The Elephant had miraculously had screw holes, dents and little bits of missing ply filled by my brother on monday night.  This was a very pleasant surprise as it will save me from needing to do this tonight or tomorrow and means I now have a decent chance of getting a coat of paint on the Elephant in time for packing in at the venue on Saturday morning.

The head is pretty close to being complete, but it needs an extra piece of ply at the back of the head to hide the internal bracing.   Just as we put the head on for a final fitting more people pop by to have a look at the Elephant.  This time Nic and Nic.  Nic made the excellent tusks and finally has a chance to see what they look like installed into an Elephant.   "It's much bigger than I imagined", he says.  

I think it's fair to say it is bigger than any of us imagined.

Now for the moment of truth, can we fit the completed Elephant with head, and tusks, into the car.  I put the backbone, legs, ribs, workmate and spare ply into the car exactly the same as last time.  I have a photograph of the legs in place to work from as there is probably only one possible way to achieve this.  Head version 1.0 fitted easily into the passenger seat, but head version 2.0 is bigger and less flexible.  This isn't going to work.

We haul the workmate and ribs out of the boot and try the head in there.  It fits perfectly, with the ear just missing the boot hinge.  The ribs fit around and behind it, and the workmate (which won't usually be travelling with the Elephant) fits in the back seat with the legs.

I drive the Elephant home and, with a little help, put him back together.

It's not yet 22:00 so I tune some more marimba bars.  I have about two more bars which need a lot of retuning before getting to the almost in tune bars.  An hour later it is all pretty well in tune and the bars all sound pretty good.  One of the smallest bars is still a semi-tone sharp, but I need to use the little drum sander and drill to tune that one and it is too late at night, so it will have to stay sharp until tomorrow.  One of the 'make your own marimba' clips I found on YouTube seems to have a similarly semi-tone sharp bar near the top, so if I run out of time and leave this sharp I will claim that this is a traditional tuning.

Now I can string the bars together.

Threading bungy cord.

I thread some bungy cord through the holes in the bars, with rubber washers to separate them.

Final positioning

Then put hooks in the marimba frame to hold the cord in place.  I take the Marimba inside and play my special new instrument comissioning melody to Raewyn, and the Marimba is complete.

Completed Elephant with instruments.

Here is the completed Elephant with main instruments attached.   

The tusks still need to be drilled to allow them to be blown, but they are so magnificent I've been leaving this until last - also I needed to be sure that whatever method we used to mount them would still allow a side blown mouthpiece.

Next step painting, working out  some tunes and finding a collaborator who is in town for the performance.

More bars, more ribs, and more heads.

I am starting to run out of time.  There is only one more week left for construction, and more importantly only one more weekend.  I still have to finish the Marimba/Balafon, finish the head, finish some ribs, sand and paint the Elephant and turn my vague musical ideas into a piece.  I also have to find a collaborator to help me play the Elephant.  This is proving more difficult than I anticipated as the obvious and usual suspects are either out of town, or involved in other pieces in Bathing With Elephants... that will be happening at the same time as my piece.

Friday night I make some more Marimba bars intending to get the marimba ready for stringing up on Saturday.  I started with three long pieces of Mahogany, two were darker wood and one lighter in colour.  We cut and planed the wood until we had what I thought were enough bars.  Most of the wider bass bars were from the lighter piece of wood and when I start working on them it becomes obvious that they are going to be a problem.  Some of them split early on, and the one I manage to cut to approximate pitch just sounds dull.    So, finishing the Marimba will have to wait until tomorrow.

Saturday morning I pack the Elephant in the car and drive it over to my brother's house.  We will be fitting the Marimba frame and hopefully making a new head, so the entire animal needs to be transported.

The first job is to rout the remaining ribs, we use a slightly quicker method for holding them, so each one can be routed in one pass each side, instead of moving clamps a couple of times.

Rib about to be routed.

Next we cut some additional bars on the table saw.   Once the new bars are cut I need to find the node points using more salt.  Knowing the node points is important for two reasons, firstly material to tune the bar is removed from between the node points of the fundamental.  Secondly this is where the supporting string/cord holes will be drilled.   The various marimba making sites I have read as research suggest checking the final node points after rough tuning and drill the holes then.  I check a few of the roughly tuned bars and the nodes are as close to the original lines as I'm ever going to be able to drill, so we set up a guide and mark on the drill press plate and drill all the holes in all the bars.

The Marimba is going to sit just over the ribs and if everything has gone to plan there will be room to fit a removable frame.  The audience will be looking from the other side, so it will look like ribs are being played.  The frame looks simple to make, but there are some complicated angles to be worked out to allow it to sit nicely on the strange shaped shoulders and hips.  

Frame loosely clamped and bars placed for checking.

The last thing we do on Saturday is fix blocks to hold the tusks.

Fixing the excellent tusks really start to make it look like an Elephant.

I leave the Elephant snug in my brothers garage and take the bars home to try and tune a few.

Sunday is pretty much taken up with designing and building a plywood head.  Head version 1, the foam sheet head, is already starting to fall apart so it's obviously not going to last.  Head version 2 is going to be made from plywood like the rest of the Elephant.  We start with a new cardboard mockup (I made one earlier before head version 1).

Cardboard mockup.

Then, build the head up with ply, which involves some complicated angles and mitre saws.

Most of the head.

This takes most of the day, but we finally have a pretty decent looking head on the Elephant.  The trunk and tusks finish off the look.  The Elephant is complete (although not finished).

We carry the Elephant out onto the driveway for a bask in the sunshine.  The neighbours look astonished and come over and have a closer look at what all these noisy power tools have been working on.

People walking by in the street are beguiled by the Elephant and come for a closer look.

Shanti plays a tune on the Kundi.

Ear drum

I go home and tune some more marimba bars.

Monday night.  More Marimba bar tuning.

I started tuning the highest notes, then went to the lowest notes and tuned them.  Counting the bars and notes it looks like there aren't enough whole tones to cover the difference between the highest and lowest note.  I can really only make bars lower in pitch (they can be sharpened, but not as easily), so I make the lowest note even lower.  This takes it to C, which is nice, but I think I will still have a couple of keys left over, and may need to make some additional higher bars, eventually.

Rib routing, Head version 1.0 and a tale of two Kundis

Tuesday night, over to my brother's house to trim some rough edges on the Kundi and route a few nice curved edges on the now sanded ribs.  It takes a while to do each one as I need to move the clamps several times for each rib.  The router is a dangerous tool that takes no prisoners, so I take my time and take care.  It is also noisy and dusty so I'm doing this outside, and have to stop at a reasonable hour to avoid annoying the neighbours too much.  The noise control complaints are supposed to come after the instrument is finished.  It occurs to me that running out of the back of the party with my instrument at 2am may be a little difficult to achieve with a 3 metre long Elephant.  I get four ribs done, the last three will have to wait, probably for the weekend.

I'm starting to get a bit nervous about the head.  It's quite important for the head to be right, and I haven't yet got that sorted.

So I try some experiments with cardboard but am not really happy with the results.  I want to achieve something like this.

Paper mockup head.

I try and achieve this using foam board.  Foam board can be shaped, to a certain degree, by heating it until the foam gets soft.  I get some sheets designed for display boards and manage to get a reasonable head using the foam.  It's a pretty good head, and if I don't come up with a better one it will be fine.  A little more research on the web suggest that there may be similar foams that will give a better result.  I'll try and source some over the next few days.

Head version 1.0

Now I can get back to making the instruments.   The Kundi is getting close, it just needs some more sanding, a resonator/skin and some strings.

Traditionally these instruments would have had a skin stretched over the hollowed out body similar to a banjo.  My original Kundi has a recycled metal plate instead of a skin.  Africans are great recyclers, any  piece of scrap metal will be scavenged and re-used.  A sheet metal skin has other advantages over animal hide for this instrument as the strings have to be threaded through the skin.  Traditionally there would be a thin strip of wood under the hide to stop the strings from pulling through.  Sheet metal is strong enough to hold the strings on its own.

In the spirit of recycling I use an olive oil can, which I cut apart with metal shears and then hammer flat.  The edges of the metal are quite sharp, so I bend them over.   Then I measure the positions of the holes in the original instrument, which are very evenly spaced at 22mm.  There are far more holes than strings.  I am not sure whether this was a mistake on the part of the original builder, or to allow for different pitches and tunings.  So I cut more holes than I will need as it is better to do this now than to only cut seven holes and discover that there is a reason for those extra holes later.

There is also a triangular hole in the side of the instrument, I'm not sure if this is a sound hole, or to aid in string replacement.  Replacing strings on this instrument looks difficult even with a small hole, and impossible without.  So I drill a round hole in the side in approximately the same position as on the original instrument.

The strings on the original instrument are made from fishing line.  I decide to go with acoustic guitar strings as I have some spares already.  To save time I thread all the strings through the metal skin before screwing it into place.

Two Kundis

I tune up the strings in a pentatonic scale and try it out.  It sounds good, and surprisingly loud.  At last I have a completed and playable instrument so  I spend the next hour noodling away.  Raewyn says "that sounds good", so I must be onto something.  

Musical Modes -

This entry describes the events of January 6 to 8 2012.

The Elephant project is an unusual musical project for me.  I have made, and invented, musical instruments, either by myself or in collaboration with other people, particularly my brother Peter and Mr Glyn.  I have also made sculptural items, such as the large metal owl that appears in the background of many of the Elephant pictures.  This is the first project to combine both a large sculptural object and multiple musical instruments.  Furthermore, the instruments I am anticipating for this project are all novel instruments, although I have come to the realisation that I could insinuate a bass guitar into one of the legs.    As, I suppose, a 3d artist, the sculptural Elephant part of this project isn't finished until it is sanded, painted, has a remarkable head, and there is no more refining to do.  A finished and perfected form is the goal.  However, from the perspective of a musician I know that I will tend to stop work on a musical instrument at the point where it makes notes and I can explore the musical possibilities.  If I was commissioning an instrument from a luthier, I would expect it to conform to all the musical requirements, and have smooth edges and a nice coat of paint or varnish.  When building for myself, I want to make notes, hear it sing, and will usually stop at the point of glorious noise.

My first instrument project was in 1984.  A cheap mandolin I had bought self destructed due to the manufacturer cutting through the soundboard bracing to install a pickup.  I found some old wood and brass in my parents garage and made a solid bodied electric mandolin.  I did put some varnish on it at the time, but I had no patience to wait between coats and sand as I wanted to play it.  Finally, in 2010, when I was doing the 8 string bass conversion I put a decent coat of laquer on it.

Electric Mandolin

I've been thinking about and working on the Elephant for a while now, and it isn't making much noise. There is a nice woodblock in one of the legs, and I have spent some time exploring the percussive possibilities, but there are no notes.

As a fabricator I'm excited because, hey, there is a really big Elephant sitting in the conservatory, although I know there is a lot more work to be done. Especially the head.

As a musician I am frustrated.

I need to spend some time, although not too much time, on musical modes.

This project is linked, in many ways, to my earlier trip through Africa 20 years ago.  In the Central African Republic a group of men came up to us attempting to sell us hideous animal heads.  In all likelihood this is what the previous tourists had bought.  They weren't the first group selling such heads, for several kilometres there had been people holding up hideous animal heads in the hope that we would stop and purchase one.  In amongst this group was a guy playing a musical instrument, which I don't think he had any intention to sell, it was just the instrument he played.  Background music for the hideous animal head sellers.

Instrument for sale.

I swapped 2 T shirts (I was moving out of my brightly coloured shirt phase) for this musical instrument, a Kundi (if anyone reading this feels inclined to google image search, please use the term 'kundi harp', or there may be unexpected consequences).

The bush telegraph being what it is, for the rest of our travels through this particular country, the hideous animal heads being held up for offer by people on the road side had been replaced by Kundi's.

I didn't really spend much time learning to play this instrument during the trip, but brought it back to New Zealand with good intentions.  However, MAF quite rightly felt the need to fumigate it and kill off any insects which may have been hiding in the wood.  I think the insects were all that were holding the Kundi together, and since then I have been unable to tune it properly or play it without pieces falling off.

I've been intending to make a new and playable Kundi ever since.

The first step to incorporating a Kundi into the Elephant is to decide where it will fit.  My original plan was to extend one of the hips with a Kundi neck.  Now I have the full size Elephant I can compare the original instrument with the hips to see if this still makes sense, and it does.

The traditional Kundi is made from hollowed out wood.  I am going to make it from cut plywood as it is part of the musical Elephant.

The first step is to form the shape of the neck, which I trace from my original instrument, and cut the shape with the remaining working jigsaw.  The original instrument had hand carved friction pegs.  I bought acoustic guitar machine heads online.  I remove the pegs and tuners from one of the metal plates and use this as a template to drill the holes.

Kundi neck being marked up for holes.

Then I measure the Elephant hip to work up the sides of the Kundi and cut out the appropriate shapes from plywood.  These need to be glued together and left overnight at least before more work is done.

Glued together and drying.

The next morning, the Kundi is half built, but still has not made a sound.  I hope to be able to make some kind of a note soon.  Today, however, I am off to my brother's house to trim the pieces of wood Ivan has donated into shape for the marimba.

I've never made a marimba before, most of the instruments I have built have been stringed, or friction idiophones.  I have done some research on the internet and discovered that a marimba can be built by an 8 year old, from expensive plans, so how hard can it be?

Before we set to the Marimba, we quickly trim up the Kundi on the table saw, to make sure all the angles are square and true.  All it needs is a little sanding, a metal resonating plate, some strings and it will be making noise!

The next step is to cut the wood to thickness using the table saw.  My online research suggests we need thicknesses between 20 and 25mm, widths of 40mm to 65mm and lengths of somewhere between 500mm and 140mm.  This is really too wooly a specification, but I have to start somewhere.  By the end of this process I'll know what I am doing, hopefully, but at this stage I have to make some decisions with limited time and resources.  I did discover a really excellent marimba tuning resource early in the morning but have not had time to read and understand it, so I'm working from several set of partial information.  I'd like to cut a few small pieces of wood, take them away for a day or two, do some experiments and then come back and make the decisions.  That's not the best use of noisy and tricky to set up table saws and planers.  It is better the make a call and run with it.

So, we cut various widths and thicknesses out of the wood we have, leaving one long uncut piece as a spare.

The next step is to try making a marimba bar, and we start with the biggest suggested by my online research, which is a 25mm x 65mm x 500mm bar.  This proves problematic.  The first thing to do is remove some material from the centre, and whichever tool we use this seems difficult.  A note has been struck, and checked against a tuner, but the tone is disappointing.  After a couple of frustrating hours, I realise I need to check a few things rather than waste any more of my, and more importantly my brother's, time.

The most convenient place I know where there is a marimba is KBB on Queen Street, and I will need some marimba mallets, and I saw some other cool percussion things there before christmas, so I head off there to measure a marimba, and buy stuff.  It's 15:30 on a saturday afternoon, should be no problem.  I get to KBB just before 16:00 and they are closed.  I can see people inside as I check the door.  I've been in this situation before, last minute strings, that kind of thing, nocking on the door of the Rockshop just after closing, someone always opens the door, lets me in.  KBB, no, they look up, see a customer trying to come in, look back down, and this is before closing time.

I have a good look at the marimba in the window, go to the rockshop and buy percussion mallets.  Of course, they're all owned by the same parent company, but still.  Don't classical musicians need last minute stuff before gigs?   Or maybe they are all so much more organised than all those other musicians?

So, I return home, make a few measurements, and realise that the big bar we've been working on really is too big.

I return to my brother's with a new specification and recut the wood to 40mm.  If we'd started with this specification we could have made better use of the wood, made less noise, spent less time and had more bars to spare if I mess up tuning them.   I'm not sure how I could have done this better, but feel bad that I didn't do so.

I cut the wood to the lengths I've now worked out to be the only ones that will fit and take them home.  I'm now committed, I have a number of bars, of defined widths, and won't be able to use the noisy tools until at least next weekend.

The next morning I have a better read of the excellent marimba tuning resource I found online.  Having had an attempt yesterday at making a marimba bar, this all started to make sense.  I now know how long my marimba can be, how wide the bars are, and therefore how many bars I can fit into the available space.  This gives me the pitch range assuming different tunings.  Traditional African marimbas are mostly either pentatonic or diatonic tunings, so I decide to go with a diatonic major scale.  This will give me 3 octaves, if I don't ruin any bars, and there aren't any cracks or holes in any of the bars that stop them from working.  From here I can pick an approximate top and bottom pitch and work from there.

I think this technically also means that I am making a Balafon, rather than a Marimba.  A Balafon is a diatonic wooden struck ideophone popular across much of west and central Africa, whereas Marimbas are a chromatic instrument popular in South Africa and South America.   From the point of view of bar  construction this makes very little difference, but it pays to know these things in case of encounters with ethno-musicologists.

My first step is to find the node points for the fundamental notes of each bar.  Tuning for each bar is achieved by carving out a curve between the nodes.  Also, the nodes are where there cord holes will be drilled.  This is all starting to make sense.  Most of the on-line resources I found have formulas to calculate these points but the La Favre documentation suggests that finding the real node point by the following method is a better way.  I don't imagine that musicians in sub-saharan Africa have been using mathematical formulas for the last fifty thousand years or so that they have been playing instruments of this kind, so this method seems like the right one to follow.

Step one.  Sprinkle salt on the bar.  Yes, this line looks like cocaine does in the movies.  You could use cocaine, but if you could afford to use cocaine in this way you wouldn't be making your own marimba, surely.

Sprinkle salt on the bar.

Then hammer the bar with the mallet.  The salt jumps around and converges on the node point for the fundamental.

Mallet, salt and bar.

It soon becomes apparent that this works best when everything is level, so I find a suitable block from an earlier art project, and a leather shim, from another art project, and make sure the platform is level.

I do this for all of the 20+ blocks I have cut.

After a little experimentation I work out a reasonable method to cut the smaller bars based on the tools I have available.  The first step is to mark a curve in the bar.

Marking/checking the curve

I derive this by careful experimentation with the smallest and largest bars, so I can have a reasonable chance of achieving the pitch range I would like.  Then I have to remove as much of the material from the curve as possible as quickly as possible.  For these small bars, and given the tools I have at home, this is to cut lots of small slots to the marked groove using the jigsaw.  For larger bars I will probably follow the curve with the jigsaw.

Cutting slots with the jigsaw

Then remove the excess material using a chisel.

Chisel away the excess

The drum sander comes in handy again to smooth the curve..

Drum sander attachment

Tuning bars

Now that I have a bar which is close to pitch I can use the tuner to check and then either the curved surform or the drum sander to remove additional material.  The drum sander is quicker, but more likely to take off too much material and make the note flat.  

Curved surform.

It takes a while, but by the end of the day I have an octave and a half of approximately tuned bars.  The final tuning will happen after I have rechecked the node points and drilled the holes for the cord which will hold the bars together.

More importantly I have played some simple but important tunes with the bars.  The musical side of me can start exploring the notes, but the bars are still separate and not yet part of an actual instrument, so the builder/fabricator is not hindered in the task of creating a finished musical elephant.

Sanding sanding sanding.

After a fruitless search for head materials on Wednesday the next job is sanding the ribs so that a nice edge can be routed round them.  There are a lot of ribs, which are all quite similar, and the left and right sides of the ribs also look similar.  After a while, a very short while, one can get quite confused about which bits have been done and which still need to be done.  So, the first thing I do is draw a zig-zag line in pencil on the faces that I am going to sand.  If there is pencil left at the end, no matter how convinced I am that I've already finished that rib, I still have sanding to do.

Some of the jigsaw cuts I made around the ribs weren't quite as nicely rounded as I would like, due to the shape of the original pattern, transcription errors and cutting errors.  I smooth a few of these out with  a small surform plane.  I like the surform, it is quick and easy to use on any kind of wood by even a 'one step up from novice' woodworker like myself.  

I also have a little curved surform which I bought to help cut out the curves on the backs of the marimba chimes.  This works well for perfecting curves on cut inner ribs.

A drum sander electric drill attachment works well for smoothing out the inner curves.  My cordless drill is not so good for this kind of work, so I haul out the old school corded drill.  This drill doesn't get much use these days, but it is one of that last things my Dad bought me, so it feels good to use it in this project.  I wonder what my Dad would make of this project, I suspect he would be bemused.  This project is linked to my earlier trip through Africa,  photos from that trip will be part of the performance during 'Bathing with Elephants'.  I don't think Dad entirely understood that project either, but he did support it, including making custom fitted boxes to fit in the Landrover.  I wonder if I should find a way of re-using those boxes, which I still have, as part of this project.

Finally, all the edges of the ribs are done.  This has taken hours.  Elephants usually have around 18 ribs, mine has 9.  I thought I'd cut 11, but don't seem to be able to find two, and I'm glad now.  The Elephant looks good with 9 ribs, and more would have taken much longer and made the structure less strong due to their being more slots cut in the backbone.  If any pedant mentions that the number of ribs in this representational Elephant is too small I feel almost certain I will give them a bad look, and perhaps say harsh words.

I use the orbital sander on the main faces of the ribs.  This is giving off a lot of dust so I dig out the face masks we bought for the Many Hands tour of Asia during SARS.  

I still need to rout the edges smooth, but I think it would be fair to say I am just about over ribs.

Will it fit?

Today is a milestone day.  The plan is for a large, but transportable, instrument.  It also need to fit into the available space at our house fully assembled.  Previous invented instruments have not been so successful in this regard.  Although amazing, Mr Pipe-o-matic, for example, is just a little too difficult to transport.

Oh, that is a bit longer than I expected.

My goal was for a transportable instrument, that is quite large, can be played by multiple people, is cool as a sculptural object and that I can easily take apart and put together on my own, even with a damaged elbow.  Experience suggests that all of these goals will not be achieved.  I haven't even started on the musical modes for the instrument, but today is the crunch point for much of the rest.

With a certain amount of excitement and trepidation I set off for my brothers house to collect the legs, jigsaw and offcuts of plywood.

We waste a few minutes trying to work out how to remove the back seat and make more space in the car. The seat gives every impression of being removable, which would let the seat backs lie flat, but we cannot work out how.  So, we try to putting the legs in the car anyway.

Yesterday, when they were still loosely held together components, this was quite tricky.  Today, with the legs glued irrevocably into place it turns out to be fairly easy.  Both sets of legs will sit horizontally in the back seat of the car.

How to fit an Elephant in a car

I will refer to this blog whenever I have trouble fitting the Elephant in the car.

I get home and can't resist trying to assemble the Elephant on my own.  After a bit of struggling my conclusion at this stage is that this is an impossible task.  It takes two people, or one person and some additional items that haven't been created yet, to assemble the legs and backbone.

Hey, there's an Elephant in the garden.

Next step, removing the excess gorilla grip glue.  This glue is much harder to remove than the standard gorilla glue and this takes a while.

Then I have to re-check the rib placement and cut the slots in the ribs.

One of the ribs will not fit in between the shoulder blades.  So, the first step is a minor adjustment to the rib shape.  After that I start cutting the slots with a jigsaw.  A couple of the ribs don't work as planned.  The rib that has been adjusted also needs a deeper slot to allow the ribs to make a nice curve.  It takes a couple of tries to get this right.  One of the lower ribs clearly needed a much shallower slot.  I check the original model, and yes, the slot on that one rib is shallower.  I'll need to either add a spacer, or recut the rib correctly.  The spacer is easier at this stage, although I may cut the new rib at a later time.

We finally have a fully slotted Elephant frame.

An Elephant in the conservatory

It looks much bigger than 1:10 scale...

Tomorrow I have a choice of going to the doctor and getting my elbow checked, sanding or trying to solve the head problem.

Glueing and slotting.

The Elephant needs to be stable, so the legs should be glued to their hips/shoulders to make it really strong.  It also needs to be transportable, preferably in our car.  So the first thing to do before we commit ourselves is to check to see if the legs will fit in the car as glued components.  After a bit of fiddling it seems, miraculously, that the legs will actually fit after glueing.   Of course the real test will come later.

After making sure this is possible we concentrate on cutting the rib slots.  This involves more framing up, calculating and cutting.  The placement of the ribs isn't so important functionally, but they will look much nicer evenly spaced and vertical.

Marking out the rib slots.

Once we finished cutting the rib slots the next step is framing up and glueing the legs.  This time we will use a slightly different glue as the gaps to be filled are much larger and the bonds will have to take more stress.  It takes some thought and experimentation to find a position where the legs will stay in place while the glue sets.  The front legs just about balance on their own when placed on a small platform of scrap wood, a few brick on top of the shoulders and we'll be fine.   We coat the insides of the slots and the faces where they touch the shoulders with glue.  The glue starts to go off quite quickly so we can't mess about.  Once the glued legs are in place we have to check that everything is true using a square and spirit level.  When we are finally satisfied with the positioning some cross braces are temporarily nailed in place, and the legs are also nail and screwed into the shoulders.  As the glue sets it will expand and push the legs out of true if they are not held in place by clamps, screws or nails.

Front legs glued and braced in position

We go through a similar process with the rear legs, although these are held upright by a temporary brace rather than bricks.

Rear legs glued and braced.

Now we have to wait over night before finding out if we have glued the Elephant in a stable configuration and more importantly if all the legs really will fit into the car!

A new year, a new born Elephant

The next step is to frame up the rear legs using the same techniques as for the front legs.  We place the legs between parallel pieces of wood and match them up to get the angles right.  One of the legs is a bit too long and will need some wood cut off the foot, but other than that it looks good.

Working out the angles and slot positions.

Once we have worked the slot positions we cut them out using the circular saw.

Cutting out the slots

Once the rear legs and hips are together we clamp them into position and again loosely position the backbone.  With the Elephant close to its final stance we mark up a datum line along the backbone.  After doing this we can mark the positions of the slots which will hold the legs into the backbone.

In position for final slot placement.

We cut out these last two slots using the same method and come to the final crunch point.  Will the Elephant fit together, standing on it own four feet, or will we need to do some complicated and possibly costly revisions?

This really has to work first time, but we have planned and checked, and given it our best shot, so we are confident.

A few moments of Elephant wrestling later and we have a free standing Elephant.

Free standing at last

I loosely place the ribs on the Elephants back and we almost have a completed Elephant frame.

Ribs approximately in place.

I try hitting various parts of the Elephant with drumsticks, and there are some nice tones to be found, even the cavity/wood block is sounding good.

There is still a lot of work to be done before the Elephant is completed, but it is great to be able to start exploring the musical possibilities of the frame.