christmas on infinite earths

Project 3 is a wrap, as is Extreme Freestyle Hacking.  My presentation went very well considering I banged on the instrument pretty randomly.  I think I got points for sheer scale, as D.W. horrible Hugborg was about the only thing the towered over it.  After the presentations were over I played it some more and got some really nice little melodies out of it by doing some kinda complex patterns, until I fell out of the zone and messed up.

Here’s me trying once again to play the one song I really wanted to play for class.  I still can’t seem to get that last part.  Happy Holidays everyone!

After figuring out the proper way to mount the springs for maximum ringatude, I went out and bought one more.  Older and wiser this time around, I was sure to get one that could easily be disassembled, and it also has 5 usable springs instead of 4, with some of them only about 10 inches long.  These will go on the second row of the instrument.  I’m gonna play around with it tonight and arrange them in some sort of intuitive order.

While picking through the pile of springs (conveniently shoved into a junker at the bottom of a pile of cars) the guy at the salvage yard found either the body or a husk of a tiny white scorpion.  I don’t know if it came with the junked out car or if the little sucker was a native to Austin in his life, but it was kind of cool and freaky at the same time.  Back to work now!

I just got the basic framework for the instrument built.  for the first time it is taking shape.

Unfortunately it is the wrong shape.  Up until now I have been operating under the assumption that the springs need to act like the tines on a kalimba, that is, be pinned down at one end while the rest is struck and vibrates.  This makes them easy to tune because you can just adjust where the spring is pinned down in order to adjust the length of the vibrating segment.  This has been entirely theoretical though.  I had been trying to find out what the springs sounded like when held and struck in this manner, but assumed that I needed the full frame set up with sound chamber in order to know.  Boy was I wrong.

I found out tonight that by holding the spring even loosely in one hand and striking it near the center with a mallet, you can make the entire spring vibrate and even fucking ring.  It’s a totally audible note with no sound chamber whatsoever.  If you touch that vibrating spring against something, anything, it amplifies the noise.  I was floored.  Finally I know what I have to do, unfortunately it means a lot of my work so far has been in the wrong direction.  We’ll see what I can salvage and what needs to be scrapped.