untravelledpath

Doing Music Differently,  Shoki Family,  Kalimba Family,  Bowus Family,  Work-In-Progress, Help-Us-Pay-the-Rent

日本語

Shoki Family***Kalimba Family***Bowus Family
Doing Music Differently****Notation***Practice***Performance***Unspecialized
Work In Progress Frozen mp3 Blog****The Indian Music Scene
Home****Buy Our Music

*

*

When we made our first instruments back in 1991 we were living a very low tech life in Varanasi, India.  So it was without power tools that we had to shape the unstandardized materials ( rough sawn rose wood planks, coconut shells, high carbon steel rods, scaffolding bamboo…. ) which went into their construction.  This inevitably meant they were a little crude, still we worked carefully so they turned out to be seriously good fun to play.  ( The Indian Music Scene, The Street Singer, Doing Music Differently )

But the instruments we’ve made since returning to the States in 1998 are far from crude, as you can hear from this music played on representatives of all 3 of our different instrument families.  ( You can listen to the rest of the instrumentals and songs on our most recent CD by going to our Work In Progress Frozen mp3 Blog. )

*

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

Qdss :  A Boxus Quartus, Dotara, Shoki, Shoki quartet

*

Right from the start we’ve made instruments only for ourselves.  That is we’ve only been willing to do the work of building them because we’ve wanted to play them.

Indeed our instrument craft and our music have grown in parallel like siblings in the same family, and it’s impossible to understand either without looking at the other.  ( Unspecialized )

For one thing, by allowing us to weave music from never before heard sounds, our instruments guaranteed we would produce music that’s very different.

This is doubly true because our self-made instruments have not been engineered to produce only tones from the official chromatic scale ( Notation ).  Instead their individual notes are funky with strange harmonics and differ in tone quality as well as in pitch.

Even beyond this, there are definitely sounds our instruments want to make and sounds they just will not make, so in effect they’ve taught us how they want to be played and put us in a position to discover our new music, a much less dauntingly difficult task than having to invent it.
*

Despite centuries of hard work by dedicated designers, conventional instruments also do not produce totally uniform and regular sounds.  String and brass instruments have wolf notes, while the lowest notes of a piano are only somewhat there.

However players of such instruments, rather than being encouraged to take advantage of these interesting irregularities, are instead strictly disciplined to avoid them.

Consider for example the fate of someone learning to play the cello, a totally awesome instrument capable of making an astonishing range of different sounds.  But pretty quickly frowns and harsh comments from their teacher make it quite clear most of these are absolutely forbidden.

So they’re trained to avoid sounds that fall between the official notes ( Notation ), to avoid squeaks, to avoid whisper tones, and to produce a consistently loud round sound ( Practice ).

Which is perfectly reasonable and correct if one’s object is to learn to play Bach ( a most laudable object ), but if one is looking to produce musical newness this sort of training is counter productive since it puts the seeker into a mental straightjacket.  Because by the time someone has become proficient on the cello, they’ve learned to avoid 90% of the sounds which their instrument is capable of making.
*

In any case the manifest irregularity of the sounds produced by our instruments has forced us to listen carefully and to learn to hear very small intervals ( Notation ).  And obviously this sensitivity has been vital for our evolutionary approach to music, where for learning, listening must take the place of studying ( Practice ).

However initially we found it less easy to understand why after concentrating for a while on making instruments, when our focus shifted back to playing them, we always discovered our music had grown.

But now we accept this as yet more proof our unspecialized approach to creating new music works.  Or to say this another way, we believe if we live music more completely, if we do things like making instruments instead of just playing them, more interesting music is one natural result.
*

Shoki Family
*

The simple bamboo flutes in our Shoki Family ( versions of the traditional Japanese shakuhachi ) first introduced us to the world of microtones, since even though they’re “tuned” by the spacing, size, and shape of their finger holes, partial closings and mouth-tongue-breath control allow one to slide smoothly among their notes and produce a whole universe of microtones.

This combined with the way shokis can whisper, blast, quiver, and generally twist notes in intoxicating ways, makes them instruments well suited to madness and getting lost, and this is the way we’ve used them.

No doubt this protected us from getting stuck in the limitations of conventional shakuhachi style.  Instead of using our flutes to diligently practice tunes from the sadly shrunken traditional repertoire, they quickly became tools for freeing up our breathing and our minds, and before we’d even noticed it our shoki playing had morphed into sadhana ( spiritual exercise ), had gone way beyond being just a prelude to performance.

*

Kalimba family
*

The newer instruments in our Kalimba Family have evolved to the point that they’re only distantly related to the African thumb pianos which were their ancestors and original inspiration.
a
This became obvious as soon as we’d created our first keyboard style kalimba, an instrument 26 inches wide with 24 linearly arranged keys tuned a half note apart.  Since then we’ve gone on to build a second such chromatically tuned kalimba and two larger quartertone instruments each of which is 37 inches wide and has 48 linearly arranged keys tuned roughly a quartertone apart.

It was 1998 when we were still in India that we built “Basus Chromaticus”, the first of these radically different instruments, and at that point we knew of nothing else even remotely like it.  Even later that year when we returned to the States and started poking around the web we found nothing comparable, though we did see a few chromatically tuned handheld instruments.

However by about 2007 keyboard style kalimbas started popping up on Google, and now they come in many different sizes and shapes.  But one thing all these instruments seem to have in common is they use something similar to a piano’s arrangement of white and black keys to peg them to a particular key ( presumably in most cases “C” ).

And while it’s true this makes them suitable for playing conventional Pop and Classical music, we doubt they can do either as well as other already existing instruments.  For Pop music a handheld kalimba with a wireless pickup would be better for a performer who wants to move and play at the same time.  While the complicated fingerings required by Classical music must be more difficult on thin kalimba keys than on the keys of any basic keyboard.
*

Beyond giving one bragging rights we can’t quite see the point of complicated visually impressive new instruments which fail to lead to new and differently beautiful music.  But perhaps we just don’t get it, since there seem to be quite a few boutique operations dedicated to building them, even as there are industries providing expensive recording equipment for people who almost never record, high-end cameras for people who take very few pictures, 6-burner stainless steel industrial stoves for people who seldom cook, and hiking boots for people who rarely walk on dirt.
*

As for actually making the beasts, since it’s more than tricky to set up kalimba keys in a way which mimics the arrangement of piano keys, trying to do so seems inevitably to result in clunky Rube Goldberg like instruments.

Fortunately since we’re not interested in playing conventional music, we were free to use 12-tone tuning and a linear arrangement of keys for our chromatic keyboard style kalimbas.  This led to simple elegant instruments which tickle our design sense, which once we figured out how to mike them ( Microphone Placement ) sound rich and resonant, and which have let us explore the type of music that interests us.  One more time being unspecialized, in this case being able to make our own instruments and do our own recording instead of just playing ready made instruments and going to a recording studio, put us in a position to produce bigger more interesting music.  We did it all ourselves, so we got it the way we wanted it.
*

This makes the process sound more clearly thought out and deliberate than it actually was.  It would be more accurate to say that when we started making these kalimbas we didn’t know where we were going, but then the instruments themselves, the music we played on them, our recording, and our sound engineering all influenced each other and evolved in parallel.  Once more the process of doing something taught us how it should be done.  ( Unspecialized )
*

Of course to our current taste even our 12-tone chromatic kalimbas still have far too much built in conventional music, so now that we have our two quartertone instruments, they’re the only ones we play.  ( Kalimba Family )

In any case, these keyboard style kalimbas are to our knowledge the only keyboard instruments where the sound is made by striking something directly with one’s fingertips.

More commonly keyboard sound is indirectly produced by something that hits or plucks a string, by a hammer that strikes a piece of wood or metal, or by dancing electrons.  Of course there’s absolutely nothing wrong with doing it these ways, but still we were greatly pleased to discover that making the sound by directly hitting something with our fingertips gave us very sensitive and sensual control of both tone quality and volume.

Also since each of our keys is individually hammered out from high carbon steel rod and so has its own funky tone quality, the tuning of our kalimbas is less uniform and regular than that of any conventional more machine-like keyboard.  Add to this that each key has a very different “touch”, and it means playing one of our keyboard style kalimbas is more like walking over a mountain trail than marching along a perfectly flat and regular city sidewalk.  ( Notation )

*

Bowus Family
*

We developed our Bowus Family because we wanted low pitched fretless bowable instruments we could play while seated cross legged.

“Bass bowus”, the most recently completed of these instruments, is eight feet long and has only a single string.

**

All the members of our bowus family are fretless and so like our shokis are well suited to playing microtones.  This of course is also true of fretless official instruments like the cello, but as we’ve noted, students of these instruments spend years learning to avoid the tones between the notes, whereas we’ve given ourselves permission to seek them out.

*

……with our own hands
*

When we say we make these instruments, we mean we actually build them with our own hands. ( Unspecialized )

The next two pictures show us hammering out quartus keys in our driveway and filing them in our little portal.  The metal we’re working is very hard high carbon steel, which probably explains why we both look somewhat stressed out.  ( It’s supposed to be impossible to cold hammer high carbon steel, but when we first did it we didn’t know it couldn’t be done, and so our keys have turned out just fine….. )
*
*

*

*

*

*

*

*

*

*

*

*
*
Shoki Family***Kalimba Family***Bowus Family
Doing Music Differently****Notation***Practice***Performance***Unspecialized
Work In Progress Frozen mp3 Blog****The Indian Music Scene
Home****Buy Our Music