Student Instruments Fall 2005

Bandoline, Drumbone, Oversized Panflute,

Spike Fiddle, Thumb Piano, Wind Chimes,

Pan Pipes, Guitar,

Tuned Rattles, Two-Stringed Instrument

Bandoline by Ben Cook		video clip sound recording “Since I had minimal options for what I could use I decided that the easiest and most readily available material was cardboard, sacrificing sound quality for ease in making the instrument. I later found out that the material that I used was not so substandard as I had previously thought. The cardboard provides a very dark tone that is not especially loud, but does have a good amount of clarity. … I found that the most important factor in the quality of sound was what I used for the bridge on my instrument. For this I used the cover off of a small dental floss container….Overall I am very happy with my instrument and luthiership.”
Oversized Pan Flute by Anthony Morse		sound recording “There was a lot of trial and error involved in my instrument project. Originally, I planned to make a tuned glass bottle xylophone until I changed the plan to instead use the glass bottles I had to make a tuned glass bottle flute and now finally I constructed a flute made out of one-inch diameter PVC piping..”
Drumbone by Brian Kotila and Joel Adams		video clip “The instrument that we have constructed is capable of producing three distinct pitches. These pitches are F, D, and C. …The first note..is achieved by having the instrument I the closed position. The second note that we chose is the D because of the way it speaks. The final note is C. This note speaks best at approximately 2.64 m length…The drumbone is an interesting and very visual pitched percussion instrument. It was fun to construct and is fun to play.”
Spike Fiddle by Rachael Gilmore		video clip “I admit that I have never played a string instrument with a bow before so I had to figure a few things out, like how to get the rosin on the bow, how to hold the bow and then how I should run the bow over the string. It took me quite a while to figure out how to draw the bow so I didn’t just get a squeak.”
Thumb Piano by Rachel Haag		video clip “First of all, I did not have wood to work with to make a base, so I went to the Salvation Army store and found a wall decoration type of thing that would work just as well… The sound … was a little unexpected for me. It has a very twangy edge to it that seems to come off as being more country-western style rather than African. …All in all, I had fun making my little thumb piano, and most importantly I learned many things throughout the whole experience.”
Wind Chimes by Jamie Renville and Aaron StAubin		video clip “…We found that (we) made things much harder than they needed to be. The second time around we first figured out the frequencies that we were looking for, and then cut the pipes accordingly. The problem with this trial was that we made two of the pipes or chimes to be half notes, which technically were in tune, but when played with the other whole notes didn’t sound very good … Knowing that the length of the pipe is the largest factor in the frequency that the pipe plays will make the chimes sound as beautiful as any that can be bought at a store.”
Guitar by Kristin Bennett and Emily Loehr		video clip “Even after finding all of the correct measurements for the strings, the creation of this instrument required a large amount of trial and error. …We had to make our first length longer two more times to get length differences distinguishable enough for the instrument to work. The other important part of the instrument was the ability to tune it…It was vital that the string actually respond to the tightening /loosening of the screw.”
Pan Pipes by Sarah Friedrichs, Nolan Hauta and Rob McInerny		video clip “…this has been a project of change. We made the pipes close instead of open, and we had to hook them together instead of glue them. The lengths we originally calculated were not the actual lengths that the pipes ended up being, but they had to be cut and have to have caps on at a certain length in order to be in tune. There was a lot of learning and doing as we went along.”
Tuned rattles by Mike Helgemoe		video clip “So I had 2 bottles that made noise, but I still needed at least three more, because the assignment asked for 5 consecutive tones. So, into the chemistry stockroom we go. The chemistry stockroom was basically a smorgasbord of instrument ideas and equipment, and we found about 7 or 8 bottles to use rather quickly.” “As it turns out, my initial hypothesis turned out to be right: the bottles could be tuned by determining the amount of beads in them…It can be compared to pouring water in a glass: the sound that you hear when you pour water in a jar gets higher as the jar fills up, and this is where we get the difference in sound with the beads.”
Two-Stringed Instrument by Huck Brock		video clip “With this instrument, both the plastic jug and the cardboard box act as Helmholtz resonators. When a string is plucked the vibrations travel into the jug and the cardboard box where they are amplified and vibrate the air within the resonators which then in turn travels through the sound hole and vibrates the air outside of the instrument.”

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