MORE EXPERIMENTS WITH MOUNTED SOUNDMAKERS

I love drums and percussion as much as the next guy, whomever he might happen to be, but I consider myself more of a lover of noises than just a percussionist.  I love the sound of a crackin' snare drum, some thunderin' tom-toms and a boomin' bass drum, but I also love the tinkle of chimes, the tintinnabulations of various bells, the resonant tones of woodblocks, plus the scrape of a guiro, the rattle of a Vibra-slap or the twang of a Flex-a-tone.  Out-of-doors I enjoy the wail of an ambulance siren, the horn-blast of a firetruck or the clatter of a train crossing just as much as the babble of a river, the chirping of birds or the whistling of the wind.

In other words, I love all kinds of sounds.  My secret desire in life was to be a Sound Effects Man during the Golden Age of Radio.  What an interesting, fun and satisfying job that would be!  When Fibber McGee opened his closet door, to be the guy who dumped the cacophonous collection of boxes, bowling pins, tools, pots and pans and other junk down a makeshift staircase to create the image of an overstuffed storage space bursting forth.....would be awesome.  Here's a clip.

So I not only collect percussion instruments manufactured by name-brand companies.  I also venture to make my own "sound effects" gadgets from time to time.  If I can find something that sounds unique or interesting, I'll try to think of a way to mount it and make it drumset-compatible.  For instance, one day I was browsing around the "Home Improvement Big-Box Store" looking for threaded rods to refurbish a bell tree.  When I found them, I also found an assortment of metal rods and tubes made of steel and aluminum.  While examining a stick of this square steel tubing, wondering what I could do with it, it slid from my grasp and made contact with the concrete floor.

DING!

Suddenly the thought hit me: I bet I could cut graduated sections of this and make chimes out of them.  This I had already done with copper tubing to make my largest set of bar chimes (or more accurately, tube chimes).

While mainstream bar chimes are typically mounted on a two-foot frame (and made from thin aluminum rods), these 1/2" copper tubes required a three-foot board to space them out appropriately to allow sufficient swing and flow.

Anyway, back at Lowe's I purchased a few lengths of the steel tubing and took it home to my workshop.  There I discovered as I suspected, that when I cut it into incremental sections they indeed made wonderful-sounding chimes.

Another project involved mounting a collection of stainless steel flatware to a wood bar to create an interesting "soundmaker."

These produce a noise that I wouldn't describe as "lovely" or "soothing," but to me this instrument sounds clashingly chaotic in a cool way.  You never know when the script might call for Fibber to drop a handfull of place settings.

One interesting and humorous note: While I was making these chimes, boring holes in the forks, spoons and knives with a drill press, my son came out to the workshop and observed my project still in progress.

"Does Gamma know you are doing that?!"

He thought I was destroying her good silverware.

I also have experimented with mounting sets of triangles, as Treeworks seems to be the only company that understands some people like to have more than one triangle at their disposal, and I don't mean the one in your kitchen sink.  Therefore, here are a couple of examples of what most refer to as "Triangle Trees."  I just call them "Triangle Sets."  The first is the three offerings from Latin Percussion: 4, 5 and 6 inch.  I took these and mounted them together so they can be hung on a single cymbal stand.

Next I took a couple of nameless triangles (made in Pakistan) and mounted them in a more unique vertical arrangement.  This was after trying it the traditional way and feeling a bit disappointed about their appearance.  These thinner but larger triangles - 8 and 10 inch - sort of disappear when hung from a straight wooden bar, so I decided to give them a wider backboard that would better accentuate their existence yet still attatch to a cymbal stand.

In my opinion, the above arrangement looks much better than a standard one:

These are but a few examples of the many bells, chimes and metal materials with which I have experimented lately.  Your brief attention to this matter is nonetheless appreciated.