A couple of weeks ago, I found this giant wooden spoon in an Arcata thrift store. It didn’t take much imagination to figure out what to do with it. It’s practically a ready-made string instrument, so the question became: how many and what kind? I have quite a few string instruments in my “Orchestra of the Unwanted.” I’ve got harps, lyres, zithers, fiddles, guitars and basses, but I don’t have much that sounds like a cello.
I like the sound of a cello, so I strung this spoon with a pair of pretty beefy (1mm) stainless steel strings, mounted a piezoelectric pickup on the bridge and a quarter-inch jack on the bowl of the spoon, and now it does a pretty good impersonation of a cello. It has a ton of upper harmonic response, that can easily get out of hand, but if you can keep it from squealing, it sings with depth and clarity.
In this piece, you can hear how the deep cello voice anchors the quartet of recycled instruments.
I made this little horror movie/music video to highlight some of the recordings I made recently with the Orchestra of the Unwanted. The Orchestra of the Unwanted is a growing collection of eccentric musical instruments I built from recycled materials and found objects. You can see pictures and demonstrations of the instruments by following this link.
The unique sounds of these crude instruments inspires the music I make with them. A lot of the music I make with the Orchestra of the Unwanted sounds like it belongs in a horror movie, so I got the idea to make a video to accompany this new album that had the look of a classic black and white horror movie from the ‘50s.
Then I remembered Rothenburg. In the summer of 2019 I visited Rothenburg, a medieval walled village in Germany. It is a beautiful place with cobblestone streets and 500 year old houses. They have a castle and a cathedral with some of the very best German woodcarving, but they also have a monster.
I saw it, and took pictures of it. It was one of the strangest things I have ever seen, and the image of it has haunted me ever since. I realized that Rothenburg had everything I needed to make a horror movie.
I shot the Vampire Hamster of Rothenburg almost entirely, on location, in Rothenburg, Germany, as an unwitting tourist, no doubt saving myself thousands of Euros in permit fees. The movie tells the story of a doomed love affair, a treacherous play for power that brings down an empire, and a bloodthirsty monster’s 500 year reign of terror. Although the story, and all of the characters portrayed in The Vampire Hamster of Rothenburg are completely fictional, the monster is REAL.
The whole movie is only 11 minutes long, but it includes excerpts of all 8 tracks of my new 53 plus minute long album, also titled The Vampire Hamster of Rothenburg by Tin Can Luminary and the Orchestra of the Unwanted. I hope you enjoy the movie, and that you like the music in it enough to check out the album, and make it the soundtrack to your own horror movie.
Since I’ve been prattling on about music for the past few weeks, I thought I’d share a little of mine with you. Here’s a whimsical short film, set to one of my recent recordings:
I extracted the video images for Mermaids of the Pterodactyl Cult from an old sci-fi movie called “Voyage to the Planet of the Prehistoric Women,” now in the public domain and part of the Prelinger Archive. The movie centers around male American astronauts who travel to an alien planet where they kill a pterodactyl and lose a robot, but never discover the aquatic hotties, who’s lives they forever alter. I reused the best part of the old movie, and sped it up substantially. I love the way the sea roils at this speed and that seemed to work with the roiling rhythms in the music. I hope you will check out all of my music, and many more music videos, at my music blog: www.electricearthmusic.wordpress.com
Many Americans, as well as millions of people around the globe have expressed their outrage at the top-secret experiments taking place at a US military base in Alaska. This nefarious program, code-named “The HARP Project,” builds on the groundbreaking work of Nicola Tesla, and seeks nothing less than complete control of global weather patterns through the use of high-frequency electromagnetic fields.
The HARP Project utilizes an enormous antenna array, and transmitters capable of pumping millions of watts of radio-frequency energy into the stratosphere. These transmissions create changes in the Earth’s ionosphere that extend around the globe, and the amplitude of these signals distort the shape of the atmosphere, and effect the Earth’s magnetic field.
The HARP Project remains shrouded in secrecy,
…but this week, the LYGSBTD Center for Investigative Reporting acquired exclusive, TOP-SECRET video footage that reveals, for the first time, exactly how it really works. This video reveals the exact frequencies of operation, resonance gradients, harmonic characteristics, and radiation patterns of the energy field transmissions. This video allows viewers to see, and hear for themselves, the effect these energy fields have on the atmosphere. WARNING: This two-and-a-half minute video will change your life FOREVER!!!!!!
See, you are now two-and-a-half minutes older, and you’ve seen the newest addition to my growing collection of crude musical instruments made out of junk: The HARP Project. Technically, a musicologist would remind us, this instrument is a lyre, but I’ve called this instrument “the HARP Project” from the moment I conceived of this contraption, and I’ve only subsequently learned of the subtle difference between the two. For the record, a harp has only three sides, while a lyre has four.
The voice of this instrument emanates from an aluminum bundt cake pan I found lying in the mud while cleaning up a property in Ettersburg. I knocked the mud out of it and tapped it a couple of times to listen to its ring. I thought it had a pleasant ring, and considered using it as a resonator on the guitar I recently built, but the geometry of the guitar just didn’t work that way.
Still, I thought this bundt cake pan had a nice ring to it, and realized it would be easy to attach a piezoelectric pickup to it as well, so I started to look at it, and think about how I could best harness its acoustic properties. I checked a few books out of the library, and I looked up some stuff on-line. At some point, I found a picture of a harp made out of a roasting pan. I took note of how it was constructed.
created by Bart Hopkins to see more of Bart’s amazing instruments click this pic
Zither pins. Until this point, my collection of homemade string instruments has been limited by the availability of tuning mechanisms. I once got a music store to sell me a few old guitar tuning machines for a dollar each, but I haven’t come across a deal like that since. Zither pins sell for about a dollar each, new. With zither pins, I could build an instrument with 20 tuned strings, and stay within my budget of $30.
I built the frame of the instrument from an old shipping pallet, and I found a piece of copper pipe just the right length for the bridge.
You already know about the bundt cake pan.
I made the strings out of a spool of stainless steel wire I’ve been carrying around for over a decade.
The piezoelectric pickup came out of my Bratz brand toy drum machine that worked long enough that you can hear it on my last album, Um… Uh… Gum Eh?, but died shortly thereafter.
I got eight great sounding piezoelectric pickups out of that toy, including this one, and the one in my record breaking guitar.
I paid one dollar for it. A quarter-inch phone jack and a volume pot with a brushed aluminum knob complete the Harp Project, and make it convenient to amplify or record.
I really like the way it sounds. Now I have to learn to play it.
I just finished building myself a new guitar. In itself, I don’t think that sets any new records, except perhaps for some personal records for myself. For instance: This new guitar, with four strings, has more strings than any instrument I’ve built so far. I don’t expect that record to last long, because I’ve already begun work on a crude electric harp. This is also the first stringed instrument I’ve built that has a fret-board, although I didn’t set the frets, and it’s the first electric stringed instrument I’ve built that has a built-in amplifier.
Aside from these personal records, I can’t even claim to have recorded any new records with this guitar. I just finished building it, after all. I’m just getting to know the instrument. I wanted to build an instrument with a unique sound, and I’ve achieved that, but I expect it will take a while before I learn to speak its language fluently enough to compose music for it. Although it has a unique sound, I can’t say it’s uniqueness breaks any records.
You could see my new guitar as a kind of phoenix, rising from the ashes of an older, if not unique, at least unusual guitar. My new guitar began with an listing on the SoHum Buy-Sell-Trade Facebook page where I let people know that I was looking for junk guitar parts, especially tuning machines. Felix Omai responded to my ad by generously offering to give me the remains of an old Harmony brand arch-top, four-string, tenor guitar. I was delighted to receive it.
The guitar was in pretty sad shape. It’s arch had fallen, the back of the body had come off, the front of the body detached from the sides, and the fret-board fell off of the neck. One of the tuning pegs turned to dust between my fingers as I tried, for obviously the first time in many years, to turn it.
I googled the guitar online, and found a nice picture of what it must have looked like in its heyday, and I have to admit that it was a pretty sharp-looking guitar, considering that it retailed for $79.00 in the Sears and Roebuck Catalog. Even in 1962, that was a pretty cheap guitar.
The online reviews, however, all panned the guitar’s sound as “muddy,” “undefined,” and “bottom-heavy,” so I didn’t feel bad about salvaging the parts I could use to make a new and unique instrument. After I reattached the fret-board to the neck, and replaced the broken tuning peg with a little slab of deer antler, I salvaged the whole neck assembly, as well as the tailpiece and part of the rosewood bridge.
I replaced the body with a crude rectangle of wood I salvaged from a shipping pallet. I built an electric pickup of my own design using an upcycled mint tin, a piezoelectric disc I salvaged from an electronic toy, some compression springs I got at Scrap Humboldt, and the rosewood string saddles from the bridge of the old Harmony. This unique acoustic-electric bridge pickup, with built-in spring reverb gives the guitar its unique sound, at least partially.
My new guitar’s other secret weapon is its on-board amplifier, with a speaker mounted directly beneath the strings. I built the amplifier around an LM386 8-pin amplifier chip, and powered it with a 9-volt battery.
The amplifier has an on-off switch, input volume, and gain control, which allows me to play it as an “acoustic’ instrument, that is, without plugging it into an external amplifiers, and to overdrive the amplifier producing distortion and feedback, whether it is plugged into an external amplifier or not.
Still, I did have to break two records to build this guitar, and no one will ever listen to this copy of Iron Butterfly’s 1960’s rock anthem, Inna-Gadda-Da-Vida,
or Billy Crystal’s hit single You Look Marvelous again.
Instead, you can listen to to me play them like this:
Today, Thursday, Jan. 22 at 5pm KMUD, Redwood Community Radio will debut a brand new radio show that I produced. The show is airing today because the hard disc crash that took my computer out of commission, also took out the newest episode of Wildlife Matters, the program scheduled for that time, that my partner Amy Gustin and I produce together. Wildlife Matters will be back next month, on the fourth Thursday in February at 5:00pm.
Instead, KMUD will air the first episode of The Adventurous Ear, a show that highlights music of exceptional originality, and profiles the artists who create it. This debut episode features the music of Willoughby, performing The Sex Life of Mushrooms live at Siren’s Song Tavern in Eureka.
The Sex Life of Mushrooms is a musical, mycological excursion into the private lives of our fungal friends. Willoughby uses many homemade and circuit-bent instruments to create his music, which he records onto cassettes with a 4-track tape recorder. He then mixes these tracks live, while speaking into a specially wired reishi mushroom.
Willoughby’s performance blew me away the night I heard him perform, and The Sex Life of Mushrooms is exactly the kind of outside-the-box originality I hope to bring to KMUD’s listeners with this new series. I had hoped to hype this show a bit more before it aired, but I hope you will tune in today, Jan. 22 at 5:00pm on KMUD.
If you live outside of the KMUD listening area, or just want to hear the show right now, here’s a link to an mp3 vesion of the show:
Like You've Got Something Better To Do 