Cigar Box Ukulele build.

Last Saturday while out in town shopping with my wife I popped into an old fashioned tobacconists, (old fashioned in the truest sense because the shop is in a building that looks like came straight out of a Dickens novel) this was just a bit out of character for a life long non smoker so what was I up to? Well you could have guessed it was something to do with my latest instrument build. I was after empty cigar boxes as I want to build a cigar box ukulele! These instrument sem to have become a bit of a craze and there are lots of sites related to them not in the least the social network site Cigar Box Nation http://www.cigarboxnation.com/

I asked if she sold them off as I had read on a blog that £1 was about the going rate but she said no we give them away but only have one at the moment and presented me with a nice ply box with nicely finger jointed corners. A plain bu other wise pretty box except it had a sticker on the back with a distressing photo of a central American guy with a huge ugly red seeping growth on his throat with the caption SMOKING CAN LEAD TO SLOW AND PAINFIL DEATH. Not the most attractive thing to have adorning your musical instrument! So I removed that though I might keep the standard Smoking Kills sticker. So with the body of the uke taken care of all I need is a neck, I have a piece of teak that I found in a rock pool on the beach, my banjo guitar has some of it as the fingerboard already and I am hoping it will make a good one piece neck, teak would be far too heavy on a guitar but as this is such a small instrument I’m hoping it will just make it feel a bit more substantial and not make it too neck heavy. I can always glue a bock into the back of the box to balance it if it is. I’m going to make it into a tenor size uke (17” scale length)as Victoria Vox’s always sounds nice and it should be a little less cramped to play than either a soprano (13”) or concert (15”) size

Cigar box Uke blog part 2

The Ukulele neck is coming on well and as you can see I've attached some extension blocks to the headstock area to make it wide enough and am gluing together a couple of maple off cuts and strip of rosewood to make a nice laminate which will be glued on top for the headstock facing.

Gary's music Club Gig

The gig at Gary’s went pretty well and the Mike Piggott trio where brilliant as always as for me the rotary speaker preformed perfectly and I even got a few laughs but I was annoyed as I made a bit of a mistake in my Beatles rendition but recovered from it ok. The worst thing was I let down by not having a sound check and worse still nobody on the sound system as my mic wasn’t loud enough! Thankfully two of my three songs were instruments but it spoilt it somewhat for me. Gary was cool about it all though and has asked me to play another 20 minute spot at the open mic in December. A bit of a consolation was that I won tickets in the raffle to see Angie Palmer at the next show which I was keen to go to anyway.
Here is a shaky clip of me with Gary on my homemade bass playing my instrumental adaption of Nancy Kelly's song Manzanita Wind.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y9HGELQbtAo

It don't impress me much.

My co-worker has been going on about his “new” car so in a way of reply here is the beginning of a song I’ve been writing:

(To the traditional tune)

Oh Lord DON’T you buy me a Mercedes Benz
I couldn’t afford to service it or pay the insurance premiums
I’d rather buy an old Nissan Primera for a song
Five hundred thousand Asian taxi drivers can’t be wrong.


To Be Continued….

A second guest appearance at Gary's Club.

I'm getting excited because on Saturday 19th September I'm playing another 20 minute guest spot at Gary's Club, I'll be playing a couple of instrumentals using my homemade gear namely my "Les Pew" guitar and my rotary speaker, even the Ale-o-phone might make an appearance!

The main attraction is The Mike Piggott Trio. Advance booking is recommended, reservations are coming in already & a sell out is anticipated.

Other performers during the evening include,
The Maypole Band
Resolution


My friend Claire Downes is the club's resident photographer so I should have some professional pictures to post here soon afterwards!

7.30pm for 8pm start, Coolham Village Hall, A272 nr Billingshurst, West Sussex RH13 8QNhttp://www.bassistgaryholder.com/fr_concertnight.cfm

Crazy pianola idea!

I am thinking about building a machine to play simple repeated riffs or maybe a solo (at the push of a foot control) on my little melodica. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MelodicaLike a piano player or a barrel organ! The melodia wouldn’t need any modification; it would be blown into by an electric pump and played by mechanical fingers. I can generate piano roll paper from midi using garageband on the computer, all I need to do is print it out, punch out the holes and roll it into a tube, it will be then read using light and a stack photo resistors! To keep it mechanically simple sharp/flat (black) notes are played by punching out the holes for the two natural notes (white) either side of it and using a little CMOS (electronic) logic to decode it the black key is depressed and white keys aren’t, I have already worked out this circuit! Even the way the way the keys are depressed is going to be unusual as I feel conventional solenoids (electro-magnets) are inefficient and expensive (old pianolas and barrel organs used vacuum) and propose to use electro-magnetic clutches in other words smaller electro-magnets maybe from relay coils that grip a stack of revolving discs so each magnet can be just a fraction away from it’s disc (so it doesn't need to be so powerful) and simply gripping it will drag and it’s finger on to the key. Maybe if this is successful some day I could scale it up to play a full size piano??!!! But anyway I think this would be good on stage playing my keyboard parts, I could build it so that all the moving parts are visible from the front.
It’s sad to me that we live in a world where every thing is solid state and sealed up, there is no longer that sense of fascination and wonder of watching things turn and mechanisms whirl like there was when I was younger, this thing would be a like apiece of kinetic art! It would be a big project but something I can work away at piece by piece, don’t expect to see anything working too soon!
Oh I suppose I should make a drum machine version too!

A rotary speaker tune

As you can hear it has a strange whrily- floaty sound, almost like an electric piano. What you are missing out on is the amazing stereo effect bcz it is recorded in mono. I am playing the "Les Pew" (See my first blog) it's just out of camera shot bcz I couldn't get the camera any further back even though it is out side of the shed door! I can just about get my two amps and pedal board into my tiny workshop and have enough room to play but I wouldn't get to practice much with it if I had to set it up in the front room! I wish we had a garage!

Every monkey stick needs a monkey!

From wikipedia

The name "monkey stick" comes from a modern practice: in homage to the trained monkeys formerly used by buskers to solicit money from passers-by, a number of musicians have taken to fixing a small stuffed toy monkey to the tops of their instruments.

I found this guy in a greetings card shop reduced to 99p I'll attach him to the pole somewhere.