Te hanganga - Woodblocks

Ngā Pouaka Rākau - Woodblocks

The first instruments I explored making were woodblocks and guiro. I aimed for mostly wooden percussive instruments in the project as I find them the most pleasing on the ear - too much metal can be hard going. We had some old 'Fascinating Rhythm Blocks' in the collection of instruments we hired from ONZA (Orff NZ Aotearoa), so I set about replicating these across a wider range of notes.

Of all the untuned percussion we use in the Orff approach, guiro are one of my favourites, probably because they are actually tuned! I like the little 2 toned guiro with a long and a short tube, so I wanted to try making a whole set of tuned guiro.

The round guiro in the picture above were my first attempt at this, but they took a long time to make (carving the grooves on a lathe and then tuning the chamber), plus I didn't have an easy source of wood (pine was a little too soft), so when I began making woodblocks with kwila as the tone wood I quickly turned to a new idea: using decking timber with grooves already in it! This created both instruments in one hit (or scrape!).

Woodblocks / guiro 

Gluing them together - it helps to have the gear!

Once I'd experimented with a few different sizes of blocks and worked out their pitches, I made a whole set and carefully sawed slots in the sides to tune them to the notes I wanted. This set has one octave (C to C), plus a high D and E. I mounted them on a temporary backing in a way that they can be easily removed, as we often use a pentatonic scale in Orff music, taking away some notes to make it easier for tamariki to be successful in their music making. 

The ability to remove notes easily and set up instruments in a pentatonic scale will be a feature of the sound garden, making it easier on the ears when students are playing randomly or out of sync with each other, and supporting success when playing as a group. 

Te tangi a ngā pouaka - Woodblocks in action

Pouaka tanguru - Bass bar

Te pouaka tanguru - making bass bars

A bass bar is essentially a one-note marimba, a single bar suspended above a large box with the chamber tuned to match the pitch of the bar and therefore amplify its resonance. I couldn't find any information on how to make one of these at first, so I had a go at replicating the C bass bar my friend Priya let me borrow from her school. Priya is a fabulous Orff teacher who got me into this approach in the first place, and has been a great support and collaborator in my teaching journey.

I made the box using plywood to match the size of the original (made from MDF), tilting the bottom toward a small gap for rainwater to escape, then tried to tune the chamber. It was hard for my electronic tuner to pick up the note it made when struck, but I eventually set the aperture adjuster to what seemed like the right note. The next step was to make a bar.

With bass instruments like these it's good to adjust the harmonic overtones as well as the base notes when you tune the bars, as these are the other main sounds you can hear. In the picture above you can see where I've tuned the base note by scalloping in the centre of the bar, and tuned the first and second harmonic by cutting notches at the appropriate distances along the bar. You can also see where I mucked up and dropped too low, and had to raise the bar's pitch by removing wood at the ends! This doesn't happen often thankfully, but drilling with an auger means the effects can't be seen once the bar is in place.

The finished bass bar. I originally mounted this on rubber pads with a nail through the middle to hold it (see top photo) in the usual style, but vibration noises made me seek another way, and I eventually replicated a hanging method I saw on maker Chris Banta's website, which fixed the problem.

Unfortunately the I-pad I've been using to record footage can't pick up the deep resonance of this instrument, but I might add a video later if I take my own recording setup to work one day. Our akonga enjoy playing it during lessons, and I'm planning to make a G and A to add to this C bar.