Ngā Kaitautoko - supporters

Generosity

To build the instruments for the sound garden I needed a workshop and tools. Thankfully I had everything I needed from a very generous new friend named Murray Kilpatrick. I met Murray when I came around to help me learn the accordion in 2016, and when he saw my artistic projects (no instruments at that stage) he offered his workshop, should I ever need one! A month or so afterwards with new plans, I decided to take him up on his offer.

Murray playing my sound garden marimba

Murray is not only a woodwork and metalwork teacher with a well-stocked workshop, he's also a great musician who plays folk music and a luthier making his own guitars, mandolins and such in his spare time. Amazing! His workshop is full of interesting timbers, frames and bits and bobs for making these things.

The marimba, the flipflopophone, and the plumber

Deciding I needed some new teaching instruments for the kura in late 2016, I rang around plumbers in Lower Hutt hoping to find some pipe offcuts for little or nothing as I had in Hokitika. I got nowhere, but eventually a local plumber, Mike Ellis asked me what I wanted to do. Saying he had a soft spot for schools, Mike offered not just to give me some free pipe but to pay for all the materials for a contrabass marimba and flipflopophone! What a legend!

I used Murray's excellent workshop and tools to build the marimba over a week of my holidays plus the first week of the school year. Learning to tune the bars, including the harmonic overtones was tricky but very rewarding.

When I emailed various signwriters to get quotes on lettering stickers for naming the notes, Fine Signs and Wellington Signs generously offered to do it for free, and Phil from Fine Signs also cut out my kōwhaiwhai patterns on his vinyl cutter, saving me a lot of work when it came to decorating the instrument.

Ngutu kākā: Kākā make a lot of noise, so I thought this pattern appropriate.

To thank Mike Ellis, Murray and Phil I organised a performance during morning karakia at the end of term 1, and organised a local reporter to visit and do an article on it, in the hope that the sponsors would receive some publicity from their generosity. Two of our Y8 students presented a clever instrumental piece they'd composed on the marimba before the whole Y6 class performed a waiata using a range of instruments, including the flipflopophone I'd managed to construct the previous day!

One day wonder! Thanks Robyn for the help 😊

Mike Ellis and whānau, Nicole Swain from Fine Signs, and Murray & Julie Kilpatrick

As you can see, a lot of what I do has come about through the generosity and goodwill of others, and I am very grateful. That's not even mentioning my wonderful whānau, who back me in everything I do. These instruments are not specifically part of the sound garden, but I thought this was a good opportunity to acknowledge the people who made them happen, and it's all part of the story anyway! 

I am also grateful to my good friends Nadine and David, whose van I use to transport supplies, and the various other people who have offered advice on instrument making, discounts on their products (Resene and Tony from Plumbing World have been great here), and in particular to the team at Tātai Aho Rau - CORE Education, whose funding has meant the project could happen. Ngā mihi nui ki a koutou katoa!

He titiro ki te wāhi mahi rākau a Murray

Murray's workshop

Pakakau teitei - Marimbas

Ngā pakakau teitei - marimbas

With a few smaller instruments completed, I thought I'd better get stuck into the big ones: a set of marimbas! The contrabass marimba I made earlier has been popular with students, and marimbas are such an asset in an Orff music programme, so I planned to build 3 alto instruments to complement this.

As with the contrabass I used Jon Madin's Make your own Marimbas manual, but due to the difference in PVC pipe sizes in Australia where he developed them, I had to reconfigure the design. I chose to use individual pipes to amplify each bar rather than a generic wooden box as the tone quality is much better, and the quality of sound is very important to me in what I make. 

Tuned 80mm pipes with caps

I built a frame for my first marimba based on the measurements I'd worked out, carefully sanding the edges to make it safe for little hands, and began tuning the individual pipes. This involved cutting up a 6m PVC pipe (downpipe), and reducing the length of each piece until it created the desired note, measured on an electronic tuner. These were then riveted onto a frame.

The pipe frame fitted snugly inside the marimba frame, where it is attached using carabiners for easy removal and transport. 

Mounting the pipes inside the frame.

The removable caps on some notes are for making an F into an F# when needed.

With the first frame complete, the big job of making the bars began. I had ordered kwila timber from Timspec in Auckland as this seemed to be the most environmentally certified and reasonably priced. After cutting it to the sizes specified I sanded each bar, calculated 22% of its length, and drilled a horizontal hole there to attach it to the frame. These points are where the node of the main soundwave generally lies, ie the area where it is vibrating the least, making it the best place to attach to the frame without dampening its sound.

Marking out the bars to tune and attach

I also marked the 30% mark of each bar, as I wanted to tune the harmonic overtones of the first 8 bars as well as the main note. This is where it gets complicated. When you hit a marimba bar (and other instruments) there are a number of different notes that sound, as well as the main note that your ear perceives as the dominant tone. By tuning the most prominent of these extra notes (overtones) to match or complement the main tone, rather than being random or out of harmony with it, the overall sound of each bar will be better. This is mainly done for lower pitched bars.

Tuning a bar for the marimba. 
You can see how I tune the bass note and the first harmonic

It's a tricky process to tune the harmonic overtones as you have to cut wood away from different parts of the bar as you go, and altering each one affects the other, but it can be very satisfying when you master it. I did this to the contrabass marimba I made earlier, and students can now play not only the main set of notes (using soft mallets) but the overtones as well, striking near the ends of the bars with hard mallets to produce notes 2 octaves above the fundamentals. 4 octaves from a 2 octave instruments is a bit of a buzz!

 

Oiling the bars to protect them and bring out the tone

Having deliberately left the bars slightly above their desired pitch, I oiled them with Liberon exterior oil before giving them a final light tune to bring them perfectly down to pitch (the oil drops the pitch slightly).

Gluing rubber strips onto the frame

As the rope based method I'd used on the contrabass didn't last very well, I wanted to work out a better way to mount the bars on my new instrument. Another marimba maker suggested rubber strips, but this meant the bars would bounce out of their nail holders, so I came up with my own system, drilling horizontal holes in the bars. 

Some marimbas have their bars attached by a cord that runs through the whole set, but I needed to be able to remove individual bars at times (eg to make the instrument pentatonic), so I experimented by threading a length of 4mm shock cord (bungy cord) through each bar and binding the ends with cable ties so they could be tightened if necessary. By hooking these onto nails inside the frame, the marimba was complete!

Finally, I made mallets by drilling through rubber bungs and attaching these to wooden dowels, which I later stained, and named the notes using vinyl stickers kindly supplied by David Calwell from Wellington Signs.

Here is the completed marimba in action. I've since made two more, a lot faster now I've got a successful prototype - they only took 5 days to make both! As I think these instruments are real assets, I've decided to use the last few days of the project to make another two. 

 
The marimba in action


Murray showing us how it goes!