{"id":18,"date":"2015-10-19T10:59:25","date_gmt":"2015-10-19T16:59:25","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/supermediocre.org\/?p=18"},"modified":"2016-07-19T06:01:45","modified_gmt":"2016-07-19T12:01:45","slug":"building-a-xylophone","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/supermediocre.org\/index.php\/2015\/10\/19\/building-a-xylophone\/","title":{"rendered":"Building a xylophone in 613 easy steps"},"content":{"rendered":"

Our xylo-adventure\u00a0started when\u00a0Jack asked for a xylophone for Christmas. He wasn’t asking for a Fisher Price, but rather a full-on concert grade instrument.<\/p>\n

\"Not<\/a>
Not the xylophone Jack wanted for Christmas<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Jack plays piano and percussion in his school bands and wanted an instrument to practice at home. My knee-jerk response was to say “sure, dude!” \u00a0When I did my research, however, I almost had a heart attack- I was not going to pay $2000-$4000 for a series of wooden blocks! So I, an electrical engineer and\u00a0a weekend woodworker, set out to build one. “How hard could it possibly be to build a one?” I asked myself. (Answer: pretty damn hard!)<\/p>\n

So last December, I jumped in with both feet. Like most people, I assumed that Google would do the majority of the work for me. Over \u00a0Christmas break, I begin scouring the web. My laptop kept me warm for countless winter evenings while I searched for a canned xylophone recipe. It quickly became apparent that if anyone like me had built a high-end xylophone, they had not published their efforts on the web. I found lots of “toy” efforts built from\u00a0PVC pipe and the likes, but got exactly zero hits on building a concert xylophone. Along the way, I did find one amazing site called La Favre<\/a> that had tons of info about building a marimba (basically a giant xylophone). The La Favre site was pivotal in that it was the first source\u00a0that I found that addressed tuning of the bars.\u00a0It doesn’t take more than high school physics to know that the longer the bar, the lower the pitch; I, therefore, assumed that tuning just meant cutting the bars to the correct length. Au contraire – the tuning of idiophone bars (the fancy, scientific name for musical instruments that you whack\u00a0with a stick) is performed by shaping the underside of the bars in just the right way.<\/p>\n

\"One<\/a>
One of my “shaped” xylophone bars.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Getting shape right is really the secret sauce to building an instrument that sounds great. Stick with me and you’ll hear a lot more about this!<\/p>\n

A Teaser…<\/h2>\n

As a teaser, below is a one-page summary of the xylophone that Jack and I built. Read\u00a0the subsequent posts if you want to learn more about our journey.<\/p>\n

\"The<\/a>
The whole project distilled into a single page<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Here is what it sounds like. These are just a couple of clips of Jack noodling around.<\/p>\n\nhttps:\/\/supermediocre.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/10\/noodle_05.wav<\/a><\/audio>\nhttps:\/\/supermediocre.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/10\/noodle_03.wav<\/a><\/audio>\n

Here is a photo of the completed\u00a0instrument.<\/p>\n

\"The<\/a>
The final product!<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

May 21, 2016 update: Here is a sound file of Jack playing a song he learned. The recording is so-so, but hey, I’m not a recording engineer!<\/p>\nhttps:\/\/supermediocre.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/10\/xylo_demo.mp3<\/a><\/audio>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Our xylo-adventure\u00a0started when\u00a0Jack asked for a xylophone for Christmas. He wasn’t asking for a Fisher Price, but rather a full-on concert grade instrument. Jack plays piano and percussion in his school bands and wanted an instrument to practice at home. My knee-jerk response was to say “sure, dude!” \u00a0When I did my research, however, I … Continue reading Building a xylophone in 613 easy steps<\/span> →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":555,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[12,8,4,9,3],"class_list":["post-18","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-xylophone","tag-building","tag-honduras","tag-projects","tag-rosewood","tag-xylophone"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/supermediocre.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/supermediocre.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/supermediocre.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/supermediocre.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/supermediocre.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=18"}],"version-history":[{"count":32,"href":"https:\/\/supermediocre.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":972,"href":"https:\/\/supermediocre.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18\/revisions\/972"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/supermediocre.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/555"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/supermediocre.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=18"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/supermediocre.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=18"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/supermediocre.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=18"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}