Adrian Bertram

Here it is. Completed.

After inital testing i discovered that the springs needed to be much, much closer to a pickup and so i had to relocate the central pickup. By using the central pickup i still have the option of including the springs in both the 2 and 4 positions on the 5 way selector, which is nice.

So now i have to learn to play the thing. It seems very good at generating extreme noise (surprise, surprise) but is also capable of some really tasty slide styles where the amount of metal things involved is lending a resonator-ish quality to the sound.

There has also been significant progress with the other instrument as well.

This is a real protoprototype, it’s currently an ergonomic disgrace and made me feel quite light headed after playing only a few notes. It is exactly what it seems: a clarinet missing a bunch of keys with a few metres of extra tubing inserted along the way. It still sounds like a clarinet, just a very, very low one. As in lower than a contrabass. As in you can almost count the wave form oscillations. Of course the extension of the overall body without a proportional redistribution of the keys means it only really has quartertones (or closer) at each keyed section with overblowing only really working on the lower segment. When amplified it sounds somewhat terrifying.