Little bit of an update.

There hasn't been much activity on my blog this week as I'm not at home. It's does not mean I have been sitting around watching daytime tv all day twiddling my thumbs. I have been reading through this instruction manual john gave to me, which has roughly about 100pgs and I am trying to condense that into a more user friendly teaching handbook for school. Its a rather slow and laborious process but I should have some images up soon of the spreads.

As far as the instrument building goes I have been trying to source more instruments from around the country so that I have enough to go into school and create roughly about 10 instruments with the children. I have discussed in college about building my own instrument that shows off all the various parts of each instrument as a showpiece for the final exhibit. Since it is going to be a showpiece I have discussed finishing off the instrument to a much higher level than that would be achieved in school. Therefore I have been pricing silver plating and lacquering for a proper professional finish. So far the price has varied from £300-£1500, I had thought about trying to silver plate and lacquer myself but I do not have the equipment needed to do such a thing so I may have to fork out the money in the long run.

Downgrade your phone.

Fran found this and said it reminded her of my work. This guy makes stickers for the backs of iphones to make them look like old mobiles. He wanted to add design to the blank space on the back of today's iphones and in doing so he thought these stickers might even deter thieves. Here is the link to the article on creative review.

Few more photos

Just uploaded a few photos of the 3 main instruments I plan to build with pupils in school. I've had quite a lot of discussion with a number of people and I feel it is best to keep the instruments as simple as possible so that they are easy to build and play. Removing the valves and turning them into simple bugles is the simplest way to do it.






I have a few close up shots of the actually joints that have been soldered etc so you can make out the fine detail on each instrument.

The French Horn:





The trumpet:







The tuba:





It is ridiculously hard to solder the parts together subtly without big lumps solder collecting at the bottom of the joints but I think I can safely say my soldering has improved since I began. Hear are a few photos of the first french horn I soldered a few weeks ago. I had difficulty melting the solder at the right heat and it so it melted in big clumps thus really messy joints but after a talk with John he showed me how to fix this problem.





Remember the manual I mentioned John had put together over the years? Well here are a few photos of it. There is a lot of useful information in this book it just needs to be broken down and designed into something more efficient and eye catching.





A little something I can work on while I'm in London, I am also starting to consider promotion ideas to get children to sign up to this class in the first place. Posters around the school are going to be a heavy influence in capturing the pupils attention and also the school website is heavily used by the pupils and their parents so I need to consider some graphics for the web.

Building a tuba bugle and testing the horn and trumpet

Good days work in the shed...

I had a very productive morning. Traveled up to John's workshop this morning with my father and we rummaged through his graveyard of old instruments. I decided to take my trumpet creation up to John to see if we could finish the piece off to a higher standard. I'm actually quite impressed at how well the polisher finishes off the brass after all the welding and sawing etc. Finally got my SLR back from London so I can actually take some decent shots. Here are a few from today's work:






Some shots of finishing the trumpet off with stronger braces and a bit of polish.








The destruction and reconstruction of the french horn:


The french horn before demolition


Blowtorching the joints.


Removing the valve section


The horn without the valve section.


Figuring out a way to join the bell and mouthpipe together.


Soldering more piping to the mouthpiece.


The final bugle style french horn soldered together.




Trying to iron out a few kinks.

I'm going to finish off cleaning up and polishing the french horn now so that it is more presentable. I'm also thinking of doing similar bugle style to one of the tubas I picked up. I will try and film these to show the process of the work and when someone else is around who can actually blow the instruments I'll get footage of it.

Some more building an research

Having realized that there was no method to my destruction i had a bit of a rethink about how to construct these instruments. The tuba with the slide and trumpet looks intriguing but it actually sounds awful and is not exactly a useful teaching tool. With this in mind I began to take apart the french horn and reassemble it without the valves and stretched out.









The new design of the horn creates one basic note but it works and sounds much better than the tuba did. Few problems have arisen from building this specific horn, I destroyed the original mouthpipe so it is missing about a foot of tubing and although played with a trumpet mouthpiece it could have sounded a lot better with the original mouthpipe and french horn mouthpiece. I did a little more reconstructing to make the horn a little more user friendly as in its currents state at bout 2m's long isn't exactly compact.




All the components have been reshuffled and welded to make the overall instrument smaller. The sound of the horn has not changed because all the same parts have been used. I discovered that as long as the length of tubing is kept the same you can bend and twist the pipe as much as you like as it will not effect the sound.

Moving on from this I decided to have a look at the trumpet. The one I obtained had damaged valves so I decided to remove them to make a basic bugle.



I found from this that there was a crack on part of the pipe that was drastically affecting the pitch, so having covered that and placed the correct trumpet mouthpiece managed to produce a rather effective sound.




The next will be creating more simple bugles out of the tuba and trombone and a possibly a french horn if I can obtain another one. From a teaching point of view and ease of use. Creating simple instruments like a bugle is probably the best option with a class of students. It quick and rather easy to assemble and simple to play.

Having discussed this with my father, he was quite excited as he thought the idea of constructing bugles would be perfect for learning the basic notes for brass. Keeping them compact and simple allows the children to take them home a practice as well.

I myself wondered while he couldn't just get kids to learn on standard bugles and he said that they all sound the same and for a child to build one them self, they could not resist trying to make a sound from it. Building bugles from different types of brass instruments will also create different sounds which in the end could help make an interesting piece of music.

A slightly different trumpet...

Just a little trumpet I made from pulling apart a french horn and attaching the valves to a trumpet bell.

Trip to a workshop in ballymoney

Met up with John today, my instrument technician and we had a rummage through his workshop for old instruments. Pretty hard considering his workshop looks like this:






Although I did pick up 3 tubas and a couple of leftover pieces of trombones and trumpets. John is not allowed to dump any musical instruments as someone else is suppose to take care of it but never actually comes round to do the job so there is plenty of battered instruments stockpiled in his stores.

I got round to constructing my first instrument today and learning how to weld and repair joints. This is the first attempt, a mix between a tuba, slide of a trombone and an extra trumpet bell.












Amazingly it does actually make a sound through both bells, but the slide is ridiculously hard to use as the tuba is already so awkward to hold. Ive taken a few instruments home with me today to have a play around and see how much more destruction i can create.

Apologies for the poor photos, my friend who is a practicing photographer was supposed to come up and help me take some decent shots but had to drop out at the last min due to some family problems. However we have rearranged to go up to John in the next few weeks to take some more photos.

John gave me a wonderful little handbook on how to repair brass that he has put together over the years he has been fixing instruments. I had already mentioned producing a handbook to help pupils when it comes round to building instruments in the class and this appears to a be a great source of information.