A French composer ordered a
tingklik jegog, low-register
tingklik in a major scale with lowered seventh.
It took three day-trips, but they successfully harvested large bamboo appropriate for export to temperate climes. I stayed home, but there were tales of our distant cousin falling down the steep hill, an albino snake, and having to find ever more skilled bamboo-climbers to hack this stuff down from the thick and oblique stand.
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| Harvested bamboo with sandals for scale |
After a day of drying Gedung chopped them into more workable lengths and set them in the hot Sulawesian sun to dry.
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| Kosil, left, gets some idle suling making done while the other Balinese chat. |
I scrubbed the dry mud and mold with soap and stood them up to dry. Another day passed before Kosil tried his hand at drafting the keys.
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| Low register keys are very quiet without a matching resonator! |
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| The fundamental is determined by the ratio of length to thickness |
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| The first octave |
Those are great lengths of PVC pipe for resonators. We prefer bamboo for aesthetic and economic reasons, but the type used for resonators invariably suffers in temperate climates. There are also great lengths of wood for the frame.
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| Planing wood for the frame |
Gedung examines hand-chiseled legs. I exclaimed that's way too long and Terip batted me away humorously. Eventually he came over and marked the long piece to be cut down.
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| That's way too long! |
Stay tuned for a video and sound sample of the finished instrument!
i'm pretty jealous, i live in the southern united states and i dont think we can grow bamboo of that diameter..
ReplyDeleteHa! but it is worth a try. Are you a bamboo aficionado? Most of my experience has been hacking runners out of my mother's garden after it started taking over the neighbor's pine trees. Now we know about corralling.
ReplyDeleteI have a dream of growing the smaller, instrument quality stuff in the States. Perhaps it wouldn't survive the New England winter but I do have farm coop connections in the South... do you have cane around there?