MUSICIAN AND INSTRUMENT DESIGNER
Everyone who’s into percussion knows: ya gotta get the right mallet if you want a good sound. Many sorts of percussion mallets are available for purchase, but a lot of us like to make our own from easily sourced materials. So it’s helpful to know, what widely available materials are good for making mallet heads for what sorts of instruments? Different applications call for different hardnesses,…
The Undertone Instruments Collection is an ensemble of musical instruments tuned to a subharmonic scale. This article describes the scale and the thinking behind it. The scale consists of selected notes from the subharmonic series, also known as the undertone series, which is the inversion of the more familiar harmonic overtone series. While the harmonic series arises frequently in nature and is…
Let’s talk about metal sheets used as musical sound sources. You can use metal sheets to make musical instruments in either of two ways: 1. go for the sounds of a sheet in itself, excited directly by percussion, wobble-flexing, edge-bowing, superball friction, or other means … or … 2. use a sheet as sound-radiator/resonator for an external source of vibration. I have made musical instruments of…
— A very short commentary Most western musical instruments are designed to produce relatively simple and coherent tone qualities. In orchestral instruments, typical timbres feature a strong fundamental dominating the sound, with an overlay of harmonic overtones emphasizing the lower harmonics more than the higher. This sort of timbre has clear and unambiguous pitch; the ear effortlessly recognizes…
Letting people know, I’ve recently released an album of my own music, played mostly on instruments of my own design and construction – the first such release I’ve done in many years. I hope you’ll give a listen! It’s available for streaming and download; details here . ← HARMONIC DAMPING COMPLEX TIMBRES IN MUSICAL CONTEXT → The post AUDIORIUM — a new album from Bart first appeared on…
This article is a brief description of an easy trick you can use for an interesting and unusual tone quality in string instruments. https://barthopkin.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/01/2-3_harmonic-damper.mp3 The idea is to insert a soft damper, such as a piece of lightweight foam rubber, under the strings at a nodal point for one of the harmonics. If the damper is light enough, then when you pluck…
This article is about the different ways one can think about musical scales and the logic that underlies them. For any given scale you could ask, how were the particular pitches of this scale selected from the continuum? What sort of reasoning underlies the choices? These questions can be asked in analyzing existing scales, and they’re also central for anyone wanting to develop new scales.…
A while back I received an email with a suggestion: Why not create a commercial collection of audio samples featuring prepared piano sounds, using my old upright? The suggestion came from Mike Peaslee, the head of Soundiron , a company that produces and sells sample libraries. For the last few years I’ve been recording sample libraries for Soundiron presenting one-of-a-kind instruments. (You can…
Some time ago I gathered a set of stainless steel drinking water bottles , tuned them by adding suitable amounts of water, and hung them on a frame for playing by percussion. They were the kind of water bottle that has an inner and an outer shell for insulation. These often have a particularly captivating sound, with the water moving within after striking and modulating the tone in an enchanting…
What happens when two or more musical strings are connected to one another? There are many ways that this idea can play out, and in this article we’ll look at some of the possibilities. The musical results can sometimes be quite interesting! You can see a version of this idea in action in this recently posted video . I first explored the idea of conjoined musical string systems long ago, and we…