Everything is (finally!) built, and any four musicians can step up and jam.

And, of course, everything will change. With all the instruments in place, I want to start fine tuning the structural issues:

• Cut a sound port in the table top to allow the bass and kick-drum tones to rise up through the high-end racket likely to be caused by the other three instruments once three musicians are wailing on them.
• Seek out a better primary drum, or maybe add a pair of little wooden bongos to the rack. The high tom-tom is fun, but I don’t think it’s the right voice to carry the drum section.
• Maybe set up the xylophone at a slight angle so the musician can stand to face the others more upright. I’d like to add resonators to give it the same rich voice as our big xylophone at home, but that might get needlessly complicated)
• Add a weatherproof finish. I’m waffling between decoratively-hammered galvanized tin sheeting, and simply covering the tabletop with a mosaic of pennies embedded in resin.

And then I’d love to find a home for the Jam Table out in Seattle – even temporary or rotating among different locations – where musicians will gather to play. Inquiries welcome!

I love buskers. Anybody playing an instrument on the street or the subway platform always gets a buck or two from me straight into their hat.

We need more random, live, human-generated music – not more of the overproduced, auto-tuned, beat-synched megaproductions ruling the AOR airwaves  (“quantized, pitch-corrected, overly-inspected,” as Henry Rollins once riffed). There’s more than enough of that.

Let’s have more of the wild, hairy, random stuff that happens when musicians experiment together. Gut-bucket, goofy, syncopated noise. Bring that beat back.

That’s why I’ve been building the Jam Table.

And that’s why the percussion array – including the kick drum – is built from a bunch of random things you can bang on.

I built a little handheld percussion array last winter out of a washboard. I screwed some metal hardware to it – a couple of old sink traps, a piece of tin scrap, and three of the tinier gongs left over from XyloVan. But it looked junky, pretty poor and wasn’t going to fit well with the shape of the other instruments.

So I tore it down to the components. I can’t afford a whole set of drum stands and all the nifty adjustable mounting brackets to play with, so I built my own frame out of reclaimed 1-inch copper plumbing pipe and a set of Maker Pipe connectors.

Once set up at a nice 45-degree angle, it can hold 6 or 8 instruments around a central gap where a drum can be mounted. I opted for a little high tomtom rather than a snare, because I don’t want the average drummer’s tendency to lean heavily on the snare to overpower the other acoustic instruments. As it is, there’ll be a heavy kick-drum under the table keeping time.

I can’t wait to have musicians try this all out, bang on all the things, and poke holes in the design and construction, as I do with anything I build for the playa.

All that feedback – anything from people breaking things to critiquing the angles or materials to utterly dumping on the whole idea will help me move this crazy prototype towards its next, more-robust and fulfilling incarnation..

One must marvel at the gorgeous form and function of a double-bass viol’s body;

Those sexy curves and f-shaped holes, rendered in fine varnished wood, are explicitly designed to sing sweetly when the strings are bowed or plucked.

But I’m just a brutish carpenter, so instead I made a box. The Jam Table’s architectural requirements for the bass are just plain weird:

1. Must sound good, and fully resonate bass frequencies made by the musician
2. Must fit between the floor and the underside of the table.
3. Must fit outside of the diameter of the table base, allowing room for the strings to move
4. Must be REMOVABLE so that the whole Jam Table can be broken down into components to be moved from my shop to its destination
5. Must not look like complete crap

I used 1/2-inch birch plywood for the frame – glued and screwed –  and then 1/8-inch plywood sheets for the front and rear resonant surfaces.

I slanted the front to be thicker at the bottom (to get as much resonant volume as possible) and thinner at the top (to clear the stainless steel tips of the table base where it flares outward).

The other goal was to have it align well with the angle of the neck and strings – which was going to be total guesswork until  I could make a way to align it all.

The next trick was to make it removable: I attached rails of thick 1.5-inch plywood to the underside of the table, and fins to the top of the sound box, allowing it to be slid into the rails and held flush with the table’s underside.

Finally – and this wound up being a little silly – I had to build an access hatch into the back of the box so that I can reach the bolts that attach the neck to the table top. I’m hoping that the gaps and non-air-tightness of the rear of the instrument doesn’t bleed off its resonance.

With all of this nonsense in place, I can now slide the box in or out to change the action on the strings.

Which turns out to be a good thing; Installing the strings was finicky, and messy.

I made an adjustable end-pin (the metal dingus sticking out of the bottom of a double bass that lets it stand on the floor) out of a carriage bolt fixed with T-nuts into the bottom of the box.

Then I fashioned a tailpiece out of acacia to anchor the strings, and lashed it to the endpin with paracord (slipknots make it adjustable) and I started the finicky business of installing the strings.

This is not nearly as straightforward as stringing a guitar: The bridge is meant to float on the top of a double-bass so that you can be positioned at the right spot (43.5 inches or so from the nut). Once you start tightening the strings, they drag the bridge off plumb, and you have to readjust it (I tapped it back into line with a hammer).  

The tension on the strings is hellacious; As the E comes into line, it pulls the other strings out of tune. Fix the D, and the E and A go flat. Fix them, and now the D and G go flat.

At the same time, the string tension starts pulling the peghead forward, slightly bowing the neck and changing the action; Before, the strings were nice and low – now there’s a 1-inch gap between them and the 12th-fret position.

I eventually pulled it all back into line, got the thing tuned, and it sounds proper. I just have to scooch the box forward a hair to lower the action.

Stay tuned!