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..