Sometimes you find handmade instruments in unlikely places

This past January I was out in Los Angeles for the winter NAMM show. NAMM is the National Association of Music Merchants, and it is the biggest music-industry trade show in the United States. I wrote an earlier post about one of the few innovative things I found there (check it out here), but this article isn't about the NAMM show and the room after room of shiny, factory-made instruments there.

This tale takes us to the other side of the city, to a dingy little recording studio in North Hollywood, where we went the day after the NAMM show to record an album. Shane Speal and Horace Panter (bassist from the legendary Ska band The Specials) had hatched the idea months before, and the whole project went from crazy idea to reality mostly during one crazy Facebook chat session. The album was to be a reworking of some of R. L. Burnside's songs, with Shane on cigar box guitar and vocals, Horace on bass, Ronn Benway on washboard and a hastily procured drummer. An engineer we had met the day before was manning the board.

So we found ourselves tramping into the studio one bright and smoggy California morning, and the guys started setting up. The studio reeked of pot smoke and history. Everything in it was just a little bit sticky. But it was the perfect setting for this sort of project.

Since I was there in more of a producer role, I had some time to look around. The place was full of old recording equipment, amps, keyboards, beat-up guitars and other relics. Some of them had been used by some fairly famous musicians on various projects.

But this is an article about homemade instruments, and that is what really caught my eye. Out of all of the neat stuff in that place, what I noticed was something special, sitting forgotten on top of an upright piano. Check out the photo of it above. What we have here is a handmade bass kalimba of sorts, with an upside down sink basin as the resonating body, The tines were about 3/4" or so wide (not sure what they used for those, possibly packing crate strapping), with a jerry-rigged mechanism for holding them in place under tension.

As you can see, the thing had seen a hard life. It was terribly out of tune, the tines buzzed and rattled, and some of them were bent out of position... but to me, it told an amazing story. It told a story of an enterprising musician on a quest to get just the right sound, the perfect sound, the only sound would work to bring to life a vision they had in their head. Nobody in the studio knew where the thing had come from or who had made it, but there it sat, a relic of some musician's drive to make music out of items never meant to have a voice.

People all over the world are still motivated by this desire to make music out of crazy stuff. Some, like the videos of the people in Africa we see with oil can guitars and homemade basses, do so out of necessity. Others, like many of us here in the United States, do so as a choice. But the impetus is the same, and the music made with these things, and the joy it brings both to the maker and the listeners, is real. 

So keep your eyes open out there - handmade music is everywhere, if you take the time to look for it. You never know where you might find something to inspire you.