photos from marimbaland

I've lost my keys...have you seen my keys?

What do you do when you can't find which keys go where? You lay them all down and smack them until they sing the right note, look the right colour and lay the right length.

They are not machine made these keys. They are moulded. They are 'worked' by the caring hands of a man with a hidden knowledge. Or maybe not. Maybe he's just got some planks, a plain and a 9V battery powered tuner that tells him he shaved too much off his D and it just became an E.

Either way it would be a valuable addition to a beautifully crafted instrument....if we could only find it.

A box, with legs and a bunch of keys

Haai, Marimba! This is about as close as we can be before the things start to look like instruments rather than ineffective furntiture. The legs are coming, the keys are ready, the sound is round the corner and it's pretty exciting.

Week 2 - Day Monday One

After a weekend away, it was nice to come back to our little family of marimbas, growing into something.

The resonator boxes are finished and being sanded and varnished. Legs are on their way and the frames for the keys are all ready. So hopefully tomorrow will be all about making legs, then a couple of days of assembly around the keys and they'll be making noise!

Will have to do some research into the physics of what makes different sizes of wood sound different when struck and whether the wood types have any effect.

Oh boy oh boy oh boy!

Day 01

Welcome to the amaAmbush marimba factory. Only it's not here anymore. I arrive at the wrong building to be told by a rather confused woman that "amaAmbush isn't here anymore. They just left. They didn't even tell us where they went to. It's all locked up."

Nevermind, I'll just mosey on down the road to a Francis St that might just be housing some sanders, saws and a few chaps shaping boxes that are one day going to grow up into noisy, awesome, rhythmic dance machines.

A house/factory is a new thing to me. Kitchen has counters with the usual: kettle, stove, drill, circular saw....sure.
Sander's in the lounge, the fireplace in the living room boasts a mantelpiece with all the finer ornaments: bolts, plugs, screws.

So we get to work after a quick wake-me-up coffee and it's all about quality craftsmanship of one of the most low-tech completely misunderstood instruments of this fine continent.

It really seems that the marimba has been relegated to the league of marimba-orchestras, where five marimbas are going at the same time, with maybe a bass drum and a djembe and some singing and dancing in a pulsating rhythmic frenzy that can keep you dancing for days.

But the marimba I'm in search of is the one that stands alone as a singer, a melody-maker, or one that places the most gentle changes where a piano would otherwise be...an instrument that will make South African music....just because it is South African.

And the only place i'm likely to find it is here, with a family of marimba makers that threaten to name their children Marimba and that show absolute joy in the craft of quality instruments.

Michael is my mentor, and I his apprentice. He's going to show me The Way. And it's going to involve a lot of noise, sweat, glue and patience. But it's interesting to see how this ancient art of making marimbas is juxtaposed against powertools, laser cutting, and tuning software that in the end produces a plank of wood that sings when struck. So it's not carving trees into xylaphones, it's piecing together parts from a host of different places, and in some ways resembles an assembly line.

Sanding, varnishing, fitting, scraping off glue and grinding metal bars that are eventually to support the frame of keys are all completed calmly and patiently and it feels like a real organic process.