Cover Song Video Project

I finally got a microphone to record with. I'm an avid listener of Icelandic composer Olafur Arnalds. His music mostly features piano, strings, and sometimes electronics and is often very minimalist. I got a hold of some of his sheet music for free on his website! I discovered that much of his music sounds really fantastic played on vibraphone. The simplicity and tempos of his music makes a perfect transcription to vibraphone. I decided to record every single part to his piece called Near Light on my vibraphone. I also bought a couple of string bass bows on eBay to play the string parts. This is pretty much my first attempt at music recording and video editing. I learned a ton of things about both topics just from getting to try things out on my own. I'm pretty happy with the result. After 10 months of completing the vibraphone and moving it 900 miles, it's still sounding and functioning great. Feel free to leave a comment on the YouTube page.

Sound Test Video

I made a simple video to show you how it sounds with and without dampening.

The Finished Product

I officially finished building the vibraphone on February 1, 2016. Nine months since I started, or at least since I picked it back up in May 2015. I had no idea what I was getting into when I started. I wish I logged all the hours I put into this, but there's too many to even begin to make a guess. It's a very rewarding feeling to just look back on something you made yourself. By no means is it perfect because there were many mistakes along the way, but I feel very satisfied with it nonetheless. I'll be uploading videos later to show how everything sounds.

After completion, the grand total cost for the vibraphone is $949.10, which includes the cost of tools I had to buy. If you subtract the cost of tools, the cost of materials to build the vibraphone is $647.99. This is pretty amazing because a brand new, manufactured vibraphone (Adams, Yamaha) will cost anywhere from $3,500 - $8,000. If you're interested, I uploaded a spreadsheet showing the cost of each item and all the subtotals.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B-4XWjs0sBQiWk4wT0dCS284WFU/view?usp=sharing

I would like to thank Jim McCarthy who runs the website www.makeamarimba.com. There you can purchase very detailed instruction manuals on how to build your own marimba, vibraphone, or glockenspiel. I based my design partly on his plans and partly on my own. But they were a HUGE help to have. I would also like to thank my parents for allowing me to take up half the garage at their house even after I moved out. Also for all the tools my dad had on hand that I didn't have to buy.

Thanks for reading my blog. If you have any questions or comments please leave a comment or email me at conn210@gmail.com

But anyways, here's some pictures. (I have no training in photography whatsoever.)

(click for higher resolution)

Dampener Bar Alterations

To my luck, the changes that needed to be made to the dampener bar were very easy. I knew that the bar was sitting too high against the keys. All I had to do was unscrew the square tubes from the A-frame strut that were jointed to the dampener bar. Then I just screwed them back in a little lower than they were before. This instantly fixed the problem.

I also added 2 more layers of felt to the dampener bar to add more dampening. Zip ties did the trick pretty well. And that's all that needed to be done. The dampener doesn't dampen the keys completely perfectly, but it's good enough for me. It just sounds like the keys are at a half pedal resonance when the pedal is up, which sounds pretty good anyway. Now the whole vibraphone is completely finished! More pictures will be coming in the next post.

The Dampener

I was hoping for this to be the final step in the construction. After finishing building and assembling the dampener bar, it proved to not work as I intended. More details will come on that later. So I have to go back and figure out some alterations to make to the way the dampener moves in order to get it working properly. So yeah, still not done. But in the meantime here is the post on building the dampener version 1.

Right off the bat I had do a pretty drastic modification to my frame. I had to cut the A-frame completely in half right down the center. This had to be done in order to drill parts into the sides of the struts on the A-frame. If they're connected there physically isn't enough room to fit a drill in there to drill guide holes for screws. It all worked out because the A-frame already had bolt hole locations where it attaches to the lower part of the frame, so the bolt holes still line up, there's just a little slit at each end of the board.

The first item I had to drill into the struts were these 2 little blocks that sit directly over the center of the pedal. These blocks will support the spring mechanism for the dampener and pedal. 

This is the spring I ended up buying on Amazon. 

I got lazy with the pictures for the rest of this. I just took pictures of all the parts after I finished it. The next part is the actual dampener bar, but the structural portion without any padding on yet. It's made from a 3/4" square aluminum tube. The wood blocks at the ends are what connect the ends of the bar to the A-frame to give it support. These are also hinged where they connect with the A-frame to allow the bar to rotate downward. In the middle is the spring mechanism. 

Here's a close up of the spring mechanism and how it's assembled. It works using an eyebolt holding the spring in place with a metal plate. The pedal will be connected to the hook of the eyebolt. The eyebolt is bolted into the square tube. When you push the pedal down, it pulls the whole bar down on the spring and compresses it. The rubber washer is there to eliminate noise from metal hitting against metal. adjusting the wingnut will allow you to raise or lower the resting position (pedal up) of the dampener. 

Here are some pictures of the dampener installed in the frame.

Next I connected the pedal to the spring mechanism with leftover square aluminum tube. It's hinged at the bottom where it connects to the actual pedal. At the top is a hook and eye turnbuckle which will allow you to raise and lower the resting position of the pedal to your preference or if you adjust the height of the whole instrument. 

At the top of the dampener square tube I riveted a long piece of flat aluminum bar. This is what the padding will be attached to. 

For the padding I bought carpet padding and black felt. The carpet padding is glued to the flat aluminum bar with epoxy. I then wrapped the felt completely over the flat bar and carpet padding and glued it to the undersides of the flat bar with epoxy. 

Technically the whole vibraphone should be done at this point, but when I put the keys back on, the weight of the keys caused the bar to sit too far forward and therefore not allow the accidental keys to be dampened enough. Also the whole bar sits too high and doesn't never fully leaves contact with the keys when the pedal is pressed. On the brighter side, with the keys off, the pedal behaves properly and the padding actually dampens the keys properly (at the least the keys it has full contact with). I have to go back and make adjustments to the default position of the dampener bar. Hopefully that isn't too challenging. 

The Pedal

At this point, the vibraphone is about 98% complete. All that's left to make is the pedal and the dampening system. If you didn't know, all vibraphones, in their default state, are dampened. This is done by a padded bar that pushes up on the keys in the middle of the frame where the natural keys and sharp/flat keys come together. The dampener is attached to a spring system that lowers it so that it's no longer in contact with the keys, letting them naturally ring when struck. This whole dampener and spring system is controlled by a pedal at the bottom of the frame that you push with your foot.

To make this pedal, I just happened to have a scrap piece of wood that was wide enough. I rounded off the corners on the end closest to your feet.

I couldn't just directly attach this pedal to the support beam running along the bottom of the frame because that beam sits a little too high and you would have to pick your foot up off the ground to push it. I had to build an extension to lower the resting position of the pedal. It's just small square blocks screwed into each other with another support beam connecting them at the bottom where the pedal will be attached. The pedal was attached using 3 door hinges.

Here is the whole instrument with the pedal installed.