Dear Mr Took

Some time ago there was a series on afternoon TV called low-tech about making furniture from wooden pallets ("just look around your local market for broken ones but don't forget to ask someone before you take any") and the cardboard tubes that carpets come rolled on. Why oh why can't the BBC do a programme like that about Kingston Stone, whose animated discourse on converting old speaker chassis and sewage pipes into drums would be a pleasure to young and old?

Kingston Stone has been the drums, acoustic, electric and home-made, and percussion, domestic and exotic on all C cat Trance releases to date, a mini-LP, two singles 'Dreams of Leaving' and 'She Steels Cars' and an LP 'Khamu'. On the current single, 'Shake the Mind', he plays predominantly, a barrel and some sewer pipe. This is not to suggest that he is of the 'if-it-is-inanimate-it-is-percussion, if-it-is-rubbish-it-is-better' school of art music. The barrel is after all fitted with Gibson machine heads. It comprises a plank of wood attached lengthways down a barrel with three bass guitar strings, anchored at one end, riding over a brass guitar bridge to a piece of wood acting as a nut, or second bridge, before the machines.

Acoustically, the barrel acts as a resonator, but there is also a guitar pick-up tied to the plank, connected to tone and volume controls and a jack socket at one end of the barrel. When the strings are plucked they sound like an Ethiopian stringed instrument, a bagana or hare of David. On 'Shake the Mind' they are hammered with drum sticks. The sound resembles a berimbau, a musical bow (as in bow and arrow) associated with latin american music but african in origin which is played by striking the bow with a stick, very simple but in the hands of someone like Nana Vasconcelos, Pat Metheny's percussionist, a very effective and distinctive rhythmic/percussive string/drone with harmonics.

The sewer pipe, it's that eight inch plastic pipe you see lying around at road works, is cut into varying lengths and used as a conventional single headed drum. With eight inch drums hoops and tom-tom fittings they are just like octobans but bigger and louder with a distinctive 'bark' to the sound. On 'Shake the Mind' they are part of a composite snare sound. To use the rims on these pipe drums, he had to dismantle two other drums made with eight ex-loudspeaker chassis mounted back to back with a head over the top one and long bolts tightening on to the underneath one. Effective rototoms without the roto.

The idea of making your own percussion, or any other instruments, seems comical to some people and if it does to you then you are limiting your own horizons. Over the thousands of man hours (person hours) that has gone into making music and musical instruments the percussive or rhythmic elements have almost always been the first ground explored and instruments like any other tools have been made out of whatever is available; vegetable gourds, sticks, seeds, logs, stones, etc, by necessity using materials that are not intended to be musical (in that the intention of a seed, is to be a plant, not part of a rattle). These instruments have been refined, improved and standardised until now there are stylised versions manufactured and marketed as standard items of percussion. A percussionist will buy an LP cabassa, easily identifiable with nearly every cabassa he has ever heard on a record, instead of applying original principles and making one to suit his needs which only sounds like his cabassa. This only makes him a better consumer, not a better percussionist. If you think the manufactured article sounds better and you can afford it, then fair enough, but percussion is expensive. L.P. is the quality make, their cabassa is around £25 and the berimbau is around £40. These prices are typical of their range so you pay a lot for just one sound. The purist approach has its drawbacks though, I had difficulty getting the boy in the butcher's to understand that I wanted a large hollow bone to scrape. He looked as if he wanted to run away, or wanted me to.

The value of any instrument, in musical not financial terms, is related as much to the way it is used as to the source of its construction. Whether you are likely to attempt to make low-tech instruments to suit a specific need or make an instrument and then find a use for it, there are it seems, several books on the subject or construction if you can stomach the patronizing air of books intended as educational aids and sift out the useful ideas. I found four in the public library; Making Folk Instruments out of Wood, Dennis Waring, pub. Sterling N.Y. This was about the best and had a good section on fitting vellum drum skins. Make Your Own Musical Instruments, Stuart Dalby, pub. B.T. Batsford; Musical Instruments Made to be Played, Ronald Roberts, pub. Dryad and Musical Instruments you can make, Hugh Garnett, pub. Pitman. These three are all a bit 'Blue Peter' but there is something of worth in all of them. They will not show you how to make a three string electric bass hammered dulcimer out of a barrel though, so you would be well advised in my biased opinion to listen to Kingston Stone play one on 'Shake the Mind'.