Editor’s note: This is a guest post by my partner, Jenni.
I grew up playing the violin and the recorder, both in the classical style, as was appropriate for a middle-class kid in small-town England. I enjoyed the learning, I enjoyed collecting the grades, but I didn’t really ‘get’ classical music.1 To me, classical music was what was necessary for exams and to play ‘properly’ – the times I enjoyed myself the most as a young musician was in kiddie orchestras, goofing off with my friends whilst playing John Williams’s film themes.
So it was this social inclination to music that allowed me to latch onto folk music, when playing for ceilidhs2 became the easiest way to keep in practice when I moved to university in Bristol. I’ve been active in the folk scene here ever since, meeting lots of fun people who play fun instruments, and becoming quite a good fiddle player (if I may say so myself!). [Ed: Jenni is quite a good fiddle player.]
Something that I really love seeing in the folk scene, is the way folks will dabble in lots of different styles and lots of different instruments. The whole thing about folk music is that, despite being hard to master, it’s easy to try out – an amateur orchestra might require you to have Grade 5 on your instrument (for me, this was seven or eight years of kiddie lessons, others do it faster), but to join a folk session in a pub, you just need to know a handful of notes on your instrument and a vague sense of where the beat is. This low barrier of entry means it’s a lot less intimidating to learn a second instrument to a level where you can have fun, so many people do. And a third, a fourth… it goes on.
Making and repairing
Which leads me to the instruments themselves. Similar to the difference in skill-barrier-of-entry, it can be really hard to make classical music sound acceptable if you have the cheapest instrument you could find at the time. Whereas, for folk, you need… an instrument (being in tune is not essential!). [Ed: Being in tune really helps, though.] Folks will comb eBay, skip-dive, take to their garages, etc., to find something resembling an instrument and make it playable. Armed with my father and his garage in the summer, or a handful of hand-tools in my flat, I’ve had a go at just that.
Here’s a few projects I’ve done myself. Hopefully they’re vaguely informative for if you want to do similarly:
Pandemic madness: fipples3 on everything
Having had a near-spiritual experience being awoken by one, one morning in Edinburgh, I had a curiosity about the low whistle.4 Being of small hands and small lungs, I couldn’t justify the hundred-odd quid to buy one outright only to find it physically impossible to play. Enter Guido Gonzato’s Low-Tech Whistle. My dad and I followed his thorough instructions to make whistles of various sizes using PVC pipes and household tools. This did include an exercise in absurdity where we installed a fipple on a 5ft piece of drainpipe just to see what would happen (contrabass B flat, I had to stand on a stool to blow it). Really accessible instrument-making project, really fun to make, whistles are not hard to play and are well-received in the pub.
Sticky concertina
I came across an eBay listing for a new English concertina,5 being sold for a third of its retail price due to manufacturing defects making it unplayable. Bought it, carefully took it apart. Turns out the glue in the key mechanism had spread everywhere and totally gummed it up. Scraped out the glue, freed the mechanisms, put it back together, and made noise. It’s not perfect, there’s still some misbehaving keys and wonky-sounding reeds, but it’ll do.
Twenty-quid clarinet
This clarinet was looking very sad in a charity-shop window. I don’t play reedy wind instruments, but it looked like it had all its metalwork, and a thorough clean at least would make it a lot happier. I’ve made an attempt at getting the tarnish off the keys (baking soda), wiped down the main body (damp cloth), and ordered materials to replace the cork joint on the mouthpiece. It seems to be approximately airtight now, but I’ll keep playing around with it and making horrific shrieks6 for a bit whilst I decide whether to attempt re-aligning one of the key mechanisms.
Sentimental interlude: I owe a lot of this approach to my father. Very much a man of the garage, he’s been doing wood- and metal-working as a hobby since forever. He’s built an electric bass (for my brother), an electric violin (for me), a handful of whistles, and helped me unstick that concertina.
A musical manifesto
And now the actual manifesto part!
Low barriers of entry to music are a good thing. Humans love making noise, and making it with other people. If you want to just have fun, skip the luthier, skip the instrument shop. Do it yourself. Take it apart. And if you find more fun making or repairing instruments, do it for other people too. So many instruments can become playable with just a couple of spare parts or a bit of sandpaper!
Ed: It has been a pleasure to listen to Jenni play the repaired English concertina and, well, tolerable to hear her make clarinet shrieks at home. I would like to thank her for this lovely manifesto and for the honour of publishing it on my blog, copious notes and all.7
In this article, I mean music in the Western classical tradition.
A ceilidh (cay-lee) is a social dance. An MC (the ‘caller’) teaches some simple dances, which are danced to live folk music.
Fipple is the noise-making mechanism found in whistles and recorders. It’s a little window with a slanted surface beneath it which makes the air make noise.
Also known as Irish whistle. They come in various sizes, the common small one also called a penny whistle. Six holes and a mouthpiece, played similar to a recorder. Big ones (Low D) sound sexy.
Not to be confused with the Anglo concertina (who named these things??), which makes different noises when you push and pull with the same button pressed. Anglos are little weird compressed melodeons, English are little weird compressed pianos, if a piano was folded in half and then into triangles. Melodeons themselves are a breed of small accordion. Their buttons are laid out very logically according to one sequence of notes, and completely nonsensical to all other patterns ever displayed in Western music.
Ed: Readers offended by the quantity of notes should read more Terry Pratchett.