Rattlebrained

– In January I received an unexpected message titled “Thumb Thumper” :

I made a thumb thumper out of a scrap of UHMW—ultra high molecular weight material. It is a very dense piece teflon plastic.
I’m not well enough versed in plastics to say much more than that, but it delivers one hell of a whack to my washboard. I hit upon the idea because I was upset about the sound of a thimble striking the cowbell. It was a “clink” not a “dong”.

I bough a pair of mallets and experimented with those. They have a lovely fat sound, but…

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It seems that when I remade the Jazz Up Your Washboard page, I removed the info on thimbles in an attempt at better organization, and then promptly forgot to do something with it. Sorry about that! Better late than never… :P

Best keep them on your fingers but how?

Some folks don’t seem to have a problem keeping the thimbles on their fingers, while other do. I suppose it has to do with finger shape and size as well as

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4 or so years ago I stumbled on a video of someone blowing into a Aztec or Maya “Death” Whistle and thought: “Wow, that’s pretty cool, would be fun to have one”… So I searched the web, found a few websites on Aztec whistles and archeology, but didn’t see any you could buy. I remember telling a friend who goes occasionally to Mexico about them and to pick one up if ever… Time went by, as it has a way of doing, and slowly they moved from drawer to drawer towards the back of my mind.

Then a couple of months ago I saw a group of clay whistles and flutes at my local music store,

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Recently I was asked how to attach a cymbal upright rather than flat/parallel to the board, like on one of the pictures I have on the Pictures of all my washboards page.

The pictures date from a few years ago and my washboard is no longer set up like that since it ended up being too heavy to be comfortable. But if you want to give it a try it’s not that hard I use a the Gibraltar SC-CSA Cymbal Stacker. This device is made to attach to a 8mm cymbal stand top so a metric 8mm threaded rod sticking out of your washboard is what you will need to attach it.

The Cymbal Stacker is made to hold two cymbals..

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About 3 years ago, wanting to make my own rhythm bones from scratch I got a few rib bones from a local butcher. I don’t have a garden so I left them on a southern facing window sill – 3 stories up – for about a year since it wasn’t clear I could stink up the place by putting them to macerate in some water. But with time it seemed obvious that just drying in the sun wasn’t going to get the grease out even with the help of a bugs.

So I covered them with water in a bucket in my workshop, put something on top of the bucket and forgot them. I wasn’t in my workshop very often at the time so maybe 4 months went by before I thought to check them out. I uncovered the bucket and found a horrible black swill which I flushed down the toilet as fast as I could… Yuck!

The bones had turned green, stunk, and still seemed pretty greasy.

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A few years ago I wanted to put the logo of my band on my kick drum but wasn’t thrilled with the idea of painting it. After giving it some thought I wondered if using permanent markers would do the trick. It did for me, so after using the same resonant head for 3-4 years I decided it was time for a change and figured I could document the process. So here is how I added my band’s logo to the new skin. But first things first:
I can’t be held responsible if you try this and mess up your kick drum resonator !
Try and draw on an old discarded drum skin first

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In November 2008 I acquired a pair of Nautical Style Bones. One thing that became obvious in the weeks after I received them was that I should have bought two pairs to be able to practice with both hands so, curious as to what wood rhythm bones would sound like and interested in the challenge, I decided to make some…

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