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Alpha

Snake1 (Male) - From Brandywell interactive Park - 4 of these connected underground to a 2m wide x 1m deep bespoke echo chamber / earth drum ©2005/06

A=440

Please note- Since we started making these instruments our basic design has been copied by several competitors who 'cut and paint' and bypass the tuning stage. Please ask to hear sound samples of the instruments before purchasing.

Because B3 makes melodic instruments, it is important that you give consideration to the usage that you anticipate for them.

Instruments are available as single bars or as a range of modular matched-sets to gives user flexibility and expandabilty as space and budgets allow.

For each of the grouped tunings, a resolution (reso) key is recommended. The reso key is generally an octave above the starting note (tonic); although part of another octave it is felt to complete the scale. e.g. a C Maj Pentatonic scale is CDEGA and C will be the reso key.

Pentatonic  

Listen to the two octave scale played on a small and medium combined set as illustrated 

There are only 5 notes in the scale. Each note will harmonise with every other note and there are no 'unpleasant' combinations. No musical skill whatsoever is required to interact musically.

This Pentatonic tuning is recommended generally. Because of the universality of the tuning; It can accommodate as many players as can physically access the striking areas of the instrument.

The melodic capabilities of the instrument are limited by the absence of two notes. In C Major the pentatonic scale is C D E G A.

Single Bars 

Available in any note in any octave of the 12 note western scale. Microtonal tunings are available at any frequency +/- 5c.

Five main tunings

• Pentatonic - 5 notes
• Diatonic - 7 notes
• Chromatic - 12 notes

Orff Instruments 

Orff instruments are teaching instruments that are client-adjustable. In the form of keyboard / chime based instruments this means the temporary removal of selected playing keys/bars.In this case, an adjustable diatonic or chromatic instrument may be appropriate.

Orff instruments require a different installation approach because of the removability of the playing keys. You should consider your security options for exterior Orff instruments

Specialist Tunings 

• Modes
  • Ionian
  • Dorian
  • Phrygian
  • Lydian
  • Myxolidian
  • Aeolian
  • Locrian
• Microtonal tuning potential

The bell tree is a copper sound sculpture designed and made by Paul that was part of a major show garden in the 2006 Hampton Court Flower Show. The RHS awarded the garden a bronze medal.

The Garden

The garden was "the Well Garden" and was created by multi-award winning designer Tony Challis of Ginkgo Landscapes in London. The client was Independent Age and the whole garden is to be taken from Hampton Court and installed at a nursing home in Hove. You can see more of the garden including a panoramic image here

The Tree

The tree itself comprises three layers of broad-leaved copper that are positioned to spread out from the original base. The main copper piece sits in the centre of the 1.2m diameter well and the 'leaves' hang over the water where they shimmer with any air movement.

On the end of a number of the leaves are the 'fruit'; comprising 5 heavy bronze bells from Nepal and Burmah that hang approximately 10-20mm above the water.

The sculpture has 6 central stainless rods shooting up and those finish in a further six Indian bells that sound in the wind. The tank is made from a discarded copper water tank and was dissected using a plasma cutter made available to me by my friend and fellow sculptor .

The Well

The well itself contains water and under the water are four pumps all facing anti-clockwise. With the pumps active, the water develops a circular current. Also in the water are a number of black neoprene pads, each having a stainless steel rod mounted through it. These rods circulate in the current and strike the overhanging bells at random intervals. The bells have a gentle,pleasing sound and long sustain. To assist with the randomness of the sounds, a number of 'interruptors' are placed at key sites in the well to deflect the strikers where they might tend to congregate.

In addition to the sounds of the bells emanating from the well, there are three underground tubes that travel from the well interior out to beside three seating areas. These tubes carry the sound of the bells to the garden's visitors away from the well. The tubes end in three copper parabolic dishes, also taken from copper water tanks. These dishes serve to focus the sound but also to catch and return rainwater to the well.

The sculpture as it ages

One of the beauties of using copper is that it ages rapidly and in a very aesthetic manner with the lively green verdigris patina being theultimate objective. To this end, the 'leaves' of the main sculpture and the resonators have had the raw copper exposed in places, other places retain the protective coatings required for use in their former domestic life. This means that different sections will age differently, the leaves for example have had the extreme edges exposed and have had random markings ground into the broad leaves. Exposed copper will rapidly dull then after a period of exposure will attain the vardigris patina. I look forward to seeing the piece in three or four years

I'm delighted to announce that I am now working with the show Tapeire and its creator James Devine to generate some new sounds for his amazing feet -

There is some video available and here's some blurb about the show.

"A unique new way of expression created by James Devine, the world's fastest dancer clocked at 38 taps per second. TAPEIRE fuses the raw improvisation of Rhythm Tap and the percussive sounds of Irish dance in surprising new ways....

TAPEIRE is raw, exhilarating Celtic passion with original live music and dance. It is the next generation in Irish tap fusing the sounds of dance, fiddle, vocals and percussion; a fast paced live music and dance jam to invent a new and funky sound.

Tapeire melds breathtaking tap with the sounds of jazz, hip-hop, funk and Celtic rhythms. Along with his four piece band, Devine will electrify the stage in an exhilarating rhythmic performance!

From the end of 2005, Paul worked as instrument design consultant with the creators of Stomp, Luke Cresswell and Steve McNicholas, to create new and unusual instruments for the world premiere of their new production, the Lost and Found Orchestra [LFO].

The general concept was that if Stomp was the percussion section, then what would the rest of the orchestra look like? Here's a chance to see the rest of the orchestra

The world premiere was on 6 May 2006 and there was an initial festival run of 5 shows only - finishing on 9th May.

The commission was to come up with new and interesting approaches to making music from everyday or unusual objects and to translate the ideas of Steve and Luke into sonic reality. Although living 500 miles away in N Ireland, Paul commuted regularly to Brighton to undertake this work.

Update, May 2007 - the show apparently broke all box office records at Sydney Opera House ousting Frank Sinatra - Sorry Frank - Way to go LFO

Instruments included have such eclectic names as Squonkaphones, Pump Monkey Instruments, Vitruvian flute and Hosaphones.

Review - Financial Times *****

Lost and Found Orchestra, Concert Hall, Brighton Dome, Brighton
By Alastair Macaulay
Published: May 8 2006

Black plastic sacks; footballs; parking cones; saws; ventilation tubes; wine-glasses; filing-cabinets; old radiators; plastic water bottles?.?.?.? Leave the Stomp Company in a rubbish dump and they’d make gamelan music from it – and they’d turn that gamelan into theatre. Stomp began life in Brighton in 1991, the result of a 10-year collaboration between Luke Cresswell and Steve McNicholas; and, amid all their international operations, Brighton has remained their base. But after all these years of making music that is basically percussion, Cresswell, McNicholas & Co have felt ready to start adding the other orchestral sonorities. So the Brighton Festival, celebrating its 40th anniversary this year, has commissioned them to present this next breakthrough endeavour: the Lost and Found Orchestra. With 50-plus players coming together, Stomp is going symphonic.

A simple doh-ray-mi scale takes on a new life when you see each note briskly thwacked out on tubes of different lengths by individual performers across the stage phase. A big blaring “brass” chord is played by a group of men blowing down long tubes into traffic cones. Steel saws are bowed like violins.

There’s a deliberate let’s- reinvent-the-wheel mindset at work here. What makes this marvellous is its innocence, and the pleasure with which it reveals new solutions. One duet played on a tableful of wine-glasses sounded celestial, Aeolian; one big percussion number sounded – exuberantly – like an atonal waltz. Those tubes, banged out in scales and other patterns, make a plucked, pizzicato, sound. When those traffic-cone Alpenhorns add their blast to a big ensemble, it’s like some climactic effect in Berlioz or Mahler. But the massive pulse that ticks through much of this music is from our own rock era, and the elite syncopations often take us back to the era when ragtime was turning into jazz.

What hit me hardest is its sheer poetry. But nobody could miss the entertainment value here, and its world premiere on Saturday night was greeted with a full-throated ovation. Stomp is Brighton’s brightest offspring. ?????

Review - The Stage

Lost and Found Orchestra
Stupendous, is the best word to describe the opening concert of the Brighton Festival. Although the promise of saws, bellows, bottles, kettles, pipes and dustbins replacing musical instruments initially filled me with foreboding, I little imagined my feet would be tapping throughout the performance.

Luke Cresswell and Steve McNicholas created the now world famous Stomp in 1991 and the following year it won the award for the most outstanding contribution to the Brighton Festival so it is more than appropriate their latest creation, should celebrate the Festival’s 40th anniversary.

A pianissimo opening with a double bass case being rubbed in rhythm soon to be followed by plastic piping of various lengths creating sounds not unlike a bassoon backed by a chorus of hosepipes and if you thought a dustpan and brush merely got rid of the dust, it makes a delightful ‘shushing’ sound.

The musical saw is a must adding a tuneful accompaniment to the various rhythms but the highlight of this performance has to be the metal tubes hanging high above the stage with six performers also suspended from above striking them in turn in perfect rhythm as they swing to and fro.

Cresswell participates as well as conducts the ensemble, ending with a tremendous climax which had a packed concert hall on its feet. A well deserved standing ovation for a foot tapping performance with great attention to dynamics and sounds that are a sheer delight.

Production information
Concert Hall, Brighton Dome, May 6-9 2006

Directors: Luke Cresswell, Steve McNicholas
Producer: Yes/No Productions
Running time: 2hrs 10mins

Review - The Daily Telegraph

Son of Stomp is a pounding frenzy of thumps, raps and taps
(Filed: 10/05/2006)

Dominic Cavendish reviews Lost and Found Orchestra at Brighton Dome

Having lined up a host of launch events, the organisers of the 40th Brighton Festival must have been gnashing their teeth at the weekend, as The Sultan's Elephant lumbered around central London, disrupting traffic flow and hogging the limelight.

The fact is that the festival had something just as worthy of attention as the bricolage-fashioned Babar up its sleeve: the British première of a follow-up to the global sensation Stomp.

That show took everyday "found" objects - dustbins, brooms, even matchstick boxes - and shook, banged and clanged them into a high-decibel fusion of percussion, movement and visual comedy. In the process, it made rich men of its Brighton-based originators, Luke Cresswell and Steve McNicholas - so perhaps the most impressive thing about Lost and Found Orchestra is that it feels utterly homegrown, as though the pair, and a sizeable entourage of scruffy mates, had tumbled off the streets and begun to busk it, slaves to their infectious, improvised rhythms, without any thought of the profit motive.

The opening section immediately establishes a sense of continuity with the noisy past, as well as a change of direction towards the more overtly melodic. A bloke walks on with a double-bass case and starts to run his fingers over its surface. The case itself becomes the instrument - and he's joined by four others to form a cheeky quintet, building a subtle, syncopated shuffle into a pounding frenzy of thumps, raps and taps.

This son of Stomp is the plumbers', road-diggers' and binmen's answer to the world's great orchestras, or a vision of how those orchestras might look after the apocalypse. Siphons, pipes and traffic cones have been transformed into trumpets; saws are used as violins; large plastic containers as drums. Bin-liners, filing cabinets, shopping trolleys, even growling vacuum cleaners are all part of the polyphonic mix. Most enchantingly, a wooden door filled with beads gets spun round like a giant rain-charm, imitating the roar of sea surf, and a crack troupe of performers swing from the rafters to create an aerial human glockenspiel.

You might be reminded of Philip Glass and Michael Nyman, of early Art of Noise, Tom Waits or even Björk at her most bonkers. Lost and Found Orchestra is its own thing, though. It might be all sound and energetic frenzy, signifying little, but it's the opposite of rubbish - and, after such a triumphant try-out, we haven't heard the last of it.

Back to me .....

It was an absolute privelege to have been involved in the devising and creation of such a tremendous show, Never have I worked so hard, slept so little or eaten with such irregularity; never too have I had the privilege of working with so many talented and welcoming people as the Stomp Company Yes/No Productions -

On the last day I got a souvenir, ok so it's only a battered aul binlid but it's top quality swag and takes pride of place on my wall :)

As well as the ceaseless energy and creativity of Luke and Steve, I give great respect and pay tribute specifically to Mike Roberts and Ward Ransom with whom I worked most closely. I have never seen two guys work so hard for such a long time.

There is also a super network of people involved in the workshop support of the project, Sleaze, Barrel, Squeeze, Danni, Nadia, Hector, Frixx, Toby, JD, Pete & the Stomp crew, I thank them all for their ready support and easy acceptance of the Belfast blow-in.