A looong time ago o knew a dude with one. Intellectually I think they make more sense than a standard guitar. I also sorta kinda knew a guy (Justin king) who could play his uber nice Martin almost like a Chapman. He was really, really good.
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Ha! That looks amazing! We donāt have a marching band tradition in Canada, just band & orchestra (which I always got roped into because we didnāt have enough french horns).
When its not the season of SAD I shall try to remember to look up something similar!
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I have no idea why this is A Thing in my area, but we have HONK! Fest every year, with hundreds of street bands from US and Canada. Iām sure thereās one somewhere around you!
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Clavichords used to be quite common when I was a wee lad in the 18th century, bit have fallen out of favor.
The vaguely look piano-forte ish, but are a different kind of beast.
French clavichord
When it comes to keyboard instruments that use strings, there are four major families (in sure I will forget some, and patrx will correct me :D)
- plucked (harpsichord)
- bowed (gurdy)
- mechanically hammered (piano)
- directly hammered (clavichord)
See, when you press a key on a harpsichord, all you get is a pluck of the string at the same velocity and pressure every time. This limits the volume, sustain, and attack, since there is really nothing a player can do about it.
A piano key operates a force multiplying, levered hammer to hit the string. This allows for greater control over velocity, attack, sustain, and other attributes, but when the lever is pushed it does its own thing.
Piano hammers
A clavichord on the other hand isnāt mechanically assisted, it is a simple lever attached to the key. This produces a number of different strategies a player can take, such as vibrato on a keyed instrument (to be fair you can do that on a gurdy as well, since they keys are direct but not levered).
What happened to this guy?
Those pins at the end literally strike the string. And the most basic just use gravity for the key lever action. They are quiet instrumentsāone of the reason the piano was branded as the piano-forteābut they are lovely, sweet sounding keyboards.
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That sounds like a riot (in the original meaning of the word), and the pBone you linked looks awesome! Iā¦ I kinda want one 
Oh thatās why I know the name Bart Hopkins, I have his books! My go-tos were Benade, boehm, and some other guy who I canāt remember, but barts designs were practical and worked.
Hey @shaddack, lets say I have a wooden tube, and I want to non invasively image the inside of the tube to 0.01mm accuracy, so I could precisely recreate the bore. And I donāt want to use calipers cause that takes forever 
Any super science way of doing that?
I canāt fill it with plaster or resin, I canāt saw it in half, and the tube is guaranteed to not be straight.
My all time favorite super-weird instrument has to be the Ondes Martenot, which I first heard about in an article about Radiohead ā their guitarist, Jonny Greenwood, is a big fan and often plays them on stage. Itās an early, experimental electronic instrument thatās a sort of bizarre combination of pipe organ, theremin, and electronic keyboard. It can be played like an organ or by wearing a metal ring and sliding it along a metal strip whilst controlling the sound with a drawer that slides out of the keyboard. Itās truly bizarre and cool.
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I consider myself learned about the craft of music, but even I still go, āWTF is that!?ā. Iāve never heard of such a magnificent beast!
Not that bizarre, given that pipe organs are pre-electronic wind-based analog-synthesizers. Tubes, even!
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Next youāll say youāve never heard of the Ondioline or the Telharmonium.
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Well, Iād certainly forgotten about them 
Iām sure most nerds know what a mellotron is, but I just adore this video promotion for them.
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I made one of these out of a tomato can, some wire and a bendy piece of wood. More traditionally, the berimbao looks like this:
You tap the wire with the stick while holding the caxixi, like a little maraca filled with beans. I used a quarter with mine, but traditionally itās a rock or a shell, which you hold against the wire to change the tone and also to get a buzzy effect. The gourd (or open tomato can) resonates and you can hold it against your body to mute and play with the tone. And you can even bang on the gourd, the main stick or the lower area of the wire below where itās bound. So you can get at least 6 or 7 different sounds out of the thing. With someone on a conga, timbales or djembe, especially with some kind of a cymbal or something metallic, you have a complete percussion section with very little equipment.
& hipster fedora man is awesome:
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Hell. Yes. It strikes me as the same level of ingenuity and talent as a diddley bow.
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Yup. Several different kinds of oscillator, pressure volume control for the left hand, and three different loudspeakers, all switchable: cymbal resonator, lyre resonator, and standard cone speaker with switchable spring reverb.
Fascinating sound. I saw Yvonne Loriod playing one at an SMCQ concert of Olivier Messiaenās music in Salle Claude Champagne in the early '70s, with the Great Man in the audience.
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The vibrato keyboard is kick-ass! Keys that respond to pressure from 1928? Dang.
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Also the Geigenwerk based on da Vinciās viola organista.
In the plucked category, youāve also got the Lautenwerk, more or less a keyed archlute. The sound is quite distinctive:
The sustain on a well-made harpsichord isnāt too bad, btw.
Yup, the clavichord is the simplest of the lot: those tangents at the end of the keys act in two ways, as a hammer to excite the string, and a bridge to divide it into its sounding length. The other part of the string has felt interwoven as a permanent damper.
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The keys donāt respond to pressure - theyāre essentially just on/off switches, and the keyboard is monophonic as well (like a Mini Moog). There is a pressure switch in the pull-out drawer on the left that acts as a volume control. As long as itās pressed, there is a sound whose volume varies with the pressure, so it affects not just overall volume, but acts as a (very, very flexible) envelope generator as well.
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That sound board is insane. Even split, glued spruce like in guitars, the tree used to make that must have been an ancient, ancient giant.
Iām part of a harpsichord group in Facebook that includes several respectable makers. They all have need for wood like that for their soundboards, and they store it for years, decades even, against need. Iām sure they have lumber sources weāve never even heard of.
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