The Whamola
Les Claypool, lead singer and bassist for the band Primus, has moved away from the band and become an experimental entrepreneur. A while back, on his newest album, Frog Brigade, he used an instrument called a Whamola. The idea of a whamola is to take a single bass string and attach it to a lever which tightens the string when pulled and hit it with a drumstick. The sound is quite amazing. Try to find the song Whamola by him and listen to the part that goes 'bwing bwing bwing bwingdwingdwing dwingy weing weirng. It's a good song. Anyway, yesterday i was doing yardwork with father when clouds came and it looked like rain, and so he went to take a sleepy. So i began work on making myself a whamola. My bassist has been wanting to make one, so about halfway through, i called him and invited him to help finish. Once he came we tweaked certain variables and looked for advantages, and finally we finished it. I used a 2x4 as a base and put a lever on the top and attached the string at the bottom. It looks vaguely like this.
It doesn't sound exactly like Les's, but it turned out a lot better than we thought, and now we have knowledge of how to make more.
Once we had a nice beautiful whamola, we needed a way to stand it up. So i built a support for it. We call it a wham-stand:
Unfortunately, I got the string from Kitt's old bass set, so they were pretty used. So we were down at his house and it broke. What a shame. Also, we took apart my bass in order to take the pick up from it to put on the whamola so we could amplify it. "Darn," I said. This summer he and I are going to build a lot of experimental instruments for fun. I'm still working on my bucket drums. Which will look like this.
-I call it a BumSet
My MS Paint skills can't be matched.