Clay Keyboard Creation

For this project, I wanted to create some more pitched percussion instruments and thought that making some kind of keyboard would be interesting.

The process started out with a simple experiment. I quickly rolled out a slab, cut out some bars and added an arch on the bottom side that you would find on any keyboard bar. I wanted to quickly make some bars and just see how they would turn out before embarking on this keyboard project, as I though it would be very labor intensive.

I didn’t pay any attention to making the bars uniform in any way, but rather they had a lot of variances. To my great surprise, when they came out of bisque, they sounded a lot better than I thought they would! Here is a short recording of these prototypes after bisque firing.

This confirmed that this was a worthwhile project, and I set out to making a more carefully produced set of bars. 3 slabs were carefully rolled out. Then we used a triangular folded paper to cut the slabs diagonally, making a straight diagonal line from the longer to smaller bars. Then the diagonal edge was cut to a straighter edge and the bars were cut in half, making - bars. A tool was used to create the curve on the bottom.

I also made 7 bars out of brown clay just to see how the different types of clay sound.

The next step was thinking about how to make the resonators for the clay bars. I hand built the resonators, imitating the shape of a gourd, which is what many keyboard instruments (such as the balafon) traditionally used as a resonator. You can see in the photos below a photo of my resonators compared to the dried calabashes on a balafon.

From my research, glazing seems to be a tricky business when it comes to ceramic instruments, so I decided to leave the bars unglazed. However, I thought adding some color to the resonators might make the instrument pop a bit more visually, so I painted on 4 coats of ‘floating blue.’

For the moment I have already made some recordings of the bars just placed on foam and they already sound great. Next step is to complete a wooden frame and string up the bars and resonators.

More to come soon!