- These PVC tube instruments,
that is a three dollar piece of plastic
you can buy at Lowe's
and that is part of what's exciting
about how would someone, a musical being,
look at this for the first time,
what would they want to do with it?
- The instruments come about,
I think every one is a little bit different.
Anybody can bring an idea to the table.
Our tone mill was one of our Blue Men
that drew a sketch.
- The concept of this is that you have different tubes
and then the length of the tube
is creating the pitch, the note.
By having two, you can have a chord.
Potentially, you can use a stick
or you can use another tube that has its own note
to create a chord.
This is another piece,
another instrument that we're working on
for a piece that's being developed
about feedback.
There's a speaker on one end,
there's a microphone on the other end
and you, when you put a microphone at a speaker,
it causes feedback.
And, with the pipe, we can tune it to be different notes.
Where the struggle is, is that every day we walk in,
the notes are totally different.
We're now being inspired by the challenge
to try and find a way to make this actually workable
and tunable every night.
So we're trying to find an instrument
that could drone in a similar way as didgeridoo
but, obviously, have different playing aspects
and something that was, again,
theatrically something that was visual
and had a lot of action to it.
It's kind of inspired by a hurdy-gurdy style instrument.
You're bowing this and then changing the note
with this lever.
- Similar concept, we've got two higher strings here,
just music wire, something you have on a piano.
And, this wheel that you spin,
and then very sophisticated,
we have zip ties cut to a little over a half an inch.
And, when you rotate this, you are plucking the strings
and then we have this slider which is fretting
and we've come up with our own musical language here,
the Blue Men speak in colors and shapes
when reading music.
- So we basically took a vibraphone
and split it apart
onto a separate sort of playable platform
that can be a lot more visual as an instrument.
So these are actual vibraphone keys
and then there's pickups underneath each one
so that we can now run it through
whatever fun pedals we want to do -
we want to run it through, so.