Works in Progress

I’m going to make a thumb piano.

I’m planning to use:

– metal tines from a rake, or spring-tempered steel from here. The tines will average less than 10cm and I’d like to have 12 of them, which would make 120cm or about 4 feet.
– resonant wood (I’ve been saving my oak)
– bike spoke
– 15 terminal grounding bar with 3 spots to mount to base

I’m reading Bart Hopkin’s book on musical instrument design and looking here for some guidelines.

Some notes:

Frequency = A/Length^2 where A is some value of the material itself.

Overtones: “you can make the fundamental more prominent and increase sustain by creating a tongue shape with more mass toward the end or, equivalently, thinning it near the base (which also, of course, lowers the pitch)”