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Ben Simon helps construct a rain stick with a student at Simon's new nonprofit, The Instrument Shop, on Wednesday. Simon teaches classes on how to build instruments.
Small dowels are glued into the rain stick, making the distinctive swishing rattle when a load of dried peas and pearled barley pour across them inside.
At the Instrument Shop, you don’t buy. You build.
It’s a combination of wood shop, art class and music haven for teenagers.
The nonprofit, which officially opened earlier this summer, is filled with completed instruments (electric guitars, autoharps, hammered dulcimers, custom keyboards) and ones in progress (a banjolele and even a long-term undertaking: a pipe organ.)
The founder and instructor, Ben Simon, learned woodworking in a professional studio, then branched out into musical instruments. He taught classes and performed in New York City before moving to Missoula.
“There’s a lot of joy in the building process, and for me personally, learning to be a woodworker — I started at age 24 — it made me feel like I had a skill set for the first time in life, like I had skills that could be useful for other people,” he said.
Finishing an electric guitar, with its myriad parts that all affect the final sound, and seeing someone else try it out generates a feeling for him that couldn’t be replicated any other way.
“That’s a sense of accomplishment that you're not going to get by just buying something off the rack,” he said.
The shop is located in a small plaza on River Road, just off the west side of Reserve Street: a spacious, wide-open white room with a skylight and the walls lined with work stations. One space in the back acts as a display area for completed projects like a harp, several autoharps and that hammered dulcimer.
The nonprofit is the fruition of a 10-year journey for Simon. He returned to school as a nontraditional student in his 30s to get a bachelor’s degree in social work, then went into the field with the Susan Talbot Boys Home of Youth Homes. He began offering workshops there three years ago, as a pilot: He wasn’t sure how students would respond to the concept. It went well enough that he proceeded ahead.
The shop will offer classes in instrument building for anyone who’s interested. It’s opening up to the general public and aims to work with other nonprofit agencies as well.
The “menu” of prospective instruments one can build is wide: electric guitar, hammered dulcimer, harp, ukulele, banjo, keyboard, bowed psaltery, tambourine, pipe organ, tongue drum, wooden flute, autoharp, egg shaker, rain stick, and for the adventurous, the option to work on made-up “art instruments.”
Earlier this week, a summer class from Youth Homes was at work on its projects: rain sticks and tongue drums.
To build rain sticks, the students took lengths of bamboo and drilled holes in them. Then, short sticks are inserted into the hole and glued in place. A mixture of pearled barley and split peas are poured into the hollow stick and sealed with a wooden end cap. Flip it over, and the barley and peas fall downward, making sounds as they strike the hundreds of sticks. There was something of a competition to see who could make one with the longest-lasting “rain” sound. The record thus far was 28 seconds.
The other project for this group was to construct a tongue drum, which originated in Africa and is one of the oldest known instruments, Simon said.
It’s functionally a sanded and stained wood-box. The top has “keys” cut by curving lines that make them appear decorative until they’re struck and sound a tone.
“Drilling the tips makes them vibrate faster, which would make the pitch higher. Chiseling them at the base makes them slower and lowers the pitch,” Simon said. They can be designed for any scale that you like, and are notable because someone who hasn’t had any musical training can play them.
In fact, some of these drums are made from Padauk, an African tree — the same that is used for marimbas, which these resemble when played with a mallet.
One student, who built an autoharp at Simon’s workshop, said he’s very big into music, art and creative pursuits, and thought it would be cool to have a wooden, handcrafted instrument of his own.
He thought it was inspiring that Simon had made all these various instruments. On one wall hangs an electric guitar with a body shaped like a pigeon — a design Simon said he generated and then cut with a computer-controlled routing machine. Elsewhere, Simon is working on a banjolele, a combination of banjo and a ukulele. Like the tongue drum, the banjo’s roots are in Africa.
The back room also has the beginnings of an ambitious group project that he hopes he can find a commission to work on. He’s begun making a pipe organ from scratch.
The main offerings will be three 12-week programs, with two-plus hours of work time per week. It costs $600 including all materials. For more information, go to youthinstrumentbuilding.org.
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Ben Simon helps construct a rain stick with a student at Simon's new nonprofit, The Instrument Shop, on Wednesday. Simon teaches classes on how to build instruments.
Small dowels are glued into the rain stick, making the distinctive swishing rattle when a load of dried peas and pearled barley pour across them inside.
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