Maker

CORDS AND CHORDS

As cutting-edge as Kaiser’s work is, it’s rooted in musical and technical fundamentals ranging from Franz Joseph Haydn, who evoked a ticking clock, to Reed Ghazala, who first bent a circuit.

Kaiser learned how things are made by fixing them. During high school he was a guitarist in what he calls Northern Minnesota’s first punk rock band. “We were all broke, and the equipment we had was crappy, so we had to learn to fix our own stuff.”

Contending with an amplifier that routinely overheated, Kaiser thought, “In junior high I learned how to solder. Why couldn’t I just cut a hole in the back and put a fan in there?” No wonder he still considers basic electrical and soldering skills “super-valuable” for makers.

He cites an early realization that a manufacturer’s delay pedal with just 2 seconds of delay was more about production costs than possibilities. By changing a few potentiometers, Kaiser increased the delay to 4 seconds. The internal workings of many of his devices result from swapping out components to make something more versatile. “I’m Mr. Void-the-Warranty,” he says. “People who know how to do things with their hands are the ones who make the world better.”

Kaiser often tries to re-create a real-world tone that resonates with him — such as the sound of a train braking while the Doppler effect lowers the pitch. That makes him heir to avant-garde musicians John Cage and Nicolas Collins, who used “found sound” electronically, and to traditional composers such as Vivaldi, Beethoven, and Saint-Saëns, who orchestrated sounds of dogs and bones, birds and storms.

Kaiser begins compositions by improvising with a tape running. He then scores the parts he likes so he can replicate them in performance. As he composes, Kaiser doesn’t consciously employ traditional musical elements such as motifs and variations, but he hears them in his finished works.

SOLDER AND SOUNDS When making instruments, Kaiser sometimes starts from scratch or from scrap foraged from yard sales and salvage yards. Other times he transforms traditional instruments.

34 Make: Volume 15

OLD PLUS OLD EQUALS NEW: Kaiser merges a violin with scrap to produce a unique instrument.

His background in guitar and music theory came into play when he turned a simple dulcimer into a cello — sort of. When he changed the distance between the nut and the bridge, the scale was no longer diatonic. He pulled the frets and smoothed the fingerboard, then replaced the three dulcimer strings with cello strings. But, because the body was small, the modified dulcimer lacked a cello’s deep resonance. Naturally, Kaiser’s response was to plug it into something.

Cue the piezoelectric transducer. Kaiser attaches piezos to all his instruments that start out acoustic and become electronic. Inexpensive and versatile, piezos are little metal disks with a special ceramic inside. Apply pressure to them and they output voltage. Apply signal and they output vibration.

If you know how to solder, Kaiser says, it’s simple to wire piezos to a circuit or a jack, or to add a volume knob. He uses poster putty to test placement and two-step epoxy to affix piezos permanently.

One of Kaiser’s commissions came from Shawn, a heavy-metal guitarist in California (he