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
