To make a short story long, my mum is an avid trawler of the charity shops on Hatfield Road (and beyond). Once or twice I've been in there too, rooting through the endless VHS, cassettes and dead men's clothes to try and find elusive items of value, that must, occasionally, end up on the shelves of the Romanian Deaf Children's Charity. My mum has found some pretty weird stuff, notably African carved heads and various bits of Asian wood, and once she came back with a load of bells. They were on strings and were quite awkward to use, so I cut em off the strings and decided that I'd do something with them. Well, here it is. A hand-held, er, bell-shaker.
Initially I sawed the wood to size, sanded it and applied several coats of varnish over a few days. The hooks were made with curtain rail eyelets, which I picked up for about £1.20 at John Deerman's in Camp Road, the kind of shop my mum hates for its blokishness, but I have always liked for random fittings, wires and screws. Plus the fact that the shop itself mostly seems to be a product of DIY. I screwed them in by hand and tightened them with pliers, then used some copper wire to attach the bells on loops. It sounds OK, very tinkly. I'll probably use it on some recording to add a bit of colour. It kept me off the streets for a while anyway.
Next week on Broken & The Blessed: Milk bottles and rice - a percussion solution.
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