How This Guy Makes His Own Novelty Instruments

[Narrator] Playground balls,

plastic bottles, and plumbing parts.

For Len Solomon, these aren't just random objects.

They're instrument parts.

[mixed whistling and honking]

My name is Leonard Solomon and I design,

build, and perform on novelty instruments.

[mixed whistling and honking]

[Narrator] Solomon has been making instruments

upwards of 30 years.

I've taken an initial cigar box banjo to a new level.

[Narrator] He's performed with them

in every place imaginable,

from the streets of Harvard Square

to the stages of Japan and Singapore.

It's really hard to categorize where I've played.

You know, church suppers, opera houses,

pretty much everything from national TV

to a backyard barbecue.

[Narrator] Solomon's journey began at a young age

with a love of music and tinkering.

When I was very small, my dad had a little workshop

in the basement and he encouraged me

to go down there and saw wood and bang nails

and twist wire with pliers.

So I've always been very interested

in building things and also in music.

So the two things came together very naturally.

[Narrator] Solomon's foray into instrument making

began in earnest in the early 1980s

when he was working as a professional cabinet maker

and dabbling in street performing.

I had a pretty hot three-ball juggling routine,

but I needed more.

And I got the idea to build the bellowphone

which is sitting there behind us.

My very first weekend street performing,

I made a little bit more than I would have made

for the entire week at the cabinet making shop.

So that was kinda the transition of my career right then.

[Narrator] The majestic bellowphone kicked off

decades of instrument making and performing for Solomon.

[mixed honking and chimes]

The bellowphone is the first instrument I made.

I classify it as a honking one man band.

And it's really a comedy instrument.

You know, I'm kinda shy and the bellowphone

allowed me to get in front of people without,

you know, I could get behind the instrument

and they were looking at it, not at me.

So it was a nice way to break into being an entertainer.

And after about five years I got the idea

to make a more serious instrument,

which I call the callioforte.

[mixed woodwind and organ]

And the full name is the forte calliopianopi,

which nobody can remember.

So you can just say the piano callioforte.

[Narrator] Since then, Solomon has built

dozens of smaller instruments, and a few large ones,

including the bottle organ.

I made two of them.

I made the first one for the Montshire Museum of Science

up in Vermont and I liked the instrument so much,

and I didn't get a chance to play it much

before I needed to deliver it,

so I made another one which I kept for myself.

[Narrator] And then, there's the umpfulapompetronium.

[honking]

Might call it Solomon's white whale.

He started building it 15 years ago,

and he still tinkers with it to this day.

The umpfulapompetronium, it's kinda of in

its prototypical development stage,

and I've just been frustrated with it

cause it's so prone to having little

technical quirks and going out of tune.

I just don't know if I'll ever finish it.

I play around with it now and then.

I might have to live with that.

My kids are gonna look at that thing

when I'm gone and they're gonna go,

what are we supposed to do with this?

[Narrator] Solomon builds each of these instruments

with unconventional materials,

found objects, hardware supplies,

and specialty items he makes himself.

You know, what are you gonna use?

You can't go to the organ pipe making store and buy stuff.

I just looked around for what I could find

that I thought would work, many things don't.

[Narrator] This trial and error method

has led Solomon to some unusual sounds.

[screaming]

I call it the laughing horn

and it has a really crazy harmonic.

It sounds like somebody with a sore throat screaming.

And I didn't know it at the time,

but it's because I made the reed

out of this beryllium copper which is

a violently toxic material.

And I'm cutting it and filing it,

and I didn't know any of this.

It was just a piece of scrap that I picked up.

And it has a really strange acoustic property

that I haven't been able to duplicate with anything else.

So I made this one off horn,

that I've never duplicated again.

And I took my little stock of beryllium copper

and I put it in a folder and labeled it poison.

So that's the craziest thing I've ever used.

[Narrator] And in case you were wondering,

Solomon says this instrument isn't dangerous

now that it's finished.

But he doesn't always find these sounds by accident.

He'll often work backwards,

first imagining a sound then building

an instrument to produce it.

My original idea for the bellowphone

was just to have an instrument that could go

ump-pah-pah, ump-pah-pah.

And I thought nice low horns would be

a funny sound for that.

And then I could play along with a kazoo.

And I didn't really expect it to get so elaborate as it did,

but as I learned a song I would get an idea

for another song that I didn't have the note to use.

And so I'd build another pipe, and another pipe.

And so over the course of a couple of months,

the bellowphone evolved into a little bit more

complex than my original plan called for.

[Narrator] For all of their whimsy,

Solomon's instruments are based on

a surprising solemn source.

They're pretty much all based on pipe organs

in some way or another.

[Narrator] The pipe organ is a notoriously

complex instrument, but at its most basic

it works like this:

Pressurized air travels through a set of tubes

controlled by a keyboard and passes through a pipe,

producing a note.

Solomon didn't know much about pipe organs at first.

I got very interested in studying them,

and I used to spend some time in the library

looking at their reference books.

And I would take a sketch pad with me

and every little detail I looked at

that I thought I could replicate for myself,

I would take little mechanical sketches

and try things when I got home to see

how things would work.

[Narrator] With that tinkering spirit

Solomon has transformed from an organ pipe novice

to a master builder.

And nowadays, he understands his instruments inside and out.

He can even explain how each part works.

There's two general kinds of organ pipes.

There's the flue pipes and the reed pipes.

And these are some examples of reed pipes.

[honking]

This part is called the boot.

It just channels the air down into the reed.

And the air goes under the reed and makes it vibrate.

It buzzes like an insect's wing.

And the frequency, or the pitch,

is determined by a little tuning spring here.

So this moves up and down,

and it adjusts the length of the reed.

And then the fine tuning is done

by adjusting the length of the resonator.

[Narrator] And what about the other

kind of organ pipe, the flue pipe?

The flue pipe works just like a whistle.

Or again, like this.

[blowing]

That's a flue pipe, that's how they work.

[Narrator] To build these pipes,

Solomon files out an opening.

And as he goes, he checks the distances

between each interior part.

There's the languid.

It's the part of the pipe that is kind of

analogous to the tongue.

That fits right in here, and the size of the opening

has to be such that when the lower lip

is glued down, the little slot there,

called the windway, that little slot there

has to form a perfect little channel for the air.

And it comes out,

and it hits what's called the upper lip.

[Narrator] Between the lower lip,

the tongue, and the upper lip, as well as the length

of the pipe, there are a few ways to change

the pitch and the tone of a flue pipe.

So there are a lot of different variables.

There's how far this is to make

the air channel bigger or smaller.

There's how far away this is

to make the mouth more open or more closed.

[Narrator] Whether you're playing

a reed or a flue pipe, you need a keyboard

to control air flow.

This is one of the first actual

working keyboards I made.

It was just one octave, 13 notes.

And I took all the screws out

to show you what it looks like inside.

Here's that little push rod.

This is the copper tee, which each one of the keys has.

And when the push rod comes down,

it pushes these little pads.

And these are just little wooden pads

with a leather cushion and they're sitting on a spring.

And the air comes in through this hole.

And when everything's screwed down,

this whole box is airtight.

And when you push a key down,

the air goes out to whichever pipe

that particular key is hooked up to.

And this is my actual prototype study model.

Same thing, this is actually,

represents a cutaway of what the keyboard box

looks like inside.

You can see when the push rod comes down,

it just pushes that little pad out of the way

and it lets the air come through

and come out and go to whichever pipe that's hooked up to.

[Narrator] Developing each of these elements

took time, and a bit of failure.

When I was trying to design the keyboard action,

so it had a nice soft touch and not a long throw,

and everything air tight, I went through

a lot of different designs.

A lot of them didn't work.

And I put all my earlier designs

together in a gallery which I call

a gallery of failures.

They're all randomly designed,

but they all have the same problem

which is a very long throw and they tend to jam.

And they leak air and they basically were not very good.

And I finally came up with the design that I use.

Very simple and neat and airtight.

But that was a process that took me,

I don't know, it was over the course of a couple of years,

I guess, till I got my good design.

[Narrator] Despite the challenges,

Solomon says building an instrument

isn't as hard as it seems.

One thing I like to do is when people say,

they look at a finished instrument and they say,

how did you even make that?

And I'd say, by filing and sawing.

And then they get it.

It's like, oh you have to do that stuff.

And it seems obvious but to put it graphically

like that makes a differences

They see, oh yeah, the hands made it.

[Narrator] But helping people understand

his instruments, is just part of the appeal.

For Solomon there's nothing quite like

performing for an audience.

It's really a great feeling.

It's quite exhilarating, you know,

doing what I do best and people enjoying it.

Who wouldn't like that?

[mixed woodwind and organ]