Building my own Blaster Beam

[masterblasterbeam-blog]

Blaster Beam Build Part 1:

Following the planning obviously the first thing we had to do was pick up the beams, this turned out to be something of an expedition having no appropriate vehicles to carry a 6 meter long aluminium beam up a highway for an hour with, thus, the beam was cut in half and strapped to the top of my sisters car.

Oops.

The next point of order was the bridges, every blaster beam I've seen in pictures from other people has used a plexiglass triangular prism to form the bridge. My idea for affixing the strings would place a decent amount of lateral stress on the bridge, requiring slots to be machined and to be honest I had absolutely no idea why the other bridges would be made of plexiglass anyway, so after some research into graphite (and plexiglass) I ended out keeping it simple and built them out of aluminium edge extrusions.

So my particular method of tuning it involved replicating the system within pianos. Initially when planning it I wanted to use the mehcanical tuners off bass guitars but the constraints of fitting a lot of strings in a small space (15 strings on an 18cm wide beam) naturally drove it more toward piano tuning pins. 

Pianos have something called a pinboard on them, it's a very dense piece of plywood that holes are drilled into and "tuning pins" are sunk into, the natural friction of the hole and being pulled on by the tension of the strings keeps them in one place (albeit still tunable with a spanner). Rather than re-invent the wheel here I just decided to take what worked on pianos and attach it to the bottom of the beam, an actual sheet of piano spec pinboard would be rather expensive so I just got the thickest, densest piece of plywood I could find and cut/filed it to fit in the bottom groove of the beam.

Next came drilling the holes for the tuning pins and attaching the pinboard to the beam itself, no drill press (and no idea in general) made this a bit tough.

All drilled, the larger holes are for the tuning pins and the smaller ones are simply to attach and keep the pinboard locked to the beam itself and (hopefully) not lose too much sustain and resonance in the process. 

That's her for now, in the next part I'll cover the tuning pins and attaching the strings.

[masterblasterbeam-blog]

A quick video example showing the stereo pickups in action, a little delay was added in post but all the reverb and the naturally wide stereo image you hear is coming from the beam itself. 

[masterblasterbeam-blog]

What is a blaster beam? Why am I building one?

Well It really all comes down to this scene from Star Trek: The Motion Picture, Jerry Goldsmith's soundtrack to ST:TMP is one of my all time favourite film scores, it's just so rich and eloquently made. One of my favourite elements of the whole score is the way the space entity v’ger is represented by this bizarre synthetic sounding low tone.

Just what the heck is that? well a little bit of research quickly leads you to the conclusion that it's what's known as a "blaster beam".

A gigantic piece of aluminium (or in the case of the original built by Frencesco Lupica, Cast Iron) with piano strings and magnetic pickups attached. It creates sweeping, resonant, metallic, otherworldy sounds almost automatically when played...and there's also little to no information out there on how to build one yourself. I mean, how do you tune it? What kind of tunings is it even tuned in the first place? (harmonic series? fuck I don't know). Even stuff like the thickness and size of the aluminium beams used to build them is not exactly well documented.

Thus I've set out on a journey to build one of my own in a combination of reverse engineering what I could see from previous beams and filling in the gaps with my own ideas where I need to.

And here they are, fresh from being picked up off the steelyard from a slightly incredulous and bemused worker who clearly found it funny I was buying the thickest, largest, most expensive aluminium beam they had for apparently no reason. 180 mm wide, 75 mm tall, 11 mm thick and 3 meters long (well, it was 6 but we cut it in half to fit on the car and in the garage it was being built in) The perfect candiate(s) to build a scaled down version of the blaster beam with.

Now I've got to actually build the bloody thing.