K&K Company Blog

Absolut Ballistic Marimba

Greetings, this is Dieter and today I’m going to give writing my first blog post ever a shot. The good thing is that I have a really exciting topic to write about.

At the end of last year, Jeff Lieberman contacted me with a rather unusual request. He wanted me to build a custom marimba pickup system for a “ballistic marimba”. He said that he was in process of fulfilling a project sponsored by Absolut Vodka, building a special marimba where small rubber balls are shot by individual canons, each one aimed onto one particular marimba bar which then plays the tone. This was designed to be interactive via the internet, so that a “player” at home could actually trigger the individual canons via his computer and watch the result on a life video at home. The K&K pickups would play the audio sound of the marimba bars.

Please check out the official ballistic marimba website, and watch the movie, too.

This is pretty typical for custom stuff that we at K&K have done or were involved with over the last 25 years. Lots of crazy ideas, projects, and products. The ballistic marimba is probably the most sophisticated one though.

To name some other “crazy” projects, K&K once had a product called the Hot Glove, a pair of gloves with trigger pickups sewn into the fingertips and cables running out through the players sleeve, then connected to a Midi drum sound module. Different drum-sounds were assigned to the individual fingertips. This way the player could play drums by tapping on all kinds of surfaces (like parts of his/her body, tabletops, doors, walls etc.; you get the picture).

Another project we were involved with was amplifying step dancers using Big Shot transducers.

And there was this bottle tree we once built for a trade show, 1 full octave of precisely tuned bottles with Hot Spot transducers attached, hanging on a rack, to be played with a mallet. Other projects involved amplifying sound sculptures, engine vibration measurements, language sound analyzing via a transducer close to the larynx and of course the “every day” K&K Custom Shop orders.

I guess that all those endeavors have widened my horizon in respect to pickup design and I am glad that we did every single one of those “crazy” projects.

Signing off,
The Dieter