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Marble-Machine

A musician by the proper name of Martin Molin, from the Swedish band Wintergatan, has created and built an amazing musical instrument he calls the Marble Auto — and you won't believe how good it sounds.

The finished production contains ii,000 marbles and 3,000 parts, and Molin says information technology took 14 months to build. He designed the machine around several musical instruments, most prominently a vibraphone that's activated when the marbles hit the bars. There's also an integrated electric bass guitar where the machine plucks the strings, and then the human operator plays the frets. As the machine plays music, information technology recycles the marbles then that they are used once again and again throughout. The machine also contains a built-in Turkish crash cymbal and some other percussion, along with a giant "breakdown" arm that grinds the automobile to a quick halt whenever desired.

To create the Marble Auto, Molin handcrafted all of the wooden parts, routing mechanisms, funnels to catch the marbles, and countless other pieces. As Molin worked on the project, he posted YouTube videos along the style showing his progress, and how certain parts of the machine were conceived, made, and refined. I've integrated some of the videos in this mail service, merely they're all worth watching. If you're simply going to watch one, though, watch the concluding music video beneath: Fifty-fifty the song is excellent.

My biggest question when watching the music video, aside from the astonishment at how beautifully the machine was engineered and how good it "sounded," was exactly that latter signal: How is Molin getting such produced, mixed, and mastered audio out of what must be the world's largest woods-and-metal rattletrap of components? If you've always recorded a ring or your own instrument playing, yous know how tricky it is to get a decent live sound in a room. It most seems imitation, similar the music was produced somewhere else and the video was made to look similar the machine was playing the diverse parts of the song when it wasn't.

It turns out it'due south absolutely real. What's happening here is that Molin set up upwardly a serial of microphones effectually the instrument to record the kicking drum, the vibraphone, the room ambience, and and so on as he played. Each microphone is recording onto a separate track on a computer running Apple tree Logic Pro. The reason the sound is coming out pristine is that he's processing the recorded sound of each instrument in real time, so what y'all're hearing is the terminal "mixed" result, over again in real time.

For example, as he shows in the higher up video, the kick drum is candy in Apple Logic Pro with a series of plug-ins that 'gate' (or mute) the background clanging and clicking from the machine whenever the kick pulsate isn't sounding. Molin also added EQ, compression, some overdrive, and other tweaks to make it audio like a existent, and highly processed, boot drum. In the video, you tin see about a minute in where he fades out the camera sound (which has all the marble rolling and metallic racket y'all'd expect) and fades in the recorded sound. Then he shows specifically how he takes out the groundwork noise of the automobile using a racket gate plug-in. The next part of the same video shows one instance of how he programs the parts; it's basically like a giant music box, with the plastic pegs hitting hammers that then play notes equally Molin mitt-cranks the giant wheel.

This goes on throughout; you can run into that the machine is plucking the bass guitar strings, but that Molin is playing the fretboard with one hand while he turns the main creepo with his other hand.

The finished music video is clearly polished in the visual department as well, and for that he brought in Swedish filmmaker Hannes Knutsson. "When nosotros started filming, nosotros knew we wanted to film the auto against as make clean a background equally possible to give the viewer a gamble of seeing how the machine works," Molin said. They concluded up using floor paint protection newspaper, like you'd use to protect the floor of a room while painting, to make the white background. Really, in that location's also much to go into in one commodity, and so be sure to check out the finished music video higher up and the making-of summary video beneath.