Howwwwww Nifty: Wintergatan

Starting off this article with a tease, a sizzle, a taste if you will….. this is simply a pianist reacting to WINTERGATAN (which, if I’m being honest…… not sure if that’s the artist or the machine—maybe both?). I discovered this channel yesterday and went down a rabbit whole and I must say: I’m impressed. While I was perusing this content I also came across a video of Mark Rober and a talking piano, literally, but that’s another subject for another day… in the meantime CONTINUE READING for the low down

Wintergatan (Swedish pronunciation:[ˈvɪ̂nːtɛrˌɡɑːtan], "the Milky Way", lit. '"the Winter Street"') is a Swedish folktronica band from Gothenburg. Two of their members—Martin Molinand Marcus Sjöberg—were previously part of the former band Detektivbyrån. —source: WIKIPEDIA

Ok so I fibbed a little bit. As mentioned above WINTERGATAN is the band and I knew that from doing research for this article. Even though the link is above here’s the WIKIPEDIA entry for the band.

 Between December 2014 and March 2016, the band uploaded several YouTube videos featuring Martin Molin documenting the construction of a music box that uses marbles to play instruments. — source: WIKIPEDIA

As you can see a hand crank is the power source of this magnificent and magic marvel of marble majesty (suck it alliteration! Haha) so tempo is manually adjustable, similar to old timey hand crank cameras. But yeah…. Hand crank powers machine which distributes marbles through tubes and routes. Once these marbles cycle and drop they acces various built in instruments including, but not always limited to:  a vibraphone, bass guitar, cymbal, an emulated kick drum, high hat and snare drum sounds

I’m always a sucker for an artist that is also an engineer. This is incredible, Beyond Being a musical instrument this thing is also an engineering marvel. Just watch a few videos of go give the channel a SUBSCRIBE ON YOUTUBE. 

After the success of the video series on their YouTube another machine was commissioned but ultimately abandoned for practical reasons (bummer)

Martin Molin stopped building the MMX at the end of 2021 after realizing the design would not be robust or reliable enough to go on tour with. The first two machines have been donated to a museum for mechanical music machines in Germany called "Siegfried's Mechanical Music Cabinet" and in March 2022 he started to design a third version, with the series name being called Martin vs the Machine. —source: source: WIKIPEDIA