Seriously Heavy Metal

Craft & Design Music
Seriously Heavy Metal

shone

Engineer and musician Tristan Shone conceives and machines instruments that look more at home in a factory than a rock venue and extrude deep, dark sounds rich with texture and emotion. We chatted with him about engineering versus art, the trials of fabrication, and industrial fetishes.

Goli Mohammadi: You started out as a one-man heavy metal band. Tell us how you transitioned to making your own instruments.

Tristan Shone: I had gotten rid of my previous band and went on my own, so I wrote sequence pieces that were basically for me playing guitar with all the bass and synth sequenced behind me. I would go and play live with that setup with a giant sound system, [but] it seemed like I needed to be more involved with the whole setup, like I needed to be basically in charge. It just felt kind of Milli Vanilli to me.

GM: How did you go from being a mechanical engineer to deciding to go to art school?

TS: I had been working for artists building installations while I was at RPI [Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute]. I met this guy Chris Csikszentmihรกlyi, who is now at the MIT Media Lab. He was the art professor but he was very technically oriented โ€” he knew how to program. He introduced me to microcontrollers, and he knew how to use CNC machines. He was also very interested in music, so I helped him with a couple of installations and traveled with him to a big festival. That kind of opened up this other world that was creative and technical yet kind of wacky, and the people were a little more fun to be around.

GM: When youโ€™re creating an instrument, does the sound dictate the design or vice versa?

TS: The whole time Iโ€™ve made music Iโ€™ve been interested in this certain type of rhythm and a certain drone-y sound, and Iโ€™m always chasing it.

Thereโ€™s also certain elements of industry that Iโ€™ve come across that I really like, like when things snap-fit, or how thereโ€™s a certain resistance you have on a wheel in a manual mill. It has a certain resistance that you canโ€™t really fake, so you have to actually make [the instrument] out of those materials. Sometimes Iโ€™ll just feel one of these things and think, โ€œThat would be a great way to feel the sound and really have that natural force feedback.โ€

Or something snaps and [I think], โ€œThat would be a really good drum sound if you had a lever that you move linearly and it just went chnk chnk.โ€ Itโ€™s really simple โ€” itโ€™s not dynamic like a violin, itโ€™s just like Iโ€™m moving this thing from there to there โ€” but itโ€™s totally satisfying. I think itโ€™s the combination of the sound coupled with that industrial fetish.

GM: Your instruments require significant force from the performer. Does your experience playing them translate to the audience?

TS: With the older instruments [Drone Machines], youโ€™re really used to sweating. My favorite combination is [moving] the wheel [Rotary Encoder] with the right hand and the Linear Actuator with the left hand. And sometimes you have to stand on the table to really rotate [the wheel] and get it up to the pitch that you need. If itโ€™s spinning at full speed and then I have to stop it, it kind of torques my body to actually stop it. I think people see that and they appreciate it.

GM: What tools do you use to design?

TS: Iโ€™ll sit and sketch and eventually come up with a general design in SolidWorks, which is like a look and a feel, and then start getting really detailed, figuring out if itโ€™s affordable, and how much of it can I make myself. And then from SolidWorks on to Mastercam for each part, if Iโ€™m gonna do it on a CNC. Some of the parts are on CNC and some are on a water jet.

GM: How do you choose your materials?

TS: Thereโ€™s a sculptor named Matt Hope, and he and I built some speakers together. He was

a big proponent of stainless steel because it was a material that you donโ€™t have to paint, donโ€™t have to coat, it never rusts, and itโ€™s super strong, and so I bought into that because aluminum bends. But after building some stuff out of steel on the last machines, itโ€™s just not feasible to tour with. You cannot carry stainless steel stuff around.

GM: How heavy are your instruments?

TS: The wheel is like 300 or 400 pounds. The first tour I went on, I went up to Portland, and my friend and I carried that up some stairs, along with all the speakers. When you first start playing, youโ€™re like, โ€œNo, I want to show everything.โ€ And as you go on, youโ€™re like, โ€œActually, Iโ€™m gonna start making things out of aluminum.โ€

The newer devices are basically a reaction to traveling. I wanted to make smaller dynamic things that are within these limits. Itโ€™s really nice to have limits like that. Itโ€™s like, OK, I have a size restriction, I have a weight restriction. If you donโ€™t have any limits, it takes you forever โ€” you can never make any decisions.

GM: Whatโ€™s going on in your laptop?

TS: Well, itโ€™s kind of sad, but everything. In my final [thesis] project, in front of all the professors, I kicked out the USB cable and it crashed my computer and I couldnโ€™t perform. I couldnโ€™t restart my computer and it was the most embarrassing thing. It was the first performance I ever did for the faculty. You have all this stuff and people expect it to do something and actually itโ€™s all communicating over the laptop.

Theyโ€™re essentially MIDI controllers โ€” these things control software synthesizer sounds or samples. So like the Headgear, although I am using my voice through it, I can trigger whatever sample I want. And the wheel, I can record a whistle and control it with the wheel and that totally would work. Itโ€™s just a serial command off the Arduino through the MIDI and then to Ableton or Reason or whatever, so without that thereโ€™s no sound. I just decided at some point that I like electronic music. Iโ€™m not an acoustic person. I like drum and bass, and dub, and this is my world and those are the sounds I want to create.

Read the full interview and hear Author and Punisher: makezine.com/22/tristanshone

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I'm a word nerd who loves to geek out on how emerging technology affects the lexicon. I was an editor on the first 40 volumes of MAKE, and I love shining light on the incredible makers in our community. In particular, covering art is my passion โ€” after all, art is the first thing most of us ever made. When not fawning over perfect word choices, I can be found on the nearest mountain, looking for untouched powder fields and ideal alpine lakes.

Contact me at snowgoli@gmail.com or via @snowgoli.

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