He demonstrates the most basic principle of it…
These are just a few of the tongues the inventor of the daxophone Hans Reichel made, such beautiful shapes and different types of wood…
I bought some balsa wood and am going to try making a tongue from it - it is so light, intrigued to see how it influences the sound as most of those tongues look like hardwood… And as per a violin, viola, double bass etc the type & age of the wood must have huge bearing on the tonality. Will also try with some aluminium…
I reccomend a read of this PDF by Hans Reichel which covers building, playing techniques etc…
http://www.daxo.de/download/DaxInfo.pdf.zip
“Incidentally, you can, of course, make a daxophone out of any rigid material such as metal, acrylic glass etc. — but, unlike wood, these materials do not produce that versatility of sound. As for the species of wood, I assume there is at least one vague rule: light, not so dense woods with long bres (like spruce, pine, cedar, ash wood…) are normally loud, bright and crisp, and tend to shriek. Heavy and dense woods (many of the exotics, like rosewood, ebony, but also oak, maple) comparably sound more mellow, and the tones can be controlled more easily.
Last but not least, the shape of the strips matters a lot. As soon as you drill a largish hole somewhere, cut off a corner or sharpen an edge, the thing sounds different yet again. The tone quality as well as the basic pitches can also be altered by changing the depth of the strips. Making them thinner will lower the pitch and make them respond to the stroke of the bow more easily, but at the same time the tone will get weaker…”
