UPRIGHT BONG-TONES
…So called because it has a bongy sort of tone. This instrument has twelve upright bars of spring steel, a half-inch wide and .039” thick. They’re rigidly mounted at the bottom in two rows with magnetic pickups between. The preferred playing method is fingernail plucking near the bottom. This excites the bongy tone with lots of inharmonic modes sounding together, but with one mode strong enough to stand out as an identifiable pitch. The plucking also sets the bars to swaying, and this creates a gentle tremolo as they move closer to and farther from the pickups. They’re tuned diatonically from Bb2 to F3.