This is a very didgeridooistic didgeridoo article, a technical construction,  that I believe only the bravest of the long didgeridoo seekers can go through However, if you do, you will gain yourself a brand new honour in the eyes of the deep didgeridoos.

I see it has become sort of a trend in didgeridoo world (at least in certain parts of world) to make longer and longer tube to play. It is a nice change, after the era of phobia of long didgeridoos that are “slow” and “low” and only for “meditative” playing. However it is maybe now good time to take a good look at it again, not to go far with a broken car..
I would like to reflect upon three different aspects of longest didgeridoo family. They come from three different periods. First one is from playing practice, second is from solo recording, third is from recording with a band – Druyd.

1. Days of solo practice. When I first started to play longer and longest didgeridoo instruments, I did that with normal didgeridoos, taped together. I joined everything that could be joined, and found only very few combinations that actually made sense. I used PVC tubes only to prolong further the long didgeridoos… I found that cylindrical extensions in the beginning worked quite well. Later, I have built only PVC didgeridoos so I can get a feeling how 10+ meter didges behave and sound like. Problem was that cylindrical structure of PVC, even if carefully assembled in progression of width, was too rough to feel the true nature of long didgeridoo. I believe it was for two reasons.

First is that consecutive cylindrical parts of half a meter or one meter are not working acoustically close enough, and in a way efficient enough – the way conical tubes do.
Second reason might be that thin PVC material cannot withstand the power and frequency of big long didgeridoo drone, and it gets dissipated through the instrument walls.
It resulted so that these didgeridoos never excelled in playability or tone quality… I could have probably found some interesting toot relations, but I wasn’t motivated at that time doing it like that…

I know it is difficult to find long didgeridoos, or ones that can be assembled, but it is really worth it if you look for the wonders of deep didgeridoo world.

2.I discovered problems the first time I wanted to put live sound to a higher level during my performance “This illusion”. It was one year after “Storytellingstories”. I got some nice preamps to use as outboard of mixing desk and I brought many nice condenser microphones. The only instrument giving me real questions was the longest didgeridoo, 7 meter with a horn. I had two really good sound engineers with me, on a sound check in a great theatre hall that lasted for half of the day. It seemed in the beginning that we had problem because of the end horn, the sound was muddy, and not punchy enough. But it turned out to be more of a transient problem.  It is partly concerning micing positions and number of microphones, and it is partly in the essence of every long didgeridoo. Sound waves have to bounce long way back and forth until they reach stable position of a standing wave, and that lasts longer than in normally sized instruments. Also the sustain of these instruments is really big.

In a way it is like driving a truck. If you have a good truck, with strong engine, it will go fast, but everything you do affects big mass. So it is more difficult to accelerate, more difficult to break, and when it gets carried away a bit, you have different ways of manouvering it, you have to use the momentum smartly to get it back on track. This is relatively ok when you are alone in the road, but what happens when there are other vehicles around you?

3. Now we come to the most recent story – from recording of Druyd’s first album (soon to be out:-). There is one song “Daorson” which includes a 4,3 meter D didge. Lately I’ve been changing it with a B didge for convenience of rehearsals… B is the first toot of the long D didgeridoo, so it made sense. And so we practiced with shorter instrument for some time, so the song got new inside rules, and curves… On the recording, I recorded both didgeridoos. With B didgeridoo I had no problem. But when I recorded D didgeridoo, I noticed a very peculiar phenomena when I listened to the recording. Everything sounded as if played with latency/delay. It is due to the fact that it takes longer time for longer didgeridoo to generate sound, it creates a larger mass, and then the sustain keeps it alive for a long time – relatively speaking. In solo performance it can go unnoticed, but in tight rhythmic playing with other instruments, even higher didgeridoos, it is revealed.

What is the conclusion? One has to be aware of this. With practice it is possible to acquire enough skills to be able to play “forward” just right to compensate the latency of a long didgeridoo. It has a certain charm of its own, and one can not regard it as simply positive or negative issue. It also makes playing long tubes more challenging. Just when you thought you got it,

you understood

that deeper inside wood

you must reach,

and with invisible tentacles

feel and navigate

the massive vessel

of deepest sounds…

Enjoy your sound sea journey!

I would like to tell you a story of a didgeridoo creature a bit neglected by its surrounding, but with some qualities so amazing that it solely can reach some places of spaces.
It starts in the Earth environment, somewhere at the seaside where agaves grow. There was a stick so tiny and slick that it would surely be overlooked by a didgeridoo hunting man or woman who knows what she or he is doing. Fortunately, I did not know what I was doing, so I took it home. And as it is usually not the case it was on a surgery desk for making didgeridoo quite soon.
Now all the doctors in my head gathered, scratched their beard and murmured… What could this be… how to make a didgeridoo out of this? We played a lot of long sticks, but never so tiny as this…
And as presence and practice were the best teachers available, ever, at all times, there was a revealing and astonishing first blow. There was a very natural feeling of much greater resonance than one would expect from this little long stick. And the easy silky toots…
It is a 235cm long didgeridoo in F#. The first 8 toots of it are: A#, F#, C, E, G, A#, C#, E
It is nice to play acoustically, BUT where it really shines through are its amazing dances in front of a microphone. Yes, dances is a good word, this didge taught me a lot about various microphone usages and new possibilities of didgeridoo sound. It was first played on Korvo Eksaltiko, and it was really a revealing experience. I believe this didgeridoo, called The Needle didge because of its appearance, has strong place in didgeridoo spectrum.
In short, it has very very nice bass which is deep and can be articulated well. It has enormous crazibilites of toots. The timbre is special and nice, non obtrusive, but powerful. It has smaller dynamic range which suits close miking better. The instrument is dynamically inert in the best sense of it. It can go, but only when you press acceleration pedal hard. There is no way to hurt yourself, microphone, or somebody in the audience accidentally. And it is still in the size that can fit in most places.
I tried to make a copy of it for travelling, but I missed one toot a bit. You could say no big deal, but it puts me to minor scale instead of major, so it can be a big deal, or it can be not, depending on what you want. But I realized many things from and about this instrument, and it will be found in the stories to come…
The point of this little story lies in the fact that something completely new cannot be in something already well known. Things come in their forms unexpectedly, and they do ask for some attention to be discovered….
Well… you know… how it goes… I wish you good luck.

Many things are changing in the didgeridoo world. I notice more and more players enjoy the richness of the deep didgeridoo underworld. I have some new ideas, and works about it, so hopefully it will inspire you in some way that will surprise me later.
There are two aspects what I would like to talk about.
The Joint and The Model.
Since the beginning of my long didgeridoo journey, like everyone who has done it, I’ve had a question how to assemble didgeridoos together. Of course, this is solvable in many ways, and some are much better than the other.
Let’s see the list of things that must be respected.
1. The point is that we can release the joint and disassemble the didge
2. The joint must be airtight
3. It must be either firm enough not to break when force is applied on one end, or flexible
4. Visually acceptable for live performances. So no nude people holding your didgeridoo tight.
5. Doable in reasonable amount of time, otherwise you lose the will to practice or perform.

So far I’ve done it in at least 4 different ways…
First. The tape joint. That is very simple to do, and it works. It is good that it is like that so anyone can try deep didges, not only (successful) rocket scientists.
Second. I made an epoxy/fiberglass joint. For a C didge i played in intro of Storytellingstories. Of course the joint wasn’t perfect enough and I still had to use tape. Only this time, only very little.
Third. The screws joint. It was done for the 10 meter didgeridoo for Storytellingstories. It had some rubber for sealing the joint. But it still needed some tape at some places. And the problem was that the joint was breaking under huge mass of 10 meter didgeridoo. So the whole didge had to be supported on many places during and after assembly.
Fourth. The inox joint. The new joint. It seems to work.

To do the model with some sense demanded a certain amount of didgeridoo experience.

But what does it take to make a deep instrument. Let’s do a little maths.
Let’s say (define) deep didgeridoo is the one which has a basic drone about an octave below “normal” didgeridoo and has at least one toot that sounds like a ‘normal’ didgeridoo. First point of deep instruments where I found it reaches some acoustical satisfaction is around 4 meters. The shape of it is around 20cm at the bell. If you look at that instrument, it has about 3 times the length, 2 times the width in both directions. 3×2x2 = 12 times bigger volume than “normal” didge. So you have to take off and dig out 12 times more wood…How does it sound? It sounds like you will not have many of those didges to try.
So what I did at some point, I took my collection of didgeridoos and made almost every possible joint that made even a bit sense. I found only three didges that made sense. But one made especially lots of sense. It is the combination of g/g# didgeridoo (long conical) I often play  in a duo with Marko Ritoša (Kongoh, Rescribi, Ljubičasto), and the fourth wooden part of 10 meter didgeridoo, a big resonator box. I will not go in details now why I like this sound so much, but I will give you an example;
Arhanđeo svega čudnog
Do you understand?

I have thought about it before, but the final impulse was the gig at JT festival, where I could not go by car, and I do not take my “original” didges to planes. The idea was to copy it, but intentionally not perfectly- otherwise I can’t learn enough from it. I had a bit more work that I thought it would be. For example, I decided to do a perfect joint without going to a metal turner. And it took me three days of work. I found out one thing; inox is sort of a HARDISH material. A bit resistant to any physical changes. So I first changed the his mentality, explaining him that he will be a very important “sound holder”- and this, off course,  is why this joint now works.

The sound. Well – it is what i hoped for. Very similar quality. Bit different sound properties. I still have some work to make it proper, and some ideas that I hope that will work that would make it more versatile. I will need a bit of Heaven’s help and it will be done in no-time.

I will present the sound when the tube comes from the workshop as I have no mean to record there properly.