To my knowledge, I am the only person to use a chromatic “BOOM”whacker in his general music classes.  Their creation was a “fluke” that occurred as an accident one day, when I was just “messing” around.  After using “BOOM”whackers in class frequently, I found that one end would eventually lose their round tubular shape and become mis-shaped more into a kind of flatter “oval”.  Many years ago I bought a plastic “shelving” unit at Home Depot which I used for storage in my garage. After many years of use, and continually adding weight onto it, the shelves leaned further and further to the right, and eventually just collapsed.  I do not know why I kept the tubing that held up each shelf in the broken unit, but I did.  I also somehow discovered this tubing was just slightly smaller in circumference as the tubing of each “BOOM”whaker, and fit snuggly inside each “BOOM”tube. 

                When one end would become “mis-shaped” after a certain period of time, placing one of these tubes inside the “BOOM”whacker, and letting is sit overnight, would re-shape the tube into its original “round” shape.  This was especially a problem with the longer “BOOM”tubes.  One day I had set up two mis-shaped “BOOM”whackers with two of the “re-shaping” tubes, and I was walking across my room, to put them in their container for the night, I just started “whacking” them on my thigh.  Each pitch sounded considerably lower.  As I continued messing around with them, I discovered, by changing the length of the tube placed inside the “BOOM”whacker could recreate a chromatic scale, of up to a minor 6^th, on any single pitched “BOOM”whacker tube.  Rather than buying a set of “BOOM”whackers and getting ONLY one pitch in each chromatic scale, I could create like 4 to 5 “C” pitches, and/or 4 to 5 “G” pitches, from that one chromatic set of “BOOM”whackers.  Rather than only being able to use two students in my class performing on two tubes designated for the needed pitches, I could double up on each part, being able to use 8 to 10 students on those same two pitches in each class.  As you can see, it got a lot more students involved in the classroom activity, for a lot less money.

                I made some of these “Trom”BOOMS” (as I called them) tunable.  By using a keyboard and my ear, I would match each chromatic note, and then mark that pitches location creating a white ring (using “white-out”) around the black inserted tube.  In addition, I took some white medical tape and also wrapped it around each ring marking, making a “ridge” which created a “click” sound for each “half step” the sliding “Trom”BOOM” was adjusted.   I would base these adjustable tubes on the “C” boom tube, and if I needed more than one pitch from that single “C” tube, I taught the students how to quickly “re-tune” their “BOOM”whacker by adjusting the “Trom”BOOM” to the desired pitch location visually, or just counting the correct number of “clicks”.  This allowed each single player to cover multiple pitches, if and when it was needed.  Weird I know, but it worked!

Sincerely,

Rich Moon