Hello everybody on HIVE and especially those of the Music Community! I am writing to you from Cape Town, South Africa. The two hobbies I tend to post the most about on HIVE are my music and song writing (usually performed these days with fellow HIVER 
Now usually when I get up on stage to play my/our own music or some covers, my main instruments are guitar (maybe with some pedals?), vocals, harmonica (played simultaneously on a rack) and, more recently, a stomp-box.
However, if that’s not enough, I do love to mess around at home with other interesting sounds on whatever zany instrument I can find… (or even make!) Because of this, I thought I would make a series of posts where I share live performances with more unusual instruments. Today I would like to post again on this topic:
PART 5 – The Rain-Stick
This is a relatively small rain-stick, but the concept is always the same
My friend Claire Mobey and I were set to play a gig at the Barleycorn Music Club last week. We have been performing together a bit over the last year, and have even started calling our duo “Mobey-Dick” (our two surnames but also alluding to the famous story about the whale!) We were going to start with a love song I have written to my hometown (Cape Town) called “Southbound Plane”.
In the song, I start with a soft guitar introduction, before building up the rhythm and strumming harder as we start to sing quite a vibey song.
I was thinking that it would be nice for Claire to add ambience to the performance while I am still doing the softer guitar intro… I then remembered that the song has the lyrics “summer wind, winter rain” to describe Cape Town. Wouldn’t it be nice if Claire could make wind and rain sounds during the introduction?
Well, wind would be easy – she would only need to blow softly on her microphone. But rain?
Well, you get a cool type of shaker called a rain-stick! I found one just in time at a hippie shop in a cool suburb of Cape Town called Kalk Bay - @jasperdick/wednesday-walk-finding-my-rain
How does it work? Well, it is a bamboo filled with some kind of shaker substance (like beads, dry rice or seeds). If you look closely, there are nails going through the bamboo that act like obstructions that slow down the shaker substance, kind of like an hourglass, to make it sound more like pouring rain than a shaker!
The beads are for decoration, but the nails holding them in place serve an important purpose, slowing down the shaker substance (Beads? Dry rice? Seeds?) to make a rain-like sound!
So, without any further ado, here was our first song of the evening: Southbound Plane. I hope you enjoy it!
(The video was taken by 
Lyrics:
"Well I…
I hear you calling…
Summer wind, winter rain…
And I…
I’m on the next plane
Home again, minutes remain!
Southbound Plane, take me home again
Southbound Plane, take me away
Southbound Plane, take me home again
And when I get back home, I hope I stay…
Well I…
I can see you…
Your blue waves crashing, on silver sands…
And I…
I can feel you…
You know this town, has my heart in its hands! (So…)
Southbound Plane, take me home again
Southbound Plane, take me away
Southbound Plane, take me home again
And when I get back home, I hope I stay…
Other tricks I used on this Song:
A stompbox that I can emphasise the beat on with my foot – it has a microphone inside to plug into the sound-desk, and with the bass turned up can resemble a kick drum!
My two-capo trick. I am really surprised that I don’t see other people do this. The second capo is a bit smaller (for an electric guitar) and leaves the top string open for the first capo. This allows me to have a deeper, fuller D-chord (in this case) or even a deeper, full C-chord if I space them 4 frets apart!
I'm quite happy with how the song came out. The audience at the Barleycorn are a wonderful, supportive, listening audience so that felt really great!
I look forward to showing a few more songs from that evening last week, as we work towards our next gig in about a month!
THE END