Piano tuner Grant Sorlie uses a sledge hammer to tune his fine instruments: not the Steinways and Baldwins of his day job, but the steel drums he creates from 55-gallon containers.
It's noisy work as he pounds on the drums with an array of sledges and ballpeen hammers. That's what it takes to produce the dished areas and bumps that render melodic tones most people can't describe."It's like an . . . organ?" is what most people say when comparing the sound to something they know. It's just so startlingly different from the plonky-plonk, whanging noise they expect.
Making music with a 55-gallon drum may sound unlikely to Montanans, but it's not strange in the Caribbean nation of Trinidad, where they originated. There, steel drums have a history that calls to mind the popular Christmas song, "The Little Drummer Boy," whose gift to the Christ child was the rum-pa-pum-pum of his drum.
In the late 1800s, children in Trinidad organized neighborhood drumming groups. But their drums were banned because the government thought they were passing subversive messages. When they made stomping tubes out of bamboo, the government stopped that practice, too, so they resorted to banging on biscuit tins and garbage cans.
It didn't take too long to discover that the resulting dented and dished metal could be tuned. So when wartime brought 55-gallon drums as raw material, the unstoppable musicians thought they were in heaven.
"It's the only acoustic instrument that's been invented in this century," said Sorlie, who caught the excitement of the Trinidad musicians when he built a steel drum as part of a percussive arts class at Montana State University.
"I heard one, and I was hooked."
Ever since, he's had steel drums in the back of his mind and one in the works in his shop. And he's studied at length with Ellie Manette, a Trinidad-born expert who in his boyhood swam around fences to liberate the drums from dumps at U.S. Navy bases.
When Sorlie built his first crude drum, he found it deceptively easy to hammer a dish into the bottom of a drum and to create an array of bumps that make the notes.
"I could get it to look like a steel drum," but the sound was something else. "Tuning it is very involved."
He wasn't interested in creating off-key noises, he wanted a fine instrument.
"You have to develop your eye as well as your ear," he said.
He has to see that the contours of the dish and the shape of the tonal bumps are just right while listening to hear that the vibrations don't go awry.
"The key is separating them," he said, so that the vibrations don't creep from one tuned bump to part of the next, spoiling the sound.
He moves from heavy hammering to light taps to "tweak it in." An overdone note or bump can be redone by tapping from the other side, but too much of that weakens the metal.
"The smoother the better," he said, and it has become something of an obsession to create the finely tuned melodic notes that Manette gets.
"With a piano, I feel like a professional," he said, and with drum-making, he just feels frustrated. Still, he can't leave the drums alone, can't stop trying to reach the standard he's set for himself.
He plays the vibraphone semi-professionally with Mark Holston's band, but he doesn't play his own drums outside of his shop.
Helen Pilling does, with the Montana Tropical Marimba Band. Sorlie has made one drum as a gift for his brother and another that's on display at Coffee Traders, plus a few others.
But it's so hard for him to declare a steel drum finished, with the sounds just right, that he usually can't be coaxed to let one out of his shop.
"There's a sound in my head, and I'm still not there. But I'm going to keep plugging away at it."