SNAMM08: Bogdon Cardboard-Box Bass

SNAMM08: Bogdon Cardboard-Box Bass - the Director's Cut

US Inventor Chris Badynee gets out of his box! 30/06/08

No flash plug

MP4

9:40 mins

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I've said it before, but some of the most interesting and inspiring things you come across at trade shows are towards the periphery of the halls... away from the Big-Money glitzy mega-stands... in the realm of the tiny booths with the Little Guys with Big Dreams... And it's there more often than not, that you'll find true genius, inspiration, and I guess what some might call the spirit of the real American Dream. Ok, okay, forgive my wordy indulgences for a second here... but it's something I really do feel strongly about. The big names in the industry serve a real and vital purpose, often pushing the bounds of technology and science to bring us interesting new developments in the world of music.
But sometimes it falls to driven, inspired individuals to give us a creation which would *never* come out of the boardrooms... ...and such a thing is the Bogdon Cardboard Box Bass - a bastard love-child of ingenuity, adversity and musical passion :-) I'll let the video, and inventor Chris Badynee speak for themselves, but here's a tiny bit of back-story as to how a mail-man from Detroit came to be shipping cardboard boxes (and a great deal of fun) around the planet. Story goes that there was a fire in the Badynee household, and the insurance company send round builders to replace the floor.
Builders being builders, they chucked all the old flooring, and the cardboard boxes the new wood came in, into the garden.
And bass-players being bass-players, Chris reckoned he could make something musical with it. With weed-whacker twine for strings, the first cardboard-box bass was born. At a family reunion, it turned out that there was some in-house expertise in acoustics and electronics, so Dave, Mark and Aeden helped tweak and improve it. A video of the bass on YouTube spawned more hits than they could believe... so the Bogdon Box Bass was born. The first little news piece we did during the show got a lot of interest, so now I'm back home, here's a bit more video for you - I hope you enjoy watching it as much as I did filming it :-) Andy Mac