Buying gamelan instrumets

In possibly one of the most exciting and enjoyable days of my entire life, today we went with our teacher Mas Darsono to see gamelan maker Mas Cokrik and talk about buying some instruments. A ten-minute taxi ride from Cakra Homestay brought us to a rather quieter part of the city, where we were welcomed into Mas Cokrik's front room. We chatted over our shopping list, with Mas Darsono helping translate.

After a while we popped across the road to his storeroom, where he started by pulling out a couple of really great looking ciblons, one in particular really heavy, from nangka wood, the best, and a little hard to get these days. We looked at the various spare parts we needed, then he brought out a set of gender keys, for which I think he will make the casing. Basically, he is at the final end of the making chain, doesn't do the bronze work, but puts the instruments together and, crucially, tunes them.

So, my mission now is to find somewhere I can burn .mp3 files to CD so that he can hear our tuning; I never thought that would be so hard or I would have done it before I left!

Wouldn't be right to discuss the prices in public, I think, but we readily agreed to the price which he suggested, which seemed a good deal from our end and is presumably a good deal from his end also. To round the day off, we hopped on the back of a couple of motorbikes driven by the two guys and went to see the gong factory. Who had stopped forging for the day, so we're going back there on Thursday.

I'm gonna spend every day of my life now buying gamelan instruments; this rocks!

(Oh, Mags is a little better, but need to wait and see. If headache reccurs tomorrow, back to the hospital I think.)

(Oh, oh and, I've memorised the ladrang drumming for Wilujeng, and I nearly managed to get through the whole thing from memory today in a play-through.)