Wintergatan – Marble Machine
2016 · Directed by Hannes Knutsson
5M Likes
Best comments
1.“Teacher: Look, playing with marbles in class won't get you anywhere in life. Him, 10 years later...”
More comments
- 2.“Takes a lot of balls to play this instrument...”
- 3.“People: 'What instrument do you play?' Him: 'A whole band.'”
The story
Martin Molin of the Swedish band Wintergatan figured building a music machine would take a couple of months. It took more than a year. The result is a hand-cranked wooden contraption with about 3,000 parts that drops around 2,000 steel marbles onto a vibraphone, a bass guitar and a cymbal, with contact microphones faking the kick drum, hi-hat and snare. The song is programmed on two wheels built from Lego Technic. Molin designed nearly every piece in 3D software and made it by hand.
The idea came from a visit to the Museum Speelklok in Utrecht, a museum of self-playing instruments, and from an online community of marble machine builders. The video, filmed and edited by Hannes Knutsson, is just Molin cranking and flipping switches while marbles do the drumming. It went up in March 2016 and has passed 270 million views.
The catch: it has to be taken apart to move, so it couldn't tour. Molin started a bigger touring version, the Marble Machine X, then shelved it at the end of 2021 because it wasn't reliable enough, and in 2022 started over on a third machine. The original one got shown back at the Speelklok museum where the whole idea started. Full circle, one marble at a time.
