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Photos by Sydney Cromwell.
William MacGavin with one of the more than 200 didgeridoos he has carved. MacGavin has been playing and making the wooden instruments since he was a teenager.
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Photos by Sydney Cromwell.
William MacGavin with one of the more than 200 didgeridoos he has carved. MacGavin has been playing and making the wooden instruments since he was a teenager.
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Photos by Sydney Cromwell.
Each didgeridoo can have a different shape or length, and William MacGavin decorates them by painting, burning, inlaying stones and other techniques.
William MacGavin’s back porch is lined with didgeridoos — long and short, crooked and straight, painted and burned and inlaid with precious stones.
In his lifetime, MacGavin has made more than 200 of these wooden instruments, and the sounds they can make vary from the traditional “drone” to a more modern, beatboxing-style sound.
“I like to experiment and create sounds that aren’t traditionally played on the didgeridoo and see what kind of new techniques I could come up with and then share that with the global didgeridoo community,” said MacGavin, who moved to Glen Iris from Tuscaloosa in June.
The didgeridoo is a wind instrument that originated with the Aboriginal people of Australia, though instruments crafted in the traditional style are often known by other names such as “yidaki.” It is played by vibrating the lips against the mouthpiece, using the vocal cords, diaphragm and mouth shape to change the rhythm and sound.
Experienced didgeridoo players can produce sound constantly through a process called circular breathing, MacGavin said, taking small breaths through the nose while continuing to blow air out the mouth.
“It’s completely driven by the player and their techniques and their control over their respiratory system to find out what sounds and what textures can be played,” he said, adding that use of the vocal cords is like “a small didgeridoo in your throat.”
He has also developed a method of playing he calls “reverse droning,” which is making sounds while inhaling through the mouth.
MacGavin is a native of Temecula, California, and his first experience with the didgeridoo came at 11 years old when his sister received one as a gift.
“I was just super interested in it,” he said. “I had to sneak into her room a lot to play her didgeridoo.”
He made his first one out of a PVC pipe, then learned to make them from the dried out stalks of yucca plants that were native to his hometown. His first yucca didgeridoo still sits in the shed in his backyard, surrounded by finished and in-progress instruments, as well as wood seasoning before it is carved.
MacGavin created the Didgeridoo Collaborative in high school and found mentors among other craftsmen to understand the instrument’s sounds and carving techniques. While a student at University of Alabama, he put together a special curriculum to learn about the physics of sound design.
“I’ve learned from lots of great players and crafters along my journey for the didgeridoo,” MacGavin said.
In 2016, MacGavin decided to turn his hobby into a professional endeavor, creating MacGavin Woodworks to sell his completed instruments. He makes didgeridoos not only out of yucca plants but also other woods that he collects locally. His only rule is that he won’t cut down living wood — he relies on finding fallen or dead limbs.
A completed didgeridoo takes between 15 and 50 hours to create, including hollowing out the inside, creating the mouthpiece and end cap, covering it in resin and decorating it. Because some hardwoods have to season for about three years before he begins carving, MacGavin said each didgeridoo is “a pretty big time commitment.”
“It’s just so open to interpretation and there’s just so much creativity in the crafting,” he said.
One of his favorites is an instrument made from an agave plant that has two sharp bends in the wood.
“It’s weird; it’s different. It didn’t follow a natural growth pattern. And you can see where it broke from either a storm, or the wind was too hard or something knocked it over, and it corrected itself,” MacGavin said.
As MacGavin has developed a name within the didgeridoo crafting community, he has been invited to perform, speak and display his work at conferences, as well as to teach children around the U.S. about the culture and sound mechanics behind the instrument. And although he teaches about the history of the didgeridoo, MacGavin said it’s important to him that he doesn’t play in traditional aboriginal styles because he doesn’t have that cultural background.
“In that same line of respect, I try not to play aboriginal sounding techniques or traditional, hard-tongue didgeridoo. That style and method of playing is used to tell stories about their culture,” MacGavin said. “Being someone not from that culture and not understanding what those sounds mean to the people there, I don’t feel comfortable mimicking something I don’t understand.”
He has played the didgeridoo with progressive rock and jazz bands, as well as with the Masterworks Symphony Chorale in Georgia and a 500-person crowd at the Houston Museum of Natural Science. At one concert, he recalled one “old lady headbanging in the crowd” that shared his excitement for the instrument.
Locally, he’s performed at Art on the Rocks, Birmingham’s Got Potential, the Aga Khan Foundation 5K and taught a course at the Alabama Folk School in October.
MacGavin is also known to carry a didgeridoo with him while tubing, hiking and caving. He often will practice by waterfalls, though he recalls having to throw one of his didgeridoos off a waterfall and retrieve it at the bottom to make it easier to climb down.
“I like to travel by ear and seek out interesting sounding places,” he said.
Learn more about MacGavin’s carving work on his Facebook page, facebook.com/macgavinwoodworks.
