BLOW QUALITY

Two tone. Uruguay to everywhere.

The horn section
is kazoos.

Blow Quality is a ska cover band. We did not hire horns. We hand them out.

… people in the horn section.
Every one of them has a number.
Get your number Hear yourself as a horn

Try it now

Hum into your microphone.

A kazoo does not amplify your voice. It changes it. Hold the button and hum, and you come out the other side as a horn section. Put headphones on first. That part is not a suggestion, and the button will not let you until you have.

Headphones required.

We turn echo cancellation off, because it strangles exactly the buzzing tone a kazoo lives on. That means your speakers feed straight back into your microphone, and it sounds like a fire alarm having a breakdown.

Your audio never leaves this page. Nothing is recorded, nothing is uploaded.

Fig. 1

The kazoo is a serious instrument.

It is a membranophone. It has no reed, no keys, and no fingering. It cannot play a melody you cannot sing, which makes it the most honest instrument ever built.

A labelled diagram of a kazoo: turret cap, membrane, tone chamber, barrel, mouthpiece, and the end that is not the mouthpiece.
A single kazoo lit like a museum piece against a black background.
One dollar. No reed, no keys, no fingering. It has been manufactured in Eden, New York since 1916, which is longer than most genres have existed.

How to play

  1. 1
    Do not play it backwards. The wide end goes in your mouth. The most-viewed kazoo photo on the internet has this wrong, which is why it is step one and not step three.
  2. 2
    Hum. Do not blow. Blowing produces nothing whatsoever, which is how most people conclude their kazoo is broken. It is not broken. You are exhaling.
  3. 3
    Enjoy. That is the whole method. There is no step four and there is no advanced technique. You already know how to play.

The band

Three of us. Then everybody else.

Blake sings. Martin plays guitar. Vic plays bass. Everyone is required to play kazoo at some point, including us, including the guests, including you.

We started in Uruguay and we are collecting musicians as we go. Guests are not a bonus, they are the design. If you play something, you are in. If you play nothing, you are still in, because we will hand you a kazoo at the door.

Every guest musician gets a number, same as everyone else. There is no green room.

Three rude boys in suits and pork pie hats on a checkerboard floor, each playing a kazoo, with a guitar and a bass slung over their shoulders.

The set

Songs written for horns, played on plastic.

We are fans first. Every one of these was written by someone we love, and every horn line in them is now somebody's job in the crowd.

The closer

Nite Klub

Goldfinger covering The Specials, covered by us, on kazoos. A 2 Tone song passed down two generations and handed to a room full of people holding plastic instruments. Everything about this band is in that one track.

Induction

Join the horn section.

You get a number. The number is yours forever, and it is the number printed on the kazoo we hand you at the show. Bring it. Play it. Badly is fine.

Two musicians in suits and pork pie hats on a Montevideo rooftop at golden hour, one on guitar and one playing a kazoo, the Rio de la Plata behind them.

Origin

It started on a rooftop.

Montevideo, the Rio de la Plata going gold behind us, a guitar, and a decision that the horn section was optional but the upstroke was not.

Ska has always been a covers genre. The first Jamaican ska records were reworkings of American R&B picked up off the radio. We are doing the same thing with worse equipment and more people.