I’m a big fan of unusual and home­brew instru­ments. In fact I’m mak­ing a cajon (also known as a box drum) right now, which I’ll post a walk-through and plans for when I’m done. For all of you that share this inter­est in the DIY­ers that add to the musi­cal may­hem in the world, I’ve assem­bled some links for you.

For some­thing weird and won­der­ful, go to Exper­i­men­tal Musi­cal Instru­ments. Be sure to go to the Tools & Ref­er­ence sec­tion to get help on mak­ing your own won­der­ful cre­ation. Along the same lines, go to Odd­stru­ment, a blog that col­lects exam­ples of awe­some instruments.

At Bash the Trash you can learn about mak­ing instru­ments from mate­ri­als you might just recycle.

Got some left over PVC pipe from that con­struc­tion project? Plas­tic Sound will show you what to do with it.

At Apol­los Axes you can pur­chase nearly any instru­ment made in the world. Not weird per se, but unusual. Though a lit­tle on the weird side, you can buy a metal­lic pink vio­lin. I’m not sure how it sounds, but man, you’d be pretty flashy onstage.

For the museum expe­ri­ence go see The Aston­ish­ing World of Musi­cal Instru­ments.

Using ice to build your instru­ment may seem fool­ish, but Terje Isungset went ahead and did it any­ways. Now the world has an ice harp.

Reach­ing back into his­tory is some inter­est­ing musi­cal automata. Long before MIDI there were drums with spokes or punched roll-paper. That’s how they did it old school. I like the auto­matic banjo.

Tags: Creativity, DIY, Fun, Instruments

This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 29th, 2009 at 11:55 pm and is filed under Everything Else. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.