This length of bamboo was going to be a clarinet until it split all down its length, so I took some leftover bits of wire and aluminum tubing and a guitar string from the servo guitar and made this. The shape makes it almost impossible to hold and play at the same time, but eventually it sounds like this.
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The open tube shape gives a tiny bit of acoustic amplification out the ends, but it’s still not very loud.
A particularly ugly instrument today – a prototype, made mostly of hotglue, for an automatic slide guitar. It’s playing a test pattern which sounds like this.
The park near my house is a collection point for old christmas trees to be recycled. Someone dumped a bunch of bamboo in the pile (christmas bamboo?) so I grabbed a stalk and let it dry for a month. This bamboo really wants to split – in fact, I can hear the flute spontaneously disintegrating in the other room.
This is a Native-American-style flute (two chambers, with an external air passage connecting the two) made with guidance from Sammy Tedder’s page.
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Clay pots, wood, brass, and hardware. (The flower pots had a previous life as companions to Trumpet Marine!)
It’s a very windy day today so I wanted to make a windchime. Sorry about the sound quality, but, well, it’s windy. You can hear birds singing and other people’s windchimes in the background. It sounds like this.
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I wanted to play with some of the leftover wood from the laser whistles, so I stuck a contact microphone to it, strummed it with a guitar pick, and bowed it. The strumming was pretty dumb but the bowing is at least a little bit interesting. It sounds like this.
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While walking the dog I found a slab of marble in a heap of renovation trash. So of course I took it home and made a gong. Beaten with one wooden drumstick and one plastic-tipped drumstick, it sounds like this.
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I assembled six more whistles from the pieces I laser-cut yesterday. Six more to go — you can probably guess where this is going. (One of these eight is a prototype that’s not going to be part of the final set.)
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Laser-cut basswood and wood glue. I took a laser cutter class today at NYC Resistor and decided to make whistles based on the classic design of organ pipes. If you have a laser cutter of your own, you can download the plans here.
The wood’s not polished or stained, just burned a nice brown around the edges by the laser. It smells terrible.
I made two sizes of whistle; they sound like this.
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The Buddha Box is a little electronic gadget that plays any of 12 chants over and over again. I wired it up with a brass tablet and drumstick so I can play it like a drum– each hit switches to a new chant. (A little bit of conductive foam on the end of the drumstick muffles the tapping sound.)
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Not enough time today to build a harpsichord or a kazoo or something, so in honor of the solution today of the Mystery of the Syrup Smell of New York, I took a jar of fenugreek seeds and played along with a famous movie scene. The results sounded like this.
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p.s. I cooked potatoes with fenugreek a few days ago. Delicious!
Made from a piece of dried up seaweed from a California beach, the mouthpiece from a junked clarinet or something, and a reed cut from the lid of a takeout food container. It sounds like this. (My fingers can only reach two sound holes, so I can only get three notes until I get more practice with breath and lip pressure on the reed.)
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Noisemakers that can be cut and folded from a thin sheet of stiff plastic. This is a variation on the drinking straw double reed. They sound like this.
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The plastic I used is Avery 11900 Insertable Dividers (this also works great in a Craft-Robo!) To make your own: cut a rectangle about 1.5 by 3 inches. Fold in thirds the long way to make a little burrito, and crease the folds. Cut one end to a blunt-ended triangle as in the photo. Unroll the burrito, cut off the outermost triangle, and re-fold. Squish it between your fingers a bit so that it bulges a little, put the pointy end inside your lips and blow. With some practice you can get a horrible squawk out of it.
I made a failed whistle, followed by a squawky plastic double reed which didn’t seem worth calling an instrument-of-the-day. Then I bumped a bead garland off of the sewing table, and as it slowly drizzled over the edge, I had the idea for the rain simulator. It sounds like this. Video here.
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