It's made from a wooden mortar and pestle and some scraps of guitar string. I strapped a rechargable battery to my thumb to use as a slide, just like Baba Yaga used to do.
That's it for instrument-a-day for this year, but Jason, Chris and I will be performing with some of these instruments on Wednesday at Barbes in Brooklyn.
I was listening to David Bowie’s "The Man Who Sold The World" and wanted to reproduce its distinctive percussion.
You may recognize the beads from last year.
It's a pennywhistle made from a can of Coke, which costs a dollar. A little slanted block of wood is glued in the mouthpiece to direct air to the fipple. I only made two holes because it was in danger of falling apart the whole time.
One of my earliest memories is of lying on the carpet under the christmas tree watching the colored shadows change as the bulbs blinked on and off, and listening to the small tinkling sounds of the tiny metal thermostat timers inside each bulb. For this instrument, I stuck contact microphones onto a bunch of blinky bulbs to magnify those sounds.
The sound in this video is in stereo.
