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During February 2009 I’m making a new handmade instrument each day.
A strong magnet distorts the sound of a music box by warping the tines. It’s recorded through a hand-wound magnetic pickup, and it sounds like this. (There’s no processing added to the sound except for noise reduction.)
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Thanks to k for the music box!
1/8" steel rod, found wood, hand-wound magnetic pickup, played through a cheap battery-powered amplifier for a bit of that KONONO N°1 sound. Inspired by the chimes made by Nathan Davis for Phyllis Chen (but not made with nearly as much skill or artistry). It’s played with drumsticks.
The steel chimes sound like this (warning: loud! but for best results you should turn it up even louder.)
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Another way to use up waste bamboo that was too split up for a wind instrument. Though a real shishi odoshi (deer scarer) would use good bamboo and make a much nicer sound. The sticks are gathered from the park; the pivot is steel rod through an aluminum tube (leftover from the slide guitar).
It sounds like this. (video here)
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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.
It sounds like this.
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Two music boxes, alternating notes. Can you recognize either of the tunes?
It sounds like this.
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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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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.)
They sound like this.
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