Fruit crate, found twigs, hardware, piezoelectric disc, sewing needle, hot glue, and "Walk This Way" by RUN-D.M.C.
I don’t have a record player, so it was time to make one out of whatever I had lying around. It sounds like this.
Instrument-a-day month is two-thirds over and I’ve only fallen behind by one day! So far I’ve made squawkers, hissers, squeakers, plonkers, and various other noisemakers, all of which you can see at <http://www.moonmilk.com/>
And on Wednesday March 4th, 8pm, I’ll be performing with some of these and other homemade instruments at Barbes in Brooklyn
In early April, Nick and Aaron and I hope to unveil our sound sculpture for the lobby of the Coney Island Museum. If all goes well, the piece will continue to grow after the opening, as we add more and more mechanical instruments to it until it takes over most of the museum. More details next month! <http://www.coneyisland.com/museum.shtml>
As poet Elizabeth Alexander recited during the recent inaugural address:
Someone is trying to make music somewhere,
with a pair of wooden spoons on an oil drum,
with cello, boom box, harmonica, voice.
Keep making noise!
– ranjit
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.)
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).
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.
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.
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.
