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.
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.
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.
