Homebrew Musical Instruments?

Josh Booth asks: "Has anyone ever built a musical instrument? I recently built two, a SSPACaRTD (Single String Plucked Air Compression and Rarifaction Tunable Device), and a full size string bass for the NJ State Science Olympiad. I played the bass and, since we did the required duet, my friend played an End Struck Plosive Aerophone, or a set rather, like what the Blue Man Group plays. We placed fifth out of 20+ schools. My bass is similar to those that Dennis Havlena made and used weedwhacker line for strings. I was wondering whether anyone else tried to build an instrument. How did you do it, what did it sound like, and how weird was it?"

Comments

bows

[croddy]

well, i use home-made guitar bows. i string them with heavy fishing line, and sand the surface of the line so it will hold the rosin. works pretty well, and the monofilament is much cheaper than hair & lasts longer under abuse.

Re:bows

[black mariah]

Uh... you do realise that you can play any musical instrument that has strings with a bow, right? There are even classical pieces based around bowed guitar. Yeah, fishing line sounds fucked up. That's the whole point.

Re:bows

[borius]

What the heck is a guitar bow? I have never heard of such a thing!

Never heard of Led Zeppelin then?

Re:bows

[H*(BZ_2)-Module]

You might not play guitar with a bow, but that doesn't mean other people don't. I don't use a bow, but I have played around with an ebow on a couple of occasions.

I make instruments for a living.

[torpor]

But it depends on what you call an 'instrument'.

In my book, an instrument is any object designed specifically and only for the purpose of making music. (This is why softsynths aren't "instruments" in my opinion; though they are 'virtualized software instruments' they're not quite complete ... since you have to use a general-purpose computer to run them ... in the same way that pro-tools using edit gimps aren't "musicians" {they're producers}, neither are soft-synths 'instrument's ... heh heh ... flame on ...)

So, anyway, I make synthesizers and work for a fairly well-known synthesizer company.

There are tons of DIY Synthesizer builders out there in 'net land, in fact its quite an active and avid community... synth construction is a very fun geek activity, and you'll be surprised by some of the amazing systems that have been built, quite openly, by instrument-making enthusiasts.

Check out synth.net, of course ... this site is all about DIY instrument makers, and if you really want to go on a wacky and wild journey, browse the Synth DIY Who's Who and see where it takes you ...

And if you want an example of the DIY/GNU spirit combined, you can't do much better than Gene Stopp's ASM1 Design (Open Modular Synthesizer Hardware Project) ... I've built a couple ASM1's now. Its like Open Source, only for Hardware... instead of compile, you solder.

Drummer Puddy

[Mork29]

I remember when I used to play the drums, they sold a "drum puddy" or something like that. You could use it stress ball style to improve your hand strength, or you could flatten it out, and hit it with drum sticks to practice rolls and such. It was nice because it had a nice bounce back and a nice muffled sound. You could hear what you were playing, but you wouldn't bother anybody by any means. It's not really making my own instrument, but it seemed to be along the same lines...

Sounds like a basic theramin...

[Phil John]

...Google will provide you with information.

Made a lot of those spooky pitch bendy sci-fi sound effects used in a lot of 40's and 50's movies of that genre.