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Homebrew Musical Instruments? 78

Posted by Cliff from the forming-a-real-garage-band dept.
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?"
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Homebrew Musical Instruments? More

Homebrew Musical Instruments?

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  • Some of my first C programs were playing with reading files byte by byte and outputting sounds based on the byte values. That was fun; should try it again sometime. You can hear the difference between different kinds of files, text versus binary for example.

  • bows (Score:4, Informative)

    by croddy ( 659025 ) on Tuesday March 30, 2004 @07:00AM (#8712439)
    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.
    • You don't play a guitar with a bow. My little nephew always calls our violin a guitar, but that's another story.

      • Re:bows (Score:2, Informative)

        by H*(BZ_2)-Module ( 536932 )
        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 [ebow.com] on a couple of occasions.
    • What the heck is a guitar bow? I have never heard of such a thing! Perhaps you mean a Violin bow? I am quite sure Violin bows exist as I play a Violin.

      I am also VERY sure that a Violin bow made with fishing line would sound awful. Horse hair violin bows are made in such a way that the hair is about an inch wide and as you play you rotate the bow so more of the hair contacts the bow when your hand is furthest from the strings and less as you move towards the strings. Also horse hair is quite fine. Much fin

      • Re:bows (Score:3, Informative)

        by black mariah ( 654971 )
        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.
        • Uh... you do realise that you can play any musical instrument that has strings with a bow, right?

          Unless, you're bowing a guitar specifically made to be played with a bow it will be little better instrumentally than an autoharp. Violins and the rest of the string section have curved fingerboards and deep notches at the waist so that individual strings can be isolated.

          • Guitarists have these things called hands, which are used to mute strings not meant to be played. Using a bow is no different than using a pick. You want only one not to sound, you mute the other strings with your fretting hand.

            Guitar fingerboards are curved, although not to the extent of violins or cellos. Older Fenders had a 7" fingerboard radius, but most modern guitar have a radius somewhere around 12-14".

        • Uh... you do realise that you can play any musical instrument that has strings with a bow, right?

          Piano.

          S

      • Re:bows (Score:2, Informative)

        by borius ( 711380 )

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

        Never heard of Led Zeppelin then?
      • The hair on your bow is an inch wide? Are you playing a 15-foot violin?

        A fishing line bow would probably sound something between a normal bow and col legno. I can see it working, especially on a guitar.

  • ...or any other instrument maker, for that matter. I make music with pre-existing instruments. It does not strike my fancy to design, test, build, show off, etc., any unique instrument, because for me, that would be a waste of time. However, I have been known to use an upside-down trash can now and then. ;-)

  • I make instruments for a living. (Score:5, Informative)

    by torpor ( 458 ) <ibisum AT gmail DOT com> on Tuesday March 30, 2004 @07:10AM (#8712468) Homepage Journal
    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 [virus.info].

    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 [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 [andrews.edu] 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) [swipnet.se] ... I've built a couple ASM1's now. Its like Open Source, only for Hardware... instead of compile, you solder.

    • Re:I make instruments for a living. (Score:1, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward
      I love it when people decide what they will consider to be an "instrument" or "music" or more often the argument is whether or not something is a "sport". You don't decide the definitions of words for yourselves. That causes mis-communication. The definition of a word is the agreed upon symbolic representation of an idea by a set of sounds.

      There is a place where they keep track of these definition things. It's called the Oxford English Dictionary.

      3. spec. A contrivance for producing musical sounds, by

  • What more can I say [sonology.net]...

    Also made [calarts.edu] by one [calarts.edu] of our siblings [sonology.net], and particularly useful due to the fact that it plays itself [dialogues2004.com]...

  • Drummer Puddy (Score:3, Informative)

    by Mork29 ( 682855 ) <keith@yelnick.us@army@mil> on Tuesday March 30, 2004 @07:15AM (#8712481) Journal
    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...

  • Space music (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Ibix ( 600618 ) on Tuesday March 30, 2004 @07:35AM (#8712529)

    The first year physics undergrads at my university have short projects in the summer term. One of the cooler ones I've seen was a kind of musical instument. It was an upward-looking proximity detector (IR, I think). It played a tone when it detected an object. It believed in eight different distances, and played a different tone for each.

    I'm not very musical. The best I could do was get a scale out of it by putting my hand close to the sensor, and then lifting my hand. The guys who'd made it had obviously practicing, because they were waving their hands in the air over the thing, making it play tunes (limited to whole tones in one octave, but tunes nontheless). It made me think of Glen A. Larson science fiction series, for some reason...

    I

  • Large Hot Pipe Organ (Score:3, Interesting)

    by bhima ( 46039 ) <Bhima.Pandava@DE ... com minus distro> on Tuesday March 30, 2004 @07:35AM (#8712532) Journal
    This, without a doubt is my favorite! And it's been on Slashdot before!

    http://slashdot.org/articles/00/07/08/195236.shtml [slashdot.org]

  • Sargeant Trumpetus On Duty Sah! (Score:4, Interesting)

    by GregWebb ( 26123 ) on Tuesday March 30, 2004 @07:53AM (#8712578)
    Hmm, wonder if anyone here saw me as that? :-)

    I'm a trumpeter, and you can make a basic brass instrument out of almost anything. All you need is a tube of some description with a bore somewhere between the diameter of your little finger and, say 3-4 inches. If you can seal the end with some form of bung so you can get an airtight seal for a mouthpiece, all the better. This way I've played kettles, teapots, chairs, relay batons, hoovers and hoses. I've seen a rifle played, open at the breach. Sound quality and range aren't normally great but hey, you're probably doing this for effect anyway so work out something you _can_ play on it and just do that.

    Anyway, I was on the staff at a kid's summer holiday club and we had a Roman theme that year. I normally ran a silly games slot, and so this year I was being an incompetent dril sargeant setting all sorts of challenges. I had a colander for my helmet, a tray for a breastplate and a soup ladle tucked into my belt. Every day, to announce my presence, I'd whip out this huge home-made post horn and play the _worst_ fanfare you can imagine, and that would signal the start of proceedings.

    It was a 2m long length of 15mm plastic pipe. I then made an expanded polystyrene bung at one end to seal a mouthpiece in place and jammed the largest kitchen funnel I could find into the other end - which, happily, fitted very neatly. Being plastic and having polystyrene for a critical interface this thing resonated absolutely horribly, had no useful tone and a really odd range. It wasn't rigid so flopped around all over the place and if I wasn't very careful when putting the mouthpiece in I knocked the bung out. You could get a really, really bad fanfare on it, though, which was most of the point of the exercise and it did get a laugh :-)

    I wouldn't recommend this particular construction for anyone after music not comedy but we did finish the week with a duet of the Prince of Denmark's March on a kettle and a teapot. You can actually get quite a good note out of them, and even use the lid to modulate volume! Tiring to play though.
    • I still have a MiniDisc somewhere of some recordings a friend of mine and I made, while we were working on a house his father was building. It was a boring evening as we sat sanding and varnishing wood facings (skirtings, architraves, that sort of thing). Sand, varnish, rack until it dries, drink beer while waiting for all the bits to dry...

      So we got some scrap plastic water pipe (the grey double-walled stuff) and blew into it, especially once we found that the bevelled stainless-steel inserts to reinfor

  • Not lately (Score:5, Interesting)

    by orthogonal ( 588627 ) on Tuesday March 30, 2004 @08:12AM (#8712629) Journal
    Has anyone ever built a musical instrument?

    Of course, until very recently -- I'm guessing the last century or two -- many musical instruments were made by their users, or by persons -0 like furniture makers -- who made instruments as a side-line.

    Exceptions of course would probably be very large instruments -- church organs, the larger pianos -- and instruments made by dedicated instruments makers first for court musicians and later for professional orchestras.

    But outside of royal halls and opera houses relying on noble patronage, popular music was probably produced by musicians who had some hand in making their own instruments. Think of the violin-picker in Appalachia, or the rebec playing sailor drifting down the Volga or the Don* -- or the Mississippi. Consider the lonely Spanish shepherd playing a bladder pipe horn made from one of his former charges -- or an equally lonely Texas cowboy plucking a Jew's harp

    * I'm thinking of the Russian Don, but it could as well be the river in England, the river in Scotland, or the river in Canada; the rebec was probably known in each place and was always an instrument of the lower classes. A guide to traditional instruments can be found here [k12.ia.us].

    Given the amount of money spent on CDs -- and the amount of downloading --, it's not hard to see that music is central in some way to the human experience. We've all felt it the lump in the throat listening to a mournful folk song about a love irrevocably ended; we've all had to grin at the infectious sound of a waltz; had our blood rush faster to the beat of a military march (marches are Turkish in origin, and entered the West through Vienna, almost as the Turks themselves did in 1683); felt pride and pathos at the sound of our national anthem.

    Tom Paine, in his argument for Deism, Age of Reason even opines that the men and women that the Bible calls prophets were in fact musicians, taking for his text 1 Samuel, chapter 10, verse 5: "...thou shalt meet a company of prophets coming down from the high place with a psaltery, and a tabret, and a pipe, and a harp, before them; and they shall prophesy...." Paine goes on to show this is not an isolated passage:

    Deborah and Barak are called prophets, not because they predicted anything, but because they composed the poem or song that bears their name, in celebration of an act already done. David is ranked among the prophets, for he was a musician, and was also reputed to be (though perhaps very erroneously) the author of the Psalms. But Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob are not called prophets; it does not appear from any accounts we have, that they could either sing, play music, or make poetry.

    Now imagine a world without portable mp3 players -- I'm listing to music from the Stuart Age (1600s) on my handled right now --, without CD players, without even eight track tape players or phonographs. Imagine no TV or radio or Internet. Would you not still have the same desire to hear music and feel the emotions it calls up in you? How else to ensure the presence of music in your life but to learn to play an instrument yourself? And unless you were one of the small minority of the wealthy, how would you get a instrument? You'd purchase one cheaply from a more or less amateur instrument maker, or better, you'd make a simple instrument yourself.

    It is one of the trade-offs of modernity, I suppose: I have at hand, on my computer, over 8000 mps -- from Bach to Bob Dylan -- more musical variety than all but the wealthiest of kings could ever have collected prior to the invention of the phonograph. I have a dozen operas, including two different productions of Wagner's four opera Ring Cycle. And my music is immediately accessible -- I don't even have to change a record or pen a CD case. I can even listen to it on my handled via WiFi, so as not to disturb the neighbors. With a credit card, or a KaZaa client, I can download nearly an

  • Well Boredom works for me. (Score:3, Interesting)

    by jellomizer ( 103300 ) on Tuesday March 30, 2004 @09:07AM (#8712832)
    When I get really board I start making instruments out of anything I can find.

    Some of my best sounding ones include.

    A Coffee mug and some rubber bands. You take the rubber bands and put them around the coffee cup. and you change the tension of each band over the mouth of the cup. Then you pluck them and get a good sound.

    Many bottles and some water (Glass sounds best but plastic works to). You fill the bottles with different amount of water and blow across them to achieve sound.

    Raisin boxes of different sizes. Just open up one end and blow threw the other.

    Scrap pipes and some string or wire. just put different sized pipes hanging on some wire and hit them with a stick.

    A paper towel role. you put it in front on you mouth and vibrate your lips. Better results occur on longer tubes like vacuums cleaner extenders but that is not recommended until you clean them.

    A Hair Comb and some of the plastic that is used to wrap individual slices of american cheese. Just put the plastic over then teeth of the comb and do a low hum.

    Sound can occur anywhere you can get something to vibrate.
  • I built a guitar from various parts I had laying around (I'm a guitar tech by day). Nothing all that special, although it sounds quite nice. I'm about to embark on the next logical step of building my own guitar from scratch. Should be fun.
  • I once bought a kit from Paia [paia.com] for their Fatman [paia.com] synth. It was great and I almost had it working (it made bleepy noises, but not quite the right ones) but then it sort of never quite got finished. Oh well! But it was a lot of fun and a good cheap starter if you're interested in those things.

  • Harpsichord... (Score:4, Interesting)

    by adamjaskie ( 310474 ) on Tuesday March 30, 2004 @09:48AM (#8713103) Homepage
    I know you can buy harpsichord kits. A quick Google search for "harpsichord kit" turns up many results, but I don't know what company would be best, so I can't really recommend anything. I am thinking of doing one of those myself one of these days. Its a fun instrument to play. The harpsichord makes a really unique sound.
  • Basically I stretched an elastic band over a cardboard box.

    I also used a ruler as an instrument and was able to play actual tunes on it.

    Bits of old drainpipe and vacuum cleaner tubes are alse great for a makeshift didgeridoo.

    Then of course there is the old paper and comb kazoo!

    • Just google for it -- there are instructions all over the place for making didgeridoos out of PCV piping.

      They work well, too (though the circular breathing takes practice, or course).
      • (though the circular breathing takes practice, or course).

        It only took me a couple of weeks with plenty of practice to learn to play. Once you've got the circular breathing though the fun starts; my fave is the bark!

        nick ..+

  • I have made some drums from large PVC pipe once upon a time. I was walking along and came across a construction site and they were throwing out some 12 inch PVC pieces (no longer that a couple feet long). I took several and built a set of tom-toms from them. I gave them to a friend as a present later, but they didn't sound too bad at all. Sure looked funny though.

    I also made some custom mallets for keyboard percussion use. I made some very nice bell (glockenspiel) mallets out of 1/2" brass, they gav
    • Our local taiko drumming group in Minneapolis (theatermu.org) has a number of practice drums made from PVC. They're leftover contstruction end pieces about two feet across, with regular rawhide heads tightened w/traditional/modern methods: pegs and ropes followed by hydraulic car jacks. Heavy though!
      I myself (with mentoring from a local taiko maker) made a chu-daiko out of a wine barrel, as most american taiko drums are.
      Anyone can make a great-sounding drum using large wooden salad bowls, rawhide heads and
  • for many ideas for wiring electric guitars.

    i haven't made mine myself but with infos from that page i customized my guitar.
  • So I got stuck with the musical instrument design as well. I built a guitar took forever (I'd guess 50-100 hrs with no wood finishing). The difficulty was that I never found good stable tuning assemblies I tried with screws but tuning was difficult with finger tightening assemblies you didn't have enough friction to hold them in place for more than a few minutes. It was an accoustic and I used several strands of thin wire (but only played one). The best instrument was a trombone made out of PVC pipe, it

  • trombone, bass, drums (Score:2, Interesting)

    by zeno_ ( 13057 )
    When I was in high school (many years ago), we made a functional trombone out of PVC pipe with a funnel for the bell. The beauty of the trombone is that anyone can make a slide out of pipes (with an inner tube that just barely fits within the outer tube) but it's hard to make valves! The mouthpiece was the metal end of a garden hose. It sounded fantastic though ended up keyed in 'A'.

    I also made the ubiquitous bass. Plywood body, 2x4 neck, weedwacker cord for 3 strings, but I had to use picture hanging
    • Your bass sounds much like mine, except that I just used .105in weedwacker cord for the E string. It didn't work well, but I found that (by ear and by tuner) plastic coated picture hanging wire starts out about 20 cents sharper when plucked than when it vibrates for a while. Being the guy I am, I chose very low volume over funky tunedness.

  • digeridoos (Score:1, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward
    ...can be made from PVC/ABS pipe, available from your friendly local hardware superstore. Get the 2.5 inch ID pipe, between 4 and 8 ft long, and Google for digerdoo and PVC.
    • ...can be made from PVC/ABS pipe, available from your friendly local hardware superstore. Get the 2.5 inch ID pipe, between 4 and 8 ft long, and Google for digerdoo and PVC.

      You'll get better sound quality with a vacuum cleaner hose. :-)

      Some people put a lot more work in to their homebrew instruments [wendycarlos.com].

      ...laura

  • When this event was first given a trial run at nationals, there were these sorts of entries:
    - people with very very nicely built flutes and stringed instruments and such... these people knew precious little of the physics behind their instruments
    - me and my friend, with some crappy pvc-pipe creations that were played like brass instruments... and we built them to be (close to) on pitch, because we knew the equations like the backs of our hands

    Guess who scored well? =) It is science olympiad, after all...
    • My friend and I were disappointed that the judges, who were probably tired, didn't let us demonstrate all our instruments could do. I didn't get to show off the range of my bass and my friend barely got to demonstrate that if you put a cap over the ends of the pipes, they are taken down an octave. We even memorized the twelfth root of 2 just so we could calculate intervals on an equal tempered scale since we didn't know "just tuning" intervals.
  • If you're going to design and build your own musical instruments, please, won't somebody think of the tendons?

    Seriously now, the funky hand positions that some instruments require can't be that good for the ol' carpel tunnels. I'm interested in seeing some ergonomically correct guitars, for example - though I can't really imagine what they'd look like. This kind of thing is perfect for the 'open source' music instrument hobby.

    • actually, I have known a couple of guitar playing computer people who claim that guitar playing + keyboard use equals no carpal tunnel. Seems the different type of bending helped them.
  • If you live in or visit NYC, there's a venue that sort of specializes in experimental instruments and music, some free jazz and other stuff. It's Tonic [tonicnyc.com], on Norfolk in the Lower East Side, and they've earned a solid reputation for hosting some great musicians of lesser known genres. John [tripod.com] Zorn [wnur.org] has played there many times.

    One night I saw a guy put a cello bow to a tiny wooden contraption with audio pickups attached. He proceeded to produce some eerie and beautiful music. Others followed with homebrew synt
  • CigarBox a piece of wood, a couple if eye bolts, and three guitar strings.

    Checkout Shane Speal's CigarBox Guitar Group [yahoo.com]
    CigarBox Guitar Site [geocities.com]
  • ... of Rube Waddell [rubewaddell.org], San Francisco's premiere Blues-cabaret-folk-country-punk-Gospel-vaudeville band.

    They create many of their own instruments out of random detritus.

    Also, gotta give a shout out to my former compatriot and his band Ballyrag [ballyrag.com]. Check out pictures of The Thing (a unique bass / keyboard combo that Dan built).

    And hey, while I type this, I've been tapping a foot against my Tower PC, thumping it into the wall, which makes for a good bass line rhythm. Careful, or I'll start singing...
  • I once built a flute for an electronic music class. It was a length of PVC pipe with buttons mounted in it, and an electret microphone where the mouthpiece would be. Instead of resonating a tunable cavity with your breath, you would blow into the microphone. A small circuit rectified and amplified the noise, then fed it into an A/D input on a PIC, which would play a note based on the noise level and the buttons being pressed. Due to how I had the microphone positioned, it was very similar to a real flute...
  • I'm a jazz bassist and I've been playing for ~ 15 years. Music isn't my profession, but I did spend a number of years studying at Peabody (Baltimore) while persuing my techy background (Comp Art/Sci, UMBC) so I do consider myself classically and professionally trained.

    Most of the gear I use I built myself (instruments, speaker cabinets, effects/pre-amp), not because I thought I could do it cheaper or I couldn't afford what I needed (though if you know what you are doing and you put no $value$ on your time

  • I love to go into Hobby Lobby or Garden Ridge Pottery (think: arts and crafts outlet) and play those big glazed ceramic pots. Because they are so inconsistent in quality and size, most of them are a different note and of differing tonal qualities.

    If they have a large enough selection you can put together a pretty good range. I generally rearrange them so that I can reach at least an octave without moving too much. I get funny looks but the sounds are amazing. Try it some time!

  • The bass player for Splitlip Rayfield [splitliprayfield.com] made his own instrument out of a gas tank, some strings, and a piece of wood.

  • You can make a cuica [congaplace.com] out of a coffee can: remove both ends, replace the plastic lid and tape it down, and (somehow) affix a bamboo skewer to the inside of the lid. Rub the skewer with your (rosined-up) fingers, and voila: it's Samba time.
  • I've seen 2 cool ones lately:

    My favorite upright bass [sirenmusiccompany.com]
    4 String Upright Washtub Bass [cmich.edu]
    Great for roots and rockabilly.

  • Moog theramin on screensavers [techtv.com]

    theramin kit [moogmusic.com] (there's got to be cheaper ones out there or plans to build them... *Shrug*

    e.
  • Alright, I wasn't that young - somewhere in high school - likely a sophmore or junior...

    Anyhow, my friend and I did all sorts of weird stuff audio-wise - add outputs to things that didn't have them (hooked his TV speaker up to his stereo for pumpin' bass from the Sega Genesis!), built crazy inputs to stereos by gutting cassettes and using playback heads as inputs (basically rolling our own cassette input interfaces), etc.

    One day, I got the idea that I wanted an amplified rubber band (!!!). I liked the sound

  • 1978: A simple synth with a circular 'keyboard' etched on a printed circuit board. To operate it you had to touch the exposed copper parts with a stylus (a probe from a multimeter...). 3-way toggle switch for octave up/down.
    1979: a 4 channel drum machine with 16 preprogrammed rhythms in a 256x4 PROM.
    1980: a synthetic drum (pad activated)

    After that it became cheaper to buy the finished stuff instead of the components. And nowadays FruityLoops and Cubase rule my studio, together with a disklavier grand for t
  • Always in tune and you can take it anywhere. I have a mid 80's model, so there aren't any Firewire ports, but newer models probably have them. Never a wrong note!
  • I've been thinking of hacking up some sort of tone generator to a Wacom tablet, and mapping X to pitch, Y to timbre (or maybe gestures for things like wah-wah? That axis is undesigned ATM), and pressure to volume. Of course, this is all vaporware still...

  • I did alternatively intonated woodwind instruments using a Java applet I wrote called WINDS (Woodwind Instrument Notes Designer System).

    A great resource for those who are interested in inventing or creating experimental musical instruments is Experimental Musical Instruments [windworld.com].

  • Perhaps you already know about this guy, but Harry Partch [corporeal.com] was the ultimate do-it-yourself instrument builder. Just a general summary of his diamond marimba [corporeal.com] is enough to make jaws drop.
  • I am planning on building a mandolin soon but first I need to make some tools, jigs, and templates. Anyway, you might want to check out the Musical Instrument Makers Forum. They have many links on building everything. You can spend days looking at everything. [mimf.com]
  • I built a theremin which never worked particularly well. Anybody who's reading this thread and feels like making their own should be forewarned: steer clear of any design based around inductors. They're far less stable and reliable than capacitors, and are harder to find in the right sizes.

    As a kid, I built a few original instruments including my favorite, the "squeakaphone", which was a continuous-pitch, double-reed wind instrument. Based around the same concept as making a balloon squeak while lettin
  • The Large Hot Pipe Organ [slashdot.org] has got to be the coolest homebrew musical gadgets ever created. It's a big honkin MIDI controlled pipe organ powered by propane explosions. Industrial design, explosions, and it sounds good too:
  • We used to program TI-58/59 calculators, run the program, and place them on an AM radio. The radio would pick up frequencies from different clocks and busses inside the calculator. OK, so it's barely a step above playing tunes on a touch-tone phone, but back then it had high geek factor. Hey, nobody ever played a tune on a slide rule!

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