home made instruments

who knows how to make various home made instruments? im really interested in making cheap simple divices my friends and i can jam on in the park during our usual jam sessions. heres one im currently working on which consists of pvc piping. the pvc piping must be suspended in air, and the holes on both ends must be free of any thing muting the vibrations or blocking the sound (i.e. a hollow pvc pipe not resting on the ground)
the way i've figured it roughly every 3 inches of pvc pipe is a semi note (one fret on the guitar)
hit the pvc pipe with your hand, or a paddle, or something that compleltey covers the top hole and you get a really neat sound. i'll post a pic of what my finished instrument looks like once im finished building it...

so what other home made intruments do you guys know how to make that would be cheap and relativley simple to play?

 

well im not exactly sure if this is going to be as good as everyone's else, but ive seen people making beautfiul noise with a whole tray of different amounts of water insdie a lot of glasses, and then they put their fingers on them and it maeks this really goo d sound.

waterbottles filled at different amounts and blowni nto liek a flute will produce a nice sound too

 

If you suspend the PVC by drilling holes and using fishing line or something... you want your make sure your mounting points are exactly at the harmonic "nodes" of the lengh. That is, tune your PVC to the final length. Then simply measure the overall length of the PVC pipe... your node/mounting points should then be placed @ 22.5% of the overall length from each end. This puts your suspension points into "tune" with the length so they will have the least harmonic impact.

This holds true with anything tuned you want to mount to be struck. And unlike a vibrating string, halving a length of a tine doubles the octave.

I've seen a really cool xylophone made from regular chrome open ended wrenches. Or you can strap a bunch of small diameter tubes together and make a pan flute (closed bottom I believe). A tin washtub string bass? You bet! You can make something musical from most anything. The possiblities are endless... there are lots of things in this world that have a surprisingly good tone. I'm sure you've seen the blue man band thing.

Visit:

http://www.rhythmweb.com/homemade/index.html

http://www.philtulga.com/HomemadeMusic.html

~7

 

woah, thnx! big help.

 

You should check out making a circuit bent toy. You can get some really interesting sounds out of them. Although it's not in the same sense as the instruments I think you were aiming for, it's still pretty cool.
You pretty much find a small child's toy (like a Speak N' Spell--a classic) or a cheap keyboard (Casio SK-1--another classic) and connect different circuits that were'nt meant to be connected. When you overload a circuit that makes a weird sound, you write it down. Later you can come back and put some pots on the circuits you want. You can get some really wild sounds out of them with little easy. Do a little bit of the ol' googlin.

 

that circut bent toy sound cool you think you could explain it better

 

you can make didgeridoos out of PVC pipe all you have to do is make a mouthpiece for one end out of beeswax or wood or something. different length pipes give you different keys. theres lots of websites that tell you how to build them.


you can make a flute out of a straw to. just flatten one end and cut it so it makes a point. then cut as many tiny holes down the straw as you want and amaze your friends with your incredible straw playing abilities. (sometimes they dont work great but other times you can make good ones)

 

I would be glad to. Basically, you take an electronic toy, hopefully something older, without a chip, and open it up. Try to find something that runs on batteries. Never bend a toy running off a wall outlet. So once you have the circuitry exposed, start making some noise with the toy. If it's a small keyboard, for example, start pressing a key. While it's making noise, start touching different circuits. Use a piece of conductive metal(paper clip works fine) to touch different circuits and resistors to eachother. Stay well away from capacitors, they can really knock you on your ass. Once you find a spot you like, you should write it down. Screen the whole toy this way. Then you can do two things. 1--if you like the sound, you can solder to the two directly together(if they're close enough), solder them with wires, or put a pot or a switch on it. You can then mount the switch on outer casing. There's alot of other cool things you can do. For example, you can get light cells that distort the sound when a certain amount of light is applied, or add capacitors or even humidity sensors. It's a pretty safe hobby. As long as you are'nt working with any high voltage(in almost all cases, you're not) it should'nt be a problem. Stay away from coming in contact with capacitors. They can hold alot of juice sometimes and really knock you on your ass. Check out this page for some really good stuff about circuit bent toys.

 

what is a capacitors, so i dont shock myself

 

o yeah also what do the circuits look like

 

A capacitor is basically a battery, made up of two metallic plates and insulation in between. The only difference is that a capacitor discharges all at once. It looks like this. (The "towers") I found a nifty guide on how capacitors work here.
A circuit board looks like this, and a blank circuit board looks like this. A circuit board it a flat piece of plastic in which tracks(copper? Someone correct me) are sprayed on. Instead of using wires to attach various parts(of which a product might have hundreds or even thousands), they use the circuit board. The tracks conduct electricity across the board to other parts. You might want to pick up a book at the library about basic electronics. It would really do you some good. Read that site I put up in my last post, it's the third one down: Reed Ghazala's Art of Circuit Bending-a bender's guide. It's a great guide written by the man who pretty much invented Circuit Bending.

 

DUDE!!! One time in highschool... Rome High School to be exact, we made this organ that was a complete and exact model of the one that the Blue Man Group uses in their shows. This was all for an INSANE talent show that they do there called The Howling. Our drama teacher was all about this thing, and we spent about two months working on that thing alone. In the end, it came out to be one of the most kickass things I think I've ever seen! They got all painted up and flourescent in the act, and I really felt like I was actually there at the Blue Man Group's show. They used PVC pipes with the foamy part of some mousepads attached to them via a solid piece of metal that was attached to the mousepad and put inside the pipe. The pipes were varrying widths and lengths... some of them actually had turns and twists in them so they looked like something out of a science fiction movie. It was totally awesome either way man, and in the end, it's basically like a percussion organ/xylophone. It'll take a while to make one, but if you do it, it's well worth the work in the end.

 

My brother made a dijeradoo out of pvc, but i prefer to play it like a drum, hitting one end with my hand, i think it sounds better that way and you can make different sounds depend on how you hit it.
last year i tried growing some gourds to make drums and other various instruments out of, but none of them got big enough

 

Weird one this, but on "This Just Might Be A One Shot Deal" by Frank Zappa, there is a credit for "electric bedsprings". I'm guessing this would be quite easy to replicate.

Once you know the theory behind sound and how sound is produced, you can make instruments out of pretty much anything. Try The Wire if you need some ideas, but generally, anything with strings on it can be played.

 

Yeah, string instruments aren't that hard to make, and they're fun as hell. If any of my damn gourds had gotten big I wanted to make a Lyre as well.

 

Well, the easiest is percussion, but I thought that was obvious. I went through a phase of using a long spaghetti jar as a kind of Djembe-cum-tabla, but it irritated the fuck out of people so I stopped.

 

one of my goals in life is to make my own drum, equipted with some kinda spring and lever inside so u can squeeze the body with ur knees to alter the sound. im thinking some kinda animal skin that has some stretch and give to it. or possibly canvas

 

I've built two or three guitars. I used a toilet seat to build a Telecaster, once.

 

I once met a pro didgeridoo player who swore that he got a better sound out of PVC than he ever got out of wood.

 

I once met a guitarist who played Ovations. I declined to call him a guitarist because I didn't think Ovations had enough wood on them to be called a guitar.