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Even More Homemade Instruments

© Cindy Lee Haddock

There is really no end to the types of instruments you can make yourself at home, if you just try to listen to life happening around you. Anything you can blow into can become a woodwind or brass instrument. Anything with strings can be plucked or bowed or banged on. For that matter, many things can be banged on, and many have an actual note that you can tune, at least in production, and thus can be sampled and used to create music. Here are a few more fun music writing tips you might not have thought of to help you come up with some new homemade musical instruments to give your music that needed original new sound.

BLOWING FUN

The wind doesn't just have to come from you. If you can take sound samples on your computer recorder and make .wav files from them, you can often take these later and transfer them to various programs or even your keyboard if is the sampling variety. Wind loves to whistle through pipes in and around your home-try putting a microphone near your downspout on a windy day, near some trees if they are full of leaves or close branches and wind is howling nicely through them, or even your windows if you can crack them a bit or there are some leaks you can take advantage of. If you have a chimney, ours makes a great deep howl when we get even gentle gales outside. Teakettles are another obvious sound to sample, and so are vents in your vehicle or home if they are on the noisy side. What is really fun about many samplers is you can take one note and the program will create an entire scale or instrument for you from one sound, so you can hit keys on the piano part of your sampler or keyboard and your toot will now sound like a bunch of nicely tuned toots in any note you wish. You just need to get that first little sample.

MORE STRING FUN

Strings are very versatile-they aren't just for strumming. Both pianos and dulcimers work by hitting strings with a mallet, so this is yet another fun thing you can do to a guitar to get more noises out of it. I've slapped the strings before, or hit them with a thumb or finger, but taking a lap steel or even a guitar and going at it like it was a dulcimer with soft ball-end sticks could be a fun change, and save you the price of a dulcimer. For that matter, you can do the same with a zither or even a bunch of rubber bands or tight strings you've stretched across various pairs of nails. Even tennis or badminton racquets make a good one-note dulcimer, for that matter, and you can just again put that one note into your sequencer and let it create a whole set of notes for you to write with using that key sound. Fishline is very much like nylon guitar strings, too, and many fisher folk can attest to how it can sing as it flies through the air or off your reel, or even when it slaps the water or gets stretched tight when you get a strike. A single fishing trip may not get you dinner, but it could make you enough samples to create a fun new instrument on your sampler.

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