Making Your Own Instruments

You don't have to be a pro to make an instrument you can use in your home studio, and some of these you could easily use in public gigs. All you really need is some imagination and an electronic tuner, and the possibilities are endless. Here are a few ideas to get you started.

PERCUSSION INSTRUMENTS

These are perhaps the simplest to make. Perhaps the most popular is an easy to hold block from a 2x4 piece of wood that you trim down after hitting it until it gives you the note you want. Harder woods will give you a different tone than softer ones, and some folks deliberately hollow it out a little to give it a more echoey sound. A shaker made from rice or beans in a plastic fake Easter egg taped or glued together so you won't lose your shaker's innards is also a fast instrument to create. You can even use rocks or little bells for a more distinctive effect. Tying a bunch of Christmas jingle bells onto a piece of leather or even a piece of wood you can hit with a drumstick works well too. I've seen bands also use inverted 5-gallon water bottles, glasses filled with water at different levels and tuned with a tuner, household pots and pans, bells made from metal tubes or glass jars hung from a wooden plank, and the ever popular rain stick made from BBs poured into a long and thick bamboo pole with leather bound over both ends. BBs inside a hollowed out and cleaned gourd with a hole drilled in one end and a stick inserted makes a good homemade maraca, and trash cans and trash can lids are good enough they were used in a popular stage production. If you can hit it and it sounds good, use it.

STRING INSTRUMENTS

Most rockers know about favorite bands whose lead guitarist made their own instrument either from scratch or from parts of old and broken instruments. There are lots of books on the subject, and all one needs is patience, ingenuity and a little money, and you can make the guitar or bass of your dreams, often for a fraction of the cost for models with similar bells and whistles. Along simpler lines, a length of rope tied to a mop handle on one end and the handle of a round metal wash tub on the other and you have a one-string bass that you can change the tone of by changing the angle of the stick on top of the inverted tub so that the string is tighter or looser. I've seen folks make a simple zither using rubber bands and a shoebox, although a wooden box and old guitar strings would work better. One of my relatives is having fun with guitar strings strung over a large thick board, each tuned to the desired frequency, with different pickups he can switch between to get different sounds, then pipes these through various effects to change the sound even more if he wishes. Once you add effects, almost anything is possible, and it is easy to correct for off color notes if you want, as well.

Go To Page: 1 2