Making cheap instruments

Computers and synthesizers are great, but every once in a while one
feels the need to play on a real physical instrument. I'm trying to
think of things I can build on a college student's budget (i.e. less
than like a hundred USD total).

So far I've got:

Buy a lot of cheap plastic tubing and cut it to various lengths. Bang
the tubes on stuff. Cap one end to make them an octave lower. Mount
them on a frame and slap the tops with a flip-flop sandal to make a
"slap organ". Make a mouthpiece out of wax or something and play one
like a didgeridoo.

Find some cheap guitar tuning mechanisms. Make a monochord or canon.
For the soundbox, use a cardboard box or some old wooden furniture.

Collect pieces of junk that make cool sounds when you hit them, and
string them up by the nodes.

Questions:

What is the correct tool to shave off slivers from wooden objects to
tune them? What about metal? Glass?

Anyone have other suggestions?

Keenan

On 3/1/06, Keenan Pepper <keenanpepper@...> wrote:
> Buy a lot of cheap plastic tubing and cut it to various lengths. Bang
> the tubes on stuff. Cap one end to make them an octave lower. Mount
> them on a frame and slap the tops with a flip-flop sandal to make a
> "slap organ". Make a mouthpiece out of wax or something and play one
> like a didgeridoo.
>
> Find some cheap guitar tuning mechanisms. Make a monochord or canon.
> For the soundbox, use a cardboard box or some old wooden furniture.
>
> Collect pieces of junk that make cool sounds when you hit them, and
> string them up by the nodes.
...
> Anyone have other suggestions?

I've been considering creating such an ensemble here in Seattle. My
main problems are finding a place where I can keep/bang on/have
strangers bang on this stuff, and finding people to bang on it.

There's a great store near my house, the Trading Musician, that sells
all sorts of stuff you could use in a folk ensemble. Flexatones,
guitar string and tuning knobs, bamboo xylophones, I go there to get
ideas for instruments sometimes.

I've had to do a lot of experimenting, but soda straws can be cut into
reeds with a very distinctive timbre.

Beer bottles. Use them as pan-pipes or cap them and make a xylophone.
Measure the amount of water for easy tuning-by-ratio.

Reed Organs. I got one for free, and another for $40. Make sure you
can unscrew the top and file the reeds out of tune.

Lamellophone. Take a bunch of plastic rulers and screw them down to a
board, then pluck them downwards.

Get a blank CD and fill it with <1 - 5 second sound clips, and make a
list of each of them. Bring in a boombox and you have a handy sample
bank. If it has a "repeat track" button, you have loops.

I learned to throat-sing for free from:
http://www.busker-kibbutznik.org/khoomei/HOW-TO/crashcourse.html
(note: high potential to hurt like heck)

I have too much hand on my time, I just sit around thinking up stuff like this.

--TRISTAN
(http://dreamingofeden.smackjeeves.com/)

In 2000 I built a cheap AND retunable instrument (with some help from
Kris Peck) I called a bottlophone.

I haven't yet posted anything on the web about it, but I did play on
it in a concert in St. Paul in December 2000.

Basically, I found a kind of soda bottle with a nice tone when struck
with a pencil-top eraser, collected ca. 30+ of them WITH CAPS, and
mounted them vertically (with Velcro straps) in rows on ca. 6 foot
long horizontal wood beams. I set up 2 such beams, and these mounted
on 2 pipes (mine were metallic, but PVC should work too), and these
pipes fit into wood floorboards.

An electric drill, hammer, and screwdriver should suffice as tools.

I filled each bottle with water plus a touch of dish soap (to help
preserve the water), tuning as needed (for that performance, 22-ET).
I capped the bottles when not in use.

If you want to make a decent recording with such a thing, I'd
recommend very close miking. Unfortunately, in the recording of that
performance, all you could hear was the attack of the tone and no
pitch, although this was not true live.

--- In MakeMicroMusic@yahoogroups.com, "Keenan Pepper"
<keenanpepper@...> wrote:
>
> Computers and synthesizers are great, but every once in a while one
> feels the need to play on a real physical instrument. I'm trying to
> think of things I can build on a college student's budget (i.e. less
> than like a hundred USD total).
>
> So far I've got:
>
> Buy a lot of cheap plastic tubing and cut it to various lengths.
Bang
> the tubes on stuff. Cap one end to make them an octave lower. Mount
> them on a frame and slap the tops with a flip-flop sandal to make a
> "slap organ". Make a mouthpiece out of wax or something and play one
> like a didgeridoo.
>
> Find some cheap guitar tuning mechanisms. Make a monochord or canon.
> For the soundbox, use a cardboard box or some old wooden furniture.
>
> Collect pieces of junk that make cool sounds when you hit them, and
> string them up by the nodes.
>
> Questions:
>
> What is the correct tool to shave off slivers from wooden objects to
> tune them? What about metal? Glass?
>
> Anyone have other suggestions?
>
> Keenan
>

Best cheap instrument on the planet: Balloon Flute.

Take a 3/4" (or any other size) PVC pipe, cut it to a length of 3-10".
Cut up a balloon and put a piece of balloon over each end, secured
with a rubber band. Drill 1/4-1/2" hole in the middle of the pipe.
Blow. Place your fingers over each end to dampen the balloon
vibrations. It turns out the resonant frequency of a pipe depends on
the flexibility of the ends. If they are rigid, the base frequency is
high. If they are very flexible, the pitch is low. Fun with balloons!
I made hundreds in grad school.

Prent Rodgers

At 02:10 PM 3/2/2006, you wrote:
>Best cheap instrument on the planet: Balloon Flute.
>
>Take a 3/4" (or any other size) PVC pipe, cut it to a length of 3-10".
> Cut up a balloon and put a piece of balloon over each end, secured
>with a rubber band. Drill 1/4-1/2" hole in the middle of the pipe.
>Blow. Place your fingers over each end to dampen the balloon
>vibrations. It turns out the resonant frequency of a pipe depends on
>the flexibility of the ends. If they are rigid, the base frequency is
>high. If they are very flexible, the pitch is low. Fun with balloons!
>I made hundreds in grad school.
>
>Prent Rodgers

Cool!

-Carl

--- In MakeMicroMusic@yahoogroups.com, "Keenan Pepper"
<keenanpepper@...> wrote:
>
> Computers and synthesizers are great, but every once in a while one
> feels the need to play on a real physical instrument. I'm trying to
> think of things I can build on a college student's budget (i.e. less
> than like a hundred USD total).
>
> Anyone have other suggestions?
>
> Keenan
>

~40 oz. glass bottle (< $5) + rubber glove ($10-$15 for a decent pack)
+ tape or silicone sealant ($5-$10) + water (free???) = UDDERBOT

With a 4 octave continuous glissando range all within the control of
one hand, the udderbot is an ideal poor man's acoustic theremin.
Consequently, you get no help finding pitches. There's an intuitive
knack to playing melodies, but I don't know who else but me has
potential as an udderbotsman. Currently planning to record some Bach
keyboard pieces to assert the udderbot's agility.

On 3/3/06, Jacob <jbarton@...> wrote:

> ~40 oz. glass bottle (< $5) + rubber glove ($10-$15 for a decent pack)
> + tape or silicone sealant ($5-$10) + water (free???) = UDDERBOT

I'm having a hard time visualizing this. Do you have a picture? What's
the classification?

--TRISTAN
(http://dreamingofeden.smackjeeves.com/)

--- In MakeMicroMusic@yahoogroups.com, "Rozencrantz the Sane"
<rozencrantz@...> wrote:
>
> On 3/3/06, Jacob <jbarton@...> wrote:
>
> > ~40 oz. glass bottle (< $5) + rubber glove ($10-$15 for a decent pack)
> > + tape or silicone sealant ($5-$10) + water (free???) = UDDERBOT
>
> I'm having a hard time visualizing this. Do you have a picture? What's
> the classification?

Woodwind (glasswind?)

http://www.ruf.rice.edu/~sci2006/pictures/DSC01114.JPG

http://www.ruf.rice.edu/~sci2006/pictures/DSC01115.JPG

On 3/4/06, Jacob <jbarton@...> wrote:

> Woodwind (glasswind?)
>
> http://www.ruf.rice.edu/~sci2006/pictures/DSC01114.JPG
>
> http://www.ruf.rice.edu/~sci2006/pictures/DSC01115.JPG

Beautiful! I'm going to make one of those as soon as I can. I think
there was something essentially the same (though more robot-looking)
in Starship Titanic.

Interesting that you called it an "Acoustic theremin" though, because
I've used the same name for a particular kind of whistling I do. I cup
my hands together into a sort of fleshey ocarena, and by wiggling the
fingers of my right hand I can get fairly complex melodies with lots
of vibrato and glissando. I've tried recording it a few times, but it
requires too much breath to operate for more than a minute.

--TRISTAN
(http://dreamingofeden.smackjeeves.com/)

--- In MakeMicroMusic@yahoogroups.com, "Keenan Pepper" <keenanpepper@.
..> wrote:
>
> Computers and synthesizers are great, but every once in a while one
> feels the need to play on a real physical instrument. I'm trying to
> think of things I can build on a college student's budget (i.e. less
> than like a hundred USD total).

http://web.archive.org/web/20040621071855/www.bernett.biz/Marimba/
Marimba.pdf

H. F. Halenz, "How to Build a Marimba" Mechanix Illustrated Sept.
1956. (if this was Popular Mechanics it would omit "properly tuned").

Clark

You've gotten some great suggestions!

But there are also plenty of books out there on making musical
instruments - many oriented toward kids, of course.

And some of these are in your local public library, and some
instructions are on the Internet.

I also got 263 hits with this Amazon search:
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/search-handle-url/103-5180143-
9274243?%5Fencoding=UTF8&dym=0&search-type=ss&index=stripbooks%
3Arelevance-above&field-keywords=make%20musical%20instruments

AND - you could probably find some broken standard instruments and
reinvent them as microtonal instrument at low cost -

How about removing/relocating frets from a guitar or similar
instrument?
Changing the lengths of valve tubes on a brass instrument?
Drilling extra holes into a flute?

You should also look into issues of "Experimental Musical
Instruments", a recently defunct magazine of such things.

--- In MakeMicroMusic@yahoogroups.com, "Keenan Pepper"
<keenanpepper@...> wrote:
>
> Computers and synthesizers are great, but every once in a while one
> feels the need to play on a real physical instrument. I'm trying to
> think of things I can build on a college student's budget (i.e. less
> than like a hundred USD total).
>
> So far I've got:
>
> Buy a lot of cheap plastic tubing and cut it to various lengths.
Bang
> the tubes on stuff. Cap one end to make them an octave lower. Mount
> them on a frame and slap the tops with a flip-flop sandal to make a
> "slap organ". Make a mouthpiece out of wax or something and play one
> like a didgeridoo.
>
> Find some cheap guitar tuning mechanisms. Make a monochord or canon.
> For the soundbox, use a cardboard box or some old wooden furniture.
>
> Collect pieces of junk that make cool sounds when you hit them, and
> string them up by the nodes.
>
> Questions:
>
> What is the correct tool to shave off slivers from wooden objects to
> tune them? What about metal? Glass?
>
> Anyone have other suggestions?
>
> Keenan
>

threesixesinarow escreveu:

> http://web.archive.org/web/20040621071855/www.bernett.biz/Marimba/
> Marimba.pdf

What is the correct URI?

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At 04:31 PM 3/7/2006, you wrote:
>threesixesinarow escreveu:
>
>> http://web.archive.org/web/20040621071855/www.bernett.biz/Marimba/
>> Marimba.pdf
>
>What is the correct URI?

That works for me.

-Carl

Carl wrote:

>>> http://web.archive.org/web/20040621071855/www.bernett.biz/Marimba/
>>> Marimba.pdf
>>
>>What is the correct URI?
>
>That works for me.

Yeah? Both in my email program (Eudora) and on the web, the line break causes a 404 page to come up. But Hudson, it should be obvious to just remove the line break and cause "Marimba.pdf" to be the file from the Marimba directory. Or you could use:

http://tinyurl.com/rmxpu

Hope Carl didn't freak out, having to look at a pdf file... :)

Cheers,
Jon

http://web.archive.org/web/20040621071855/www.bernett.biz/Marimba/Marimba.pdf
^^^^

Sorry, I got confused by the www. in the middle of the URI.
Hudson

>>> >>> What is the correct URI?
>> >> That works for me.
> > > Yeah? Both in my email program (Eudora) and on the web, the line
> break causes a 404 page to come up. But Hudson, it should be obvious
> to just remove the line break and cause "Marimba.pdf" to be the file
> from the Marimba directory. Or you could use:
> > http://tinyurl.com/rmxpu
> > Hope Carl didn't freak out, having to look at a pdf file... :)
> > Cheers, Jon
[...]

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_______________________________________________________
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:-(
No success in downloading the PDF so far...
Hudson

Hudson Lacerda escreveu:
> http://web.archive.org/web/20040621071855/www.bernett.biz/Marimba/Marimba.pdf
> ^^^^
> > Sorry, I got confused by the www. in the middle of the URI.
> Hudson
> > >>>>What is the correct URI?
>>>
>>>That works for me.
>>
>>
>>Yeah? Both in my email program (Eudora) and on the web, the line
>>break causes a 404 page to come up. But Hudson, it should be obvious
>>to just remove the line break and cause "Marimba.pdf" to be the file
>>from the Marimba directory. Or you could use:
>>
>>http://tinyurl.com/rmxpu
>>
>>Hope Carl didn't freak out, having to look at a pdf file... :)
>>
>>Cheers, Jon
> > [...]
> -- '-------------------------------------------------------------------.
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*Nï¿œo deixe seu voto sumir! http://www.votoseguro.org/
*Apï¿œie o Manifesto: http://www.votoseguro.com/alertaprofessores/

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_______________________________________________________ Yahoo! doce lar. Faï¿œa do Yahoo! sua homepage. http://br.yahoo.com/homepageset.html

Hudson,

{you wrote...}
>:-(
>No success in downloading the PDF so far...

Check all your settings or browser or something. No problem here at all. If you can't get to it, I can upload the file to one of my sites and you can download it there...

Cheers,
Jon

Hi Jon.

Jon Szanto escreveu:
> Hudson,
> > {you wrote...}
> >> :-( No success in downloading the PDF so far...
> > > Check all your settings or browser or something. No problem here at
> all. If you can't get to it, I can upload the file to one of my sites
> and you can download it there...
> > Cheers, Jon

My download manager nt (AKA d4x) said `it seems that there is no download continuation support'. It downloads about 25% and then restarts from 0% again... The latest try it downloaded more than 40% and then restarted once again...

I have tried download the file directly with mozilla, without success. (The download seems o be successful completed, but the damaged file had only ~500KB...)

I use dial-up connection, maybe this can be some temporary problem with my ISP. Later on I will try again.

Thanks.
Hudson

_______________________________________________________
Yahoo! Acesso Gr�tis - Internet r�pida e gr�tis. Instale o discador agora!
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Hudson,

{you wrote...}
>I use dial-up connection, maybe this can be some temporary problem with my ISP. Later on I will try again.

Yes, dial-up is probably no fun. If you want to give a try to someplace different, I put it on one of my sites just temporarily. You can get it at:

http://www.microtonal.org/hold/marimba_construct.pdf

Let me know either when you've gotten it or when you don't need it anymore, and I'll take the file down. It is 1.5mb, by the way.

Cheers,
Jon (who, while on the dreaded Wintel platform, uses Firefox...)

Jon Szanto escreveu:
[...]
> Yes, dial-up is probably no fun. If you want to give a try to
> someplace different, I put it on one of my sites just temporarily.
> You can get it at:
> > http://www.microtonal.org/hold/marimba_construct.pdf
> > Let me know either when you've gotten it or when you don't need it
> anymore, and I'll take the file down. It is 1.5mb, by the way.
> > Cheers, Jon (who, while on the dreaded Wintel platform, uses
> Firefox...)

Thanks Jon,
I got the 7 pages without any problem.
Hudson

_______________________________________________________
Yahoo! Acesso Gr�tis - Internet r�pida e gr�tis. Instale o discador agora!
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Overtone flute (note: I haven't tried it myself):

http://www.sarana.biz/diy.html

--- In MakeMicroMusic@yahoogroups.com, Hudson Lacerda <hfmlacerda@...>
wrote:

> My download manager nt (AKA d4x) said `it seems that there is no
> download continuation support'. It downloads about 25% and then
restarts
> from 0% again... The latest try it downloaded more than 40% and then
> restarted once again...

I'd download GetRight and try again.

Gene Ward Smith escreveu:
> --- In MakeMicroMusic@yahoogroups.com, Hudson Lacerda <hfmlacerda@... wrote:
>>My download manager nt (AKA d4x) said `it seems that there is no >>download continuation support'. It downloads about 25% and then restarts >>from 0% again... The latest try it downloaded more than 40% and then >>restarted once again...
> > I'd download GetRight and try again.

It seems the problem is that the file server doesn't support resuming, and not a problem with the download manager nt <http://www.krasu.ru/soft/chuchelo/>.
BTW, GetRight is not free software.

Back to cheap instruments, this page is interesting:
<http://science.univr.it/goccia/whistle/index.html>

I don't know if it is feasible to do a microtonal tin whistle or like, however.

Cheers,
Hudson

--
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_______________________________________________________
Yahoo! Acesso Gr�tis - Internet r�pida e gr�tis. Instale o discador agora!
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> Back to cheap instruments, this page is interesting:
> <http://science.univr.it/goccia/whistle/index.html>
>
> I don't know if it is feasible to do a microtonal tin whistle or like,
> however.

My main concern with tin whistles is that if you make a mistake
placing a hole, it's fairly difficult to fix. I'm working on plans for
a microtonal ocarena, with a theoretical maximum of 1024 unique
pitches. I'm working out how that's possible, but that's math for you.

--TRISTAN
(http://dreamingofeden.smackjeeves.com/)

--- In MakeMicroMusic@yahoogroups.com, Hudson Lacerda <hfmlacerda@...>
wrote:
> Gene Ward Smith escreveu:

> > I'd download GetRight and try again.
>
> It seems the problem is that the file server doesn't support resuming,
> and not a problem with the download manager nt
> <http://www.krasu.ru/soft/chuchelo/>.

With GetRight, it doesn't matter if the file server supports resuming.

> BTW, GetRight is not free software.

It's shareware, so that isn't a problem.