I need ideas to make home made instruments..?

Question

Anyone have any?

Answer 1

Percussive instruments are easy--banging on things makes a wide variety of noises...so instead I'll focus on how to make instruments that produce actual pitches:

The basic ideas of most musical intruments come down to three basic things: resonating air column, resonating strings, or resonating something else.

Air columns--you can take beer bottles or other glass bottles and fill them to different heights with water to produce different pitches. You blow on them, and they make noise--the more empty they are, the lower the pitch. This is one of the easiest things to do. It's also easy to tune--just add or remove water. The problem is you need one bottle for each pitch.

Vibrating strings--you can make a whole lot of things by attaching strings to things. The idea of a washtub bass is to attach a string to a washtub and then a stick, and you can vary the length of the string by moving the stick up and down. You can use a regular bass string, if you have it...or anything that can produce a pitch (stronger is better). One site on the net has people using an aircraft cable. The washtub on the bottom of the bass makes it resonant and loud.

Any sort of hollow tube can be used to make a wind instrument. You can even construct things like a digeridoo out of PVC pipe. Smaller tubes made out of various substances can be used to make flute or recorder-like instruments...with holes added to change pitches.

It can be a lot of work, but you can make something like a Xylophone out of many different substances. I've seen ones made out of wrenches even. This is hard though--you need to anchor each key, and this can be very difficult to do while keeping it tuned properly.

You can also make chimes out of various things...hollow shoots of bamboo work--if you can find a bamboo patch, cut and dry them, then cut them to different lengths. I've seen very good wind chimes made out of bamboo.

These are just a few ideas--you can improvise and come up with new ideas. Remember, a musical pitch is produced by vibration--so creating a vibrating air column (in some sort of tube) or a vibrating string or piece of metal are all ways to produce instruments.

I hope this helps!

Answer 2

there are lots of books at the library that tell how to make all kinds of instruments. check em out. ;)

Answer 3

Bamboo chutes make great flutes, and as always, pots and pans make great drums, and glasses filled with different amounts of water make pretty noises.

Answer 4

http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=navclient&ie=UTF-8&rls=RNWE,RNWE:2005-19,RNWE:en&q=homemade+musical+instruments