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Staff & Stick

Homemade percussion links & resources:

Make Your own snare drum with Mark Powers at Drummers' Digest

you MUST check out BALLOON DRUMS thanks to R. Clark for this link..

Iner Souster's INCREDIBLE collection of Stringed instruments. Whoa..

Don't miss Donald Knaack's
Junkmusic.org

homepage of Dennis Havlina
Tons of stuff here.

McMaster-Carr is the ultimate hardwarestore/ supply shop. Everything, from rubber tubing, to containers to you name it.. check them out..

Inventing Homemade Instruments
with Math and Measurement by Phil Tulga
-

Check out Stomp. This Video, STOMP OUT LOUD, is a must have. They are the reigning geniuses with found sounds.

One last link to inspire you. These folks are wayy beyond the homemade stage, but their ingenuity is wonderful. Check out Bill & Mary Buchen's page, Sonic Artchitecture.

sound sculptures by Will Menter

Odd Music.com

THE ART OF SOUND EFFECTS
by Ray Brunelle
- Here's a great article about the history of sound effects in theater, radio, TV, and film.

Robert Patterson Collier - music created mainly with experimental thumb pianos, broken guitars, and toy keyboards. (RPC has been working with invented instruments for 25 years..)listen

BashTheTrash.com - john Bertles has been involved with this work for many years..

 

Homemade Percussion & Junkmusic

At Right: the Juevon or Egg Ipu

When you use your imagination to make or find percussion instruments for yourself, you are following a tradition that stretches back thousands of years to the dawn of human music making. It's an essential part of being a percussionist.

This is only a starting place for ideas. Think outside the box... or the egg, as the case may be..

Jason Bruns' Can Drum Orchestra - Jason Bruns, an L.A. area teacher, used some of our ideas for a 25 piece percussion orchestra. Read more about it.

Newest homemade drum: A featherlight plastic pork rind jar. Read more

Working with fishskin: A ceramic clay hibachi drum with dual fishskin heads..

Water Bottles About Playing Techniques

Coffee Can Drums Learn to make this portable and useful little drum.

Shakers - Understanding the Variables

Tube Drums - Beautiful, sonorous, inexpensive, and HOMEMADE!
Click for complete instructions..

sticks and beaters - Learn to use the right shape and material for the right sounds

Bass Instruments - Here's a quick and easy one that works.

The Djun Basket - Easy Project For a loud and portable drum

Metal Bowls - Etherial metal sounds from 'housewares' conjure an atmosphere that is hard to get any other way.. have a look

Wooden Boxes - Inexpensive and rich in tone, a cigar box or other small wooden box can be a nice instrument.

What works? Use your EARS. The 21st century urban environment provides tons of cool sounding material resources, many of which we explore here. Also, if you don't know about Stomp, check them out. (the link is below.) You'll never look at a hardware store the same way again. Beautiful sounds come from things like copper tubing, bushel baskets, dowel, pipe, pvc pipe, coffee cans, vitamin jars, bb's, old keys, hub caps, brake drums, frying pans, you name it. If it's made of wood, metal or certain types of plastic, it will probably sound good.. Being round or hollow is an added benefit.

 Your ears and your imagination are your handiest tools.

Certain plastics, especially polycarbonate resins, have incredible sonic properties, and in the right hands, a sparklett's bottle is as delicate and subtle as the finest UDU. We alter 'em, and here we tell you HOW, in "STU's Moondrums".

Here are a few recommended books to get you started. We checked 'em all out. No sense in re-inventing the wheel here..these are the best books available on the Web dealing with homemade percussion instruments.

 

Sound Designs: A Handbook of Musical Instrument Building
Reinhold Banek & Jon Scoville


 AT AMAZON!

This book is a must. SOUND DESIGNS will teach you how to build truly unique musical instruments, including oil drum gongs, beautiful tongue drums and temple blocks, thumb pianos, cowbells, tube drums, willow whistles....on & on. Sources for these and many other designs are drawn from cultures world wide - from the Stone Age to the Space Age. The necessary materials can be purchased easily, or simply found in nature or a junkyard. Arthur Hull recommended this one to us, and it's our favorite one. Thanks, ATA!

Musical Instrument Design Practical Information for Instrument Making
Bart Hopkin
Bart Hopkin has for 14 years published and edited the quarterly journal Experimental Musical Instruments. In the course of that work, he's been in constant contact with musical instrument makers of all sorts, as well as acousticians, scholars and theoreticians -- lots of truly skilled, knowledgeable and creative people. He brings his experience to this book, and it shows. No other single resource contains the theoretical and practical information found in this book


BUY IT AT AMAZON!

Making Simple Musical Instruments
A Melodious Collection of Strings, Winds, Drums & More
Bart Hopkin

BUY IT AT AMAZON!
Making Simple Musical Instruments is a friendly, accessible and informative collection of home-buildable instrument plans, supplemented with generous amounts of additional background information, beautifully presented with lots of graphics. Not just percussion instruments, this book covers strings and winds as well.

How to Make Drums,Tomtoms & Rattles:
Primitive Percussion Instruments for Modern Use.
Bernard S. Mason
Complete, thorough directions are given for making a variety of drums, many from such simple, everyday materials as wooden kegs, flower pots, coffee cans, buckets, old inner tubes and airplane cloth. Also such drum related articles as drumsticks and many different kinds of rattles are described with additional instructions on how to make them.  A very inexpensive book, well worth the cost.
BUY IT NOW at AMAZON
Let's Make Music: An Interactive Musical Trip Around The World
by Jessica Baron Turner and Ronny Susan Schiff


BUY IT NOW at AMAZON

  • Sing and play songs from around the world.

  • Create instruments from 10 different countries using recycled materials.

Kids' homemade rhythm workshops  - Stu at Rhythmweb does a workshop at YOUR location.

AUDIO PIECES
from the upcoming Junk Rituals series. by Eric Stuer

Feb 14, 2004, Earth:- the Egg Ipu or juevon is born..

Juevon - the Egg Rituals - the latest recording in a series - coming soon!

Hubcap Ritual 12
Stu's 1st release in a series using homemade and found sounds

Water Ritual
Incorporating the Water bottles # 2 in the series

When one combines homemade and found sounds with electronics and computers, all kinds of things are possible. Listen to what composer Rick Walker has done with only a cranberry juice bottle.

Our friend Dale Wambaugh in Seattle has a nice junk page started.

Folkurban Music
Tim Escobedo's site is full of great ideas.

Corporeal Meadows (Harry Partch's spot online) . The instruments on these pages will astound and inspire you.

Experimental Musical Instruments a wonderful homemade instrument site, content rich.

Visit the Soundry, an educational website about sound.

Ikigala Construction
Brian has made some excellent and powerful stick drums here, and has explained exactly how he did it; this is a good page

Sonics From Scratch

 

 

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