DYI Instruments

I watched some clips of Staff Benda Bilili and heard the NPR segment. My questions: FIrst, the can guitar thing. How is it made? Second, any cool DYI musical instrument sites you can point me to?
posted by cjorgensen (4 comments total)

This is a pretty good thread on homemade instruments.
posted by sleepy pete at 11:35 AM on October 15, 2011

Here's some more (mainly because I think that thread I posted isn't what I thought it was):

Dennis Havlena's site. Haven't made anything from here yet, but there's lots of stuff I want to do soon.

Musical Instrument Makers Forum has a lot of great links.

These two are more for kids/teachers:
Homemade Instruments
The Virtual Museum of Music Inventions

And then there's Bart Hopkin's Musical Instrument Design (partial google book, it looks like).
posted by sleepy pete at 8:00 PM on October 16, 2011 [2 favorites]

Here's the trailer for the Benda Bilili documentary. These songs sound pretty amazing. Youtube in general has an amazing subculture of DIY instruments.
posted by Corduroy at 3:20 PM on October 17, 2011

Thanks. If others have more I'd love to read them. I'm looking for things I could make over a weekend or three. I love the sound that kid gets from that guitar thing!
posted by cjorgensen at 5:49 PM on October 17, 2011