>>http://www.oddmusic.com
>I have only ever built one instrument(of my own design) and due to it's
>largish size(relative to the small size of my house) and the fact that I was
>unlikely to ever play it again I had to dump it :-(
>
>If anyone else on the list has ever built their own instruments I'd like to
>hear about it.
i've not really ever built anything completely of my own design...but, i
have taken some things and altered them to my liking...mostly just
children's toys, etc.
there are some great instruments out there designed with children in mind
(of all ages) that can be found relatively cheap.
some of my favorites are the accordian i recently received as a birthday
gift...it's very small, very simple, but with an incredible sound...i have
no reason to do any altering to something like that.
however, i do have a guitar that i found for less than 5 dollars...it's
designed with a kind of electronic keyboard up the neck...i have it torn
apart and was working on re-organizing the order of the keys so that they
would fall into a kind of self-controlled scale rather than their more
traditional arrangement.
i also have some voice-altering toys and anything with pre-recorded
beats/riffs can be a lot of fun...especially if fitted with almost dead
batteries. actually, the guitar that i just mentioned also came with a
nice head-mount mic that seems to have some bizarre filtering capabilities
(most likely unintentionally and more due to its poor quality). another
great device i've found to use as a filter is an old set of fisher price
skytalker walkie-talkies...they can add a nice gritty quality to anything,
and if you play and record music through them, it can add a kind of
vintage/hissy/lo-fidelity quality to it...like old radio. they're also
great for creating silly feedback/screeches...
with a little more time and effort, it'd actually be quite simple to just
go in and mount 1/4" in/out jacks to most of this stuff, making it even
easier to play through real recording/mixing equipment.
another one of my favorite toys is an old record player i acquired...i
routed the wires to the motor so that i could reverse the polarity and have
it spin either forward or reverse...they do make high line players with
options like this, but mine cost me about 2 dollars total as compared to at
least 500.
like i said...for me, it's more about finding cheap things and making them
more fun or just taking advantage of their already quirky qualities...
on this note (so to speak), does anyone know where i might be able to find
a cheap tone generator, or possibly something that creates random noise for
testing phone equipment, etc...if anything like that even exists?
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* how small a thought it takes to fill a whole life!
