instrument-a-day 2008 – moonmilk

Thanks to everyone who came to the 29 Noisy Noises party on March 1 and helped me celebrate finishing 29 instruments in 29 days! Lots of great people came over and made a lot of great noise on the 29 … Continue reading →

It’s a dog. Eating from a metal bowl and then fighting with the blankets, he sounds like this. If you’re in NYC and you’d like to meet this or other instruments-of-the-day, check this out. I’m going to continue with the … Continue reading →

I found the box in the garbage while walking the dog yesterday and I knew I had to make a fiddle. It looks like it was a chunk cut out of a cheap veneer door or something. This was my … Continue reading →

Today my ebay order of mongolian horse hair arrived! So I made a fancy horsehair bow. It’s an awful bow, of course, and I have no idea how to use a bow anyway, but what the heck: here’s what it … Continue reading →

Yes, it’s another rotten stick! But no walnuts this time. It’s a saxophone of sorts, using reeds made out of coke cans, subway passes, and whatever else I had lying around. Here’s what it sounds like with three different reeds. … Continue reading →

Bart Hopkin calls it a boo – a tongue drum made from a tube of bamboo or a box. It might not seem complicated compared to some of my earlier instruments, but for me, cutting and attaching these five pieces … Continue reading →

Ever since I saw it in the instrument collection at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, I’ve been obsessed with the trumpet marine, a giant one-stringed instrument that’s supposed to sound like a trumpet. Besides its monstrous size, the most important … Continue reading →

Continuing to explore the variable tension theme from yesterday: the rotten stick tension guitar uses a hand lever to stretch the string and thus set the pitch. I had that bit of coconut leftover from the banjo, so I used … Continue reading →