Musical Instruments

(Gross) How to Make Everything wants to make a collection of musical instruments from scratch. First up is a drum. He made it out of maple wood, pigskin and twine. He had a lot of help from a woodworker, but he did all the gross stuff for the leather.

Moon Guitars makes custom electric guitars based on Fender designs. One of their latest builds is this beautiful Telecaster style project that has a body made of wood and epoxy resin. It’s equipped with Shoreline Menlo Park pickups and Gotoh hardware.

LEGO Ideas contributor Sleepy Cow created this 2,798 piece model of a grand piano which features 25 working keys, complete with strings, pedals, and dampers. It doesn’t actually play music, but it’s still a mechanical marvel. If you’d like to see it produced, vote here.

Görkem Sen performs an improvised piece on a custom-built acoustic instrument called the Yaybahar. The unusual instrument gets its ethereal sound by bowing strings that conduct vibrations down through its neck onto coiled springs, connected to a pair of drum heads.

Jamstik’s new smart guitars offer portability for both pros and newbies. The Jamstik7 is perfect for beginners – it has 7 frets and works with Jamstik’s educational apps. The Jamstik12 is a 12-fret smart guitar with low latency, palm mute sensing and MIDI compatibility.

A look inside the McPherson Guitars‘ factory, where talented artisans use a mix of high tech materials and traditional finishing techniques to create lightweight, durable, and visually striking musical instruments. The Carbon Series guitars range in price from $2799 to $3299.

A hilariously absurd video from Grieg Johnson which provides instruction on how to play an “ancient, elegant” musical instrument. But it’s not just the Shenanigan that’s of interest – it’s the fake Scandanavian-ish tongue that the narrator speaks in that really makes the video.

Don’t have the room for an entire pipe organ in your home (or theater or church)? Musician Andrew Anderson shows off his rig, which uses Hauptwerk’s virtual pipe organ software, loaded up with Paramount Organ Works‘ set of incredibly accurate Wurlitzer samples.

Populele is a ukelele designed for total newbies. Its fretboard has 72 embedded LEDs. Together with its free companion app for iOS and Android, the LEDs will teach you chords and full songs. It also has mini-games that will teach you the basics.

Teenage Engineering’s third batch of Pocket Operators is now complete. Accompanying the PO-32 Tonic drum machine are the PO-33 K.O.!, a micro-sampler with 40s memory, and the PO-35 Speak, a voice recorder and sampler.

Got a broken washing machine and some woodworking skills? Then check out Scrap Wood City’s clip in which he shows how to convert the metal tub from a washing machine into the body for a fretless acoustic contrabass. It’s only got two strings, but it still sounds cool.

Sometimes when we play tennis, we we like to fool around and play air guitar with the rackets. But Scrap Wood City went one better, and shows us how they transformed a racket into a fully functional electric guitar. Though it does only have three strings.

Spectrasonics spent 10 years refurbishing, tuning, and capturing the sounds of some of the world’s greatest pianos, organs, and synths, and collected them into a digital library you can play with a MIDI keyboard and a computer. If it’s good enough for Stevie Wonder…

Learn to play the guitar like a pro with this nifty gadget. It slides beneath the strings onto the fret board of any 6-string guitar, and uses LEDs to show you where to place your fingers as you build your skills. A companion smartphone app provides lessons and tracks your progress.

Specdrums are electronic rings that let you map notes or sounds to any color around you. You can wear them, put them on sticks, and more. Their app lets you map colors to a variety of instruments as well as your own sounds. You can also use Specdrums with other MIDI apps.

It may not be the most sonically pleasing instrument, but the engineering behind Josh Sheldon’s build makes up for it. The organ uses 49 stepper motors which spin backwards against variably-sized disks, producing waves of electrical current which can be amplified.

The Roland TR-08 looks and works exactly the same as its grandfather, the TR-808, but in a much more portable form. You can even power it with batteries. It doesn’t sound quite as crunchy as the original, but for its price and size it’s a hell of a deal.

Musician and inventor Subhraag Singh shows off his “saxophone of the future,” a unique wind instrument with computer-controlled valves which slide open and closed. It produces a nearly infinite variety of pitches, and can even be played hands-free.

The hurdy-gurdy makes its distinctive sound by turning a rosin-coated wheel across strings as its keys are pressed. Now you can make your own with this flat-pack kit from Ugears. It looks like a very challenging build, but the end result is a functional musical instrument.

Christopher “C3” Cardone of Kalium Strings shows off “Godzilla” – a custom-built bass guitar which has 24 of his company’s strings. Stick around, and you’ll also be treated to a demo of their .266 gauge strings, which produce ridiculously deep bass notes.

A unique machine designed solely to produce eerie sounds for horror films. Luthier Tony Duggan-Smith created this combination of strings, rods, magnets, wood, and other found objects so Indie Film Maker could make original sounds instead of turning to a stock library.

New and improved versions of Loog Guitars’ kid-friendly, three-stringed mini guitars. The Loog Pro has improved bridge, neck, pickup and body designs, while the new Mini is for kids as young as 3 years old. Both come fully assembled.

Please forgive us for posting videos with Flight of the Bumblebee three times in the same week, but this clip that shows the process of crafting a Vincent Bach trumpet mouthpiece from a brass rod was too captivating to pass up.

This strange looking gadget isn’t a self-aware vacuum cleaner. It’s a complete drum machine, sequencer, synthesizer, looper, clip launcher, and wireless MIDI controller in one. Its packed with hundreds of sounds, and has 96 velocity and pressure-sensitive pads.

A kid plays a hilarious gizmo cobbled together from the butt of a rifle, a garden sprayer, and a brass horn. We certainly wouldn’t want to be on the business end of this half-vuvuzela, half-fart sound machine.

The latest addition to Teenage Engineering’s awesome Pocket Operators is a programmable drum machine you can tote in your pants. Available by itself, or bundled with Microtonic VST letting you upload custom sounds. A nifty calculator inspired pro case drops this April.

YouTuber Mike Boyd takes on one of the most daunting instruments to pick up. The violin sounds distinctively annoying in the hands of a rookie, but Mike quickly figured out a basic tip: it’s all in the grip. And the time you put in. Here’s what 13 hours of practice sounds like.

Turn your desktop into a complete drum kit with this roll-up electronic drum pad. The system includes 7 drum pads and two foot pedals, and you can listen via headphones, built-in speakers, or use it as a USB Midi controller. Save 37% in The Awesomer Shop. Demo here.

A pair of tiny and wireless sensors that let you play drums using only drumsticks and a MIDI smartphone app such as GarageBand. It works with both iOS and Android. You can even buy a second pair and strap them to your feet to mimic pedals.

From the makers of the Seaboard comes a modular and newbie-friendly MIDI controller. Blocks’ main unit is the Lightpad, a pressure-sensitive block. You can connect multiple Lightpads together or with the optional control Blocks. Works with iOS and desktop DAWs.

Luthier Linda Manzer shows off one of the most amazing stringed instruments we’ve ever seen – a multi-necked guitar with a whopping 52 strings that she built for musician Henrik Andersen, based roughly on a hilarious cartoon he provided. Hear Henrik play it at 3:06.

Weapons expert Vitaly Kryuchin heads up the Russian Federation of Practical Shooting. While on the firing range, he came up with this very special musical instrument called the Metallophon, which is played with bullets and extraordinary aim.