Awesome Musical Instruments

Nicolas Bras likes to make unique musical instruments. He created this unusual instrument out of skinny PVC pipes designed to make that popping sound you make by hooking a finger in your cheek and yanking it. He then goes on to play the perfect song on it – Hot Butter’s Popcorn.

Burls Art and his pal went camping in search of wood and other materials they could build a guitar from. In addition, they built the instrument in the forest entirely using hand tools. It didn’t take long to forage the supplies, but it took nearly a week in the woods to create the guitar.

Rather than go with an off-the-shelf synthesizer, Edward Black Rose built his own from scrap wood. Its wooden keys make strings vibrate between a laser and a photocell, then send that signal to a software synthesizer. It’s not ideal for creating polyphonic sounds, but it’s a clever design nonetheless.

Inspired by a fan-submitted design, this miniature model of Fender’s iconic Stratocaster electric guitar is accurate down to the smallest detail. The 1074-piece model features tiny strings, an official Fender strap, and a 1965 Princeton Reverb amp with a visible interior. It comes with bricks for both red and black guitar bodies.

The Roadie 3 is an automatic tuner for guitars, basses, ukuleles, and other stringed instruments. We took one for a spin to see how quickly and accurately it works on a guitar, along with testing it on a less common instrument – a bouzouki. Overall, it’s an impressive tool for any musician who plays strings.

Musician Grégoire Blanc previously impressed us with his cover of The Great Gig in the Sky. This video isn’t quite as melodic, but it’s just as entertaining. Enjoy as Blanc demonstrates 10 ways to make interesting and captivating sounds by playing a saw and a violin bow in concert with effects pedals and synthesizers.

Piano builder Adrian Alexander Mann created this elongated piano, which measures 18 feet, 9 inches long and weighs over a ton. It has the longest bass strings of any piano, resulting in deeper harmonics and a richer overall tone without affecting pitch. Listen as musician Hyperion Knight performs on the impressive instrument.

After crafting a handmade guitar out of a shelf, luthier Tchiks Guitars came up with a new guitar challenge – to see if they could build a guitar body and headstock out of a single slab of cherry wood. Sit back and enjoy the quietly satisfying process of cutting, carving, and sanding to create a beautiful and functional instrument.

Blue Man Group put the sound of banging on pipes on the map. Imagine if Doc Ock got their hands on their music makers, and you’d have a pretty clear idea of what OCTAV is. Created by industrial designer Asaf Wainberg, the wild-looking wearable is a set of plastic drain pipes that have been cut to different lengths to produce notes.

The slide whistle is one of the goofiest-sounding musical instruments out there. Now, thanks to the engineering smarts of mitxela, we’ve now got a way for a computer to play music on a slide whistle using MIDI commands. It uses a pair of servos and a scissor mechanism to move the slide, and a pump to blow into it.

Music equipment rental company Gate to Hell shared footage of them assembling an enormous drum kit at Essen, Germany concert venue Turock. After the massive rig of percussion instruments was set up, musician Jürgen “Ventor” Reil from the band Kreator put the drum set to the test.

The Colour Palette is a 17-key kalimba that incorporates on-board reverb and delay effects and a 1/4″ output for recording. Musician Simon the Magpie demonstrates the instrument’s sounds and capabilities, then mods it to his own whim. It’s currently sold out, but you can sign up to be notified when more are in stock.

The yellow machine you’re looking at is “Le Mécanophone,” otherwise known as a 1935 Citroën truck, equipped with 42 different car horns. But this thing doesn’t just beep, it’s basically a calliope on wheels. We want one of these just so we can honk at traffic all day long.

Those little felt-covered things that strike the strings in piano are known as hammers, but they definitely couldn’t drive a nail. Musician Mattias Krantz wanted to see what would happen if he replaced all 88 of the piano hammers with real metal hand tools. The resulting sound is surprisingly pleasant and melodic.

Made by Japanese toy company Kiko+ and gg, this beechwood burger and fries are designed for kids, but we’d be happy to play with our food too. The cheeseburger clacks like a castanet, while the fries make the sounds of maracas. We want one of their telephones for our desk too.

If you look around, you can find a bargain-basement drum kit for about $200. But if even that’s not in your budget, you could do what Deden Noy did, and make your own drums from plastic buckets, water bottles, scrap metal, and packing tape. Check out his YouTube channel for more performances.

When is a flute not a flute? When it’s a street barricade, of course. Musician Xavier Lozano demonstrates as he performs a brief piece of music on a metal barrier he drilled out to work as a wind instrument. Lozano is known for his ability to transform unusual objects into musical instruments.

Maker of unusual instruments and musician Nicolas Bras is back with another strange music maker. This time he’s showing off a one-string violin that uses its player’s mouth to produce resonant frequencies. In this case, it isn’t a totally original invention – it’s based on a Vietnamese instrument known as the k’ni.

Artist Dennis Van Hoof shows off his violin-making process which combines modern tech with traditional woodworking. He uses a Shapeoko XXL CNC router to carve the instrument’s pieces from olive wood, replicating the shape of a Stradivarius violin. The finished piece incorporates epoxy resin to fill in the gaps in the wood.

Wonder World shows us an unusual guitar that uses a motorized wheel to strum its strings, so the person playing it only needs to worry about the frets. Anthony Dickens‘ unique instrument has a other interesting innovations like the ability to output sounds one string at a time with the push of a button.

Invented in the 1950s, but rarely seen, the Cristal Baschet is a musical instrument that produces sounds by stroking a series of glass rods attached to metal rods. The ethereal sounds it produces are the perfect complement to Hans Zimmer’s theme from Interstellar, performed here by Marc Chouarain at SFL Studio Féerique.

Most wind instruments are made from wood or brass. But it turns out that a plastic straw can be modified to make music too. This video shows how late Danish musician Peter Bastian was adept at performing on a drinking straw with holes cut in it. Flutist Naveen Kumar shows how you can make your own here.

We all know that breathing helium makes you sound like Mickey Mouse. But does that pitch change affect the air you blow into a saxophone or a bagpipe? The guys from The King of the Random conducted a few experiments to test out the impact of helium and sulfur hexafluoride on the frequencies wind instruments produce.