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Best DIY instrument how-to
Here are three great guides for making your own musical instruments. Advantages of making your own: 1) Personalized, 2) Cheaper, 3) Types no one else sells, 4) Satisfaction of making. There is not much overlap of instruments featured between these three books. The coolest of the three guides is Making Gourd Musical Instruments. It has very explicit step-by-step instructions for making 60 instruments using lightweight gourds as the sound amplifiers. Gourds enable wind, string and percussion instruments – so you could make an entire orchestra. This book has the most variety of musical options and great examples of world-wide traditional instruments for inspiration. If you can get only one of these three books, this should be it.
Making Musical Instruments by Hand is a good guide for making instruments from wood and wood veneers. Their builds are a little more complex resulting in instruments that may look more “professional.” They require a bit more skills and tools, although none out of the ordinary.
But if you are making your own instruments, why not make ones that have never existed before? Sound Designs, an older book, lays out helpful hints for making 50 different unorthodox instruments using salvage materials. It stresses innovative interpretations: how about oxygen bottles for bells, or electrical conduit xylophones? Its intent is to encourage you to not just make your own musical instruments, but to invent them as well. – KK
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A cool tool can be any book, gadget, software, video, map, hardware, material, or website that is tried and true. All reviews on this site are written by readers who have actually used the tool and others like it. Items can be either old or new as long as they are wonderful. We post things we like and ignore the rest. Suggestions for tools much better than what is recommended here are always wanted.
As if the privacy intrusions and random phone checks weren’t enough, now the cost to enter the USA is going up too. If you’re from a nation that this administration has a beef with, there are ridiculously onerous new conditions and fees that are still in the implementation phase. If you’re from an ally nation (is there really any such thing now?), the cost to enter is going from $21 to $40 on September 30. For land arrivals it goes from $6 to $30. Read all the ugly details here, including about a $12.5 billion drop in tourism during what has been a record year for nearly every other destination in the world.
The Most Peaceful Countries
If you’d like to visit somewhere calm instead, we’ve got some data for you. Iceland is the most peaceful country, followed by Ireland, New Zealand, Austria, Switzerland, and Singapore in this Global Peace Index. Safe countries don’t have to be the most expensive though: Portugal, Czechia, Malaysia, and Hungary all made the top 20 and Bulgaria edged out the UK. (The USA ranks #128, just below Honduras and Kenya.)
The Exploding Hotel Brand Landscape
If you feel like you can’t keep up with all the hotel brands out there and it’s a big confusing mess, there’s a good reason for that sentiment. This Hotel Brands of the World infographic puts them all on a wheel, with companies presented as pie slices, going from luxury in the middle to budget at the edge. Marriott and Accor both have more than 30 brands each to keep track of, though the biggest slice is “Independent Groups,” with brands that are refreshingly focused. These go from Rosewood and Four Seasons to Drury Inn and In Town Suites.
A weekly newsletter with four quick bites, edited by Tim Leffel, author of A Better Life for Half the Price and The World’s Cheapest Destinations. See past editions here, where your like-minded friends can subscribe and join you.
