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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.
Beal clean grip liquid chalk:Recommended to me by a more experienced lifter when I started weight training in 2010. Every time I’ve forgotten it since, lifting has felt like trying to hold onto the bar with soapy hands. One bottle lasts for years.
Any A4 spiral notebook: I’ve used an A4 spiral notebook to plan my weeks since 2014. One notebook per year, one page per week. Each page follows the same structure: a numbered list of ten projects or focus areas for the week. Not tasks, but the things that will compete for my attention. Seeing all ten on a single page gives me a realistic sense of capacity. If something is tied to a specific day, I simply write the weekday—like “Tue”—on that line. I sometimes add small circles next to an item to indicate how many pomodoros I want to spend on it. It’s a simple, manual system. It doesn’t help me do more—it helps me decide what actually matters this week.
Oral-B iO electric toothbrush: The difference in feel between a manual toothbrush and an electric one is real. The difference between a standard electric toothbrush and the Oral-B iO feels just as big. You notice it immediately when you run your tongue over your teeth. Once you’ve gotten used to that level of clean, going back—when traveling without it—always feels noticeably worse.
DIGITAL
Readwise (and Reader): I’ve used Readwise since 2020. I’m currently on a +1,700-day review streak, with over 30,500 highlights—mostly from Kindle Paperwhite/Kindle app and Reader. What keeps me coming back isn’t the streak, but the habit it supports. Highlights resurface when I’ve forgotten them, often at exactly the right time. Readwise Reader has also become my default place for PDFs and (long-form) articles. It’s the best app I’ve found for turning things I read into things I actually remember.
A personalized Todoist setup based on Tiago Forte’s video series: I’ve adapted my Todoist system around Tiago Forte’s approach to managing projects and commitments (from his excellent video series). Instead of treating Todoist as a task dump, my setup helps me distinguish between what I’m committed to and everything else. I find this framework far more useful than a generic inbox-to-zero workflow—the structure gives direction, not just an empty inbox. The method has become the backbone of how I actually work with Todoist.https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/cg-29pZUFcs?rel=0&autoplay=0&showinfo=0&enablejsapi=0
INVISIBLE
Herbie, the bottleneck
From The Goal by Eliyahu Goldratt. In the story of Herbie, the slowest boy in a hiking group determines the pace of the entire line. Even if everyone else walks faster, overall throughput cannot exceed the speed of the bottleneck.
The insight is simple: system performance is governed by its constraints, not by the individual speed of its fastest parts.
