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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.
An Italian passport used to be one of the easiest ones to obtain for those who wanted a second one that came with EU movement freedom, but living la dolce vita is getting much tougher now. You must prove direct lineage no further back than a grandparent, speak Italian well enough to pass a proficiency exam, and live there already for three years to qualify. See the details here.
Cheaper Streaming Abroad
I’m going to add Apple TV at home after watching only part of Severance on a United flight, but I’ll likely subscribe in Mexico where it’s 28% cheaper than the USA. You can play this arbitrage game with most of the streaming services—I once got HBO on sale for $5 a month. In Mexico you can get the highest tier of Netflix for the price of the middle tier stateside, a 39% monthly savings (with a better studio movie selection too). Shop around if moving around. In Turkey, for example, the highest tier of Netflix with 4K hi-def is less than US$10 per month. Try regional gift cards, signing up while in another country, or using a good VPN for the first transaction.
A Long Walk Is Better Than Many Short Ones
Good news for travelers: those mountain hikes and long walks across the city are better for your health than quick spins around the block. According to research in the Annals of Internal Medicine that measured step counts over eight years, “People who walked in longer stretches had a lower risk of heart problems than those who walked in short bursts. Their risk of heart disease and death dropped significantly.” I’m linking to the explanatory article from the BBC since the source study’s title will give you an idea of how dry their version is: “Step Accumulation Patterns and Risk for Cardiovascular Events and Mortality Among Suboptimally Active Adults.”
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.
