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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.
There are as many tips about trying to sleep on a plane in economy class as there are colors of neck pillows at the airport, but I’ve got one trick that has worked consistently for me for a hundred+ flights and bus rides. I pop on an eye mask, put in the noise-canceling earbuds, then play one of the two albums that are my “sleep albums.” These never change. What you pick probably doesn’t matter as long as it’s mellow, but the idea is to find something that trains your brain to say, “Ah, okay, the sleep music. It must be time to snooze.” I’ll put the album on repeat, but I rarely make it past the third song before I’m out.
The Most Powerful Passports
Which passports will get you into the most countries visa-free? This year’s report says the three most powerful ones are all from Asia: Singapore, South Korea, and Japan. Five countries tying for fourth are all in Europe. Australia is tied for seventh, the UK is in the group ranking eighth, and Canada is tied for number nine. For the first time since the index started 20 years ago, the U.S. passport dropped out of the top-10 and now sits at #12. That’s down three places from last year, tied with Malaysia and just one point above Bulgaria and Romania.
The Case for Wearing Patagonia
I was just in Patagonia, around a lot of people wearing Patagonia, and I made a YouTube video about that here. I also published this blog post about buying quality travel clothes that will last instead of throwaway fast fashion. I noted in there that Generation Z is leading a resurgence in buying responsibly and buying used; hopefully it will spread. No company has done more for this cause than Patagonia: they are the most sustainably run large apparel corporation in the world, from every angle. They prove it every day by making clothing good enough to carry a lifetime guarantee, plus they give you a credit for trading in items you don’t want anymore (or accept worn-out ones for recycling). They regularly send staffed trucks into adventure travel destinations to repair rips and broken zippers. And that’s just the start. See more on their website here.
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.
