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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.
Drawing from neuroscience, evolutionary biology, and Buddhist philosophy, Arrow explores how storytelling became humanity’s defining superpower, and reveals how the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves can either liberate or imprison us.
Core Principles
We Are Story Animals
Different cognitive faculties — consciousness, emotion, episodic memory, mental simulation, language, and theory of mind — converged in human evolution to create a new ability: storytelling. This capacity became a tool for communication, a mechanism for self-regulation, and a means of social connection that shaped who we are.
The Self Is a Narrative Construct
What we call our “self” is not an objective reality but a story we continuously tell ourselves. Our identity comprises interconnected narratives: our origin story, our present identity, and our anticipated future. As Gadea writes, “Story is a tool that became its inventor. What we call our Self is a Story.”
Story as Medicine and Poison
The book’s title references a Buddhist parable about a monk struck by a poisoned arrow. Like that arrow, our storytelling ability is dual-natured — it enables powerful human connection and meaning-making, but it can also foster discontent, self-deception, and suffering when we forget our stories are just stories.
A Path Beyond Narrative Dependency
Rather than abandoning stories entirely, Gadea suggests developing a different relationship with them — constantly remembering that they are constructions rather than fixed truths. This awareness opens a pathway to being steadier, stronger, more connected, and more content.
Try It Now
Notice one story you’re telling yourself right now about your life (e.g., “I’m not successful enough” or “Things always go wrong for me”).
Write it down as if it were a plot summary for a movie about someone else.
Ask yourself: “What evidence would I need to write a completely different story about the same events?”
Practice saying to yourself: “This is a story I’m telling, not necessarily the truth.”
Notice how your emotional relationship to the situation shifts when you hold the story more lightly.
Quote
“The stories we don’t pay enough attention to are the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves. My practice isn’t about losing those stories — it’s about constantly remembering that they are just stories.”
