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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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Cool tools really work.
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.
A podcast I am enjoying is Articles of Interest, which is a spinoff of the legendary 99% Invisible podcast. It has the same nerdy fascination with things we tend to take for granted. In this case, clothing. It dives deep into the origins, and meaning of common articles of clothing such as blue jeans, school uniforms, outdoor wear, even pockets, zippers, and clerical collars. Each episode is a delicious rabbit hole. It’s a blast. There’s a very satisfying archive of back episodes. — KK
Visualize your love in time and space
Still Here is a visualization tool for mapping your time and shared space with a loved one (animal or human) after they have passed. It was created by someone grieving the death of his dogs, and it feels very personal and tender. My fur baby is 7 years old now, and he has taught me so much about how grief and love are two sides of the same coin, so I am often thinking about his death. This feels like a kind of exposure therapy for my heart. — CD
Secret exec contacts for stubborn companies
When a company stonewalls you on a refund or dispute, head over to the Elliott Report’s Company Contacts database. Journalist Christopher Elliott has compiled direct phone numbers and email addresses for customer service executives at hundreds of companies — airlines, hotels, car rentals, banks, cable providers, and more. Skip the front-line customer service maze and go straight to someone with actual authority. The site also rates each company’s responsiveness to consumers. Free to use, no signup required. — MF
Portable board game
The tiniest portable board game I know about is Iota ($30 used). It fits into a small container the size of an AirPods case, and so can be slipped into any day bag, purse or pocket. It’s perfect for travels. To play you keep arranging its tiny little cards on a table into nesting sets, sort of like dominos, but with more dimensions. The game rewards pattern matching. Even small kids can play, and it is challenging enough for adults. Also no language is needed – another plus for travel. — KK
Book finding guides
This week I came across two book-finding tools worth sharing. NPR’s Books We Love is an interactive guide that lets you filter more than 4,000 staff and critic picks first by year and then by genre and other tags, like length or mood. If you prefer something not on a bestseller list, you can also try Whichbook, a search engine that lets you find books by emotion or by character, or click on a world map to find books set in specific countries. — CD
Wireless under-cabinet kitchen lights
I bought a 2-pack of these battery-powered MCGOR motion-sensor lights to use as kitchen counter lighting. They snap magnetically onto adhesive metal plates you stick under your cabinets. They turn on automatically when you get near; step away, and they shut off after 20 seconds. Five brightness levels let you dial in exactly the right amount of light. They are USB-C rechargeable, and one charge lasts days. — MF
