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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.
With American Airlines announcing recently that they’re going to offer free satellite Wi-Fi to loyalty members on flights, this means all 3 legacy U.S. carriers should have it in place by next year. It was already free on JetBlue. On Alaska Air you can get it free if you’re a T-Mobile customer but on Southwest, not at all unless you bought a Business Select ticket.
Cheapest Places to Live in the World, Take 2
At the end of last year I put up an article on the cheapest places to live in the world and apart from a degradation in the value of the greenback lately because of the economic chaos, it’s still the best guide out there if you’re looking to cut your monthly expenses in half. Some people would rather watch than read though, so I put together a video on the subject on my YouTube channel. Check it out here. (Want more detailed advice? Get my book.)
Live TV Channel
If you’ve cut the cord or are traveling and miss live TV, then the website TV Garden is for you. It shows feeds of TV shows around the world, so you can use it to tune into what’s local or see channels from your home country. You can get BBC news on there and the selection from the USA is surprisingly robust, with CNBC, the Food Network, local network affiliates, and various Adult Swim animated channels available.
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.
