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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.
The common career advice to "follow your passion" often leads to anxiety, job-hopping, and chronic dissatisfaction. Cal Newport argues that the path to meaningful work is mastering rare and valuable skills first, then using this "career capital" to craft a fulfilling career.
Core Principles
The Craftsman Mindset
Rather than obsessing over finding your "true calling," focus relentlessly on becoming excellent at valuable skills. Like a craftsman honing their trade, approach your work with a dedication to quality and continuous improvement. This mindset leads to the accumulation of "career capital" — rare and valuable skills that can be traded for greater autonomy and impact.
Career Capital Theory
The traits that make work great (creativity, impact, control) are rare and valuable, so they require rare and valuable skills to be offered in exchange. These skills must be deliberately cultivated through focused practice and continuous skill development. Success comes from the patient accumulation of career capital, not from sudden passion-driven changes.
Strategic Control
Once you've built up career capital, invest it wisely in gaining more control over your work. But timing is crucial — attempting to gain control without sufficient career capital leads to failure, while waiting too long means fighting against resistance from employers who want to keep valuable employees in conventional roles.
Try It Now
Identify the core skills in your field that are both rare and valuable. Make a concrete plan to systematically improve these skills.
Track your practice hours weekly, focusing on deliberate practice that stretches your abilities beyond your comfort zone.
Start small experiments to test new directions, rather than making dramatic career changes based on passion alone.
Look for opportunities to trade your growing expertise for more control over your work, but only when you have sufficient career capital to support the move.
Quote
"Deliberate practice is an approach to work where you deliberately stretch your abilities beyond where you’re comfortable and then receive ruthless feedback on your performance. Musicians, athletes, and chess players know all about deliberate practice. Knowledge workers, however, do not. This is great news for knowledge workers: If you can introduce this strategy into your working life you can vault past your peers in your acquisition of career capital."
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