Once a week we’ll send out a page from Cool Tools: A Catalog of Possibilities. The tools might be outdated or obsolete, but the possibilities they inspire are new. Sign up here to get Tools for Possibilities a week early in your inbox.
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
Become a Patron!Support our reviews, videos, and podcasts on Patreon!
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.
The Grand Encyclopedia of Eponymous Laws is a collection of 200 playful observations about human nature. Many of them are new to me. A few samples:
Time Cube Law: “As the length of a webpage grows linearly, the likelihood of the author being a lunatic increases exponentially.”
Wadsworth Constant: “The first 30% of any video can be skipped because it contains no worthwhile or interesting information.”
Akin’s 10th Law: “When in doubt, estimate. In an emergency, guess. But be sure to go back and clean up the mess when the real numbers come along.”
— MF
Pirate Radio Map
This sound map of Brooklyn’s pirate radio stations is an audio archival project that lets you tune into the underground and countercultural broadcasts of past eras. When I was a child, my dad was a long-haul truck driver, so I would listen to Coast to Coast AM to feel close to him. I’ve always been fascinated by all things radio-CB radios, ham radios, pirate radios. The little girl in me still loves the lo-fi quality and fringeness of it all. — CD
Sprinkler key hide
If you still use keys for your front door lock, this small $4 hard plastic holder is the most perfect one I’ve found to hide a spare key. It is disguised exactly as the black top of a sprinkler in your garden or lawn. — KK
Park poetry service
Oliva Dodd goes to public parks with a folding table and a manual typewriter. She invites strangers to open up and tell her something personal about their lives. After a moment’s reflection, Dodd types a poem on a card, which she reads out loud to the person. As you can see on her Instagram, the recipients are sometimes moved to tears by the poignancy of the poems. — MF
5 Habits of Super Calm People
This article explores the perspectives necessary to cultivate calmness, but I think the key takeaway is that super calm people are not free from chaos. Instead, they have developed the ability to respond to chaos with acceptance, self-responsibility, flexible thinking, presence, and a natural alignment with the cycles of life. — CD
Sign up here to get Recomendo a week early in your inbox.
