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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.
Want to know what it’s like to drive around a foreign city, listening to a local radio station? You can do it from home by visiting DriveAndListen.app, which uses dashcam footage. The tunes really transported me to the scene in Delhi and Izmir and when I pulled up Havana, I was riding in a vintage car. If you don’t like the station you can change it, just like in a real car.
Countries the Expat Execs Rank Highest
I hesitated to highlight this Internations Expat Quality of Life Survey since that site mostly appeals to relocated corporate executives living in walled-off enclaves. Turns out it’s full of interesting and detailed insights though. Panama was the big winner, moving from 16 to 3, joining always-highly-rated Spain and much richer countries like Luxembourg and Austria. Czechia and China moved into the top 10 and I’m assuming someone will replace #2 Dubai in the next one. But the Philippines got trashed despite the sea and sunshine (#45 of 46) and wow does the survey kill that “America is the greatest” boast since the country ranks #43. “The USA ranks dead last when it comes to Healthcare and receives disappointing results in the Safety & Security Subcategory (43rd).”
Online Security Issues at American Airlines
If you have an AAdvantage account with American Airlines, you should probably change your password. As in today. The company is being quiet about how much data was compromised in several hacker-claimed cyberattacks in the past year, one of them in April. Based on my wife’s frustrating experience though, it was a lot. The company locked her out of her account a month ago, saying it was compromised, and she still doesn’t have access. After a month of hold times, six sessions of being passed around between agents, and unkept promises about a fix, they’re now apologizing that “The fraud department is completely overwhelmed right now.”
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.
