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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.
This excellent book profiles the most famous industrial designer you’ve never heard of: Brooks Stevens. Sure, you know of designer Jonathan Ive and his Apple products, and maybe Raymond Loewy, who slimmed the Coke bottle and decked out Kennedy’s Air Force One, but flipping through this book you’ll instantly recognize Brooks Stevens’ equally famous mid-century creations: that 3M “Mondrian” packaging, The Excalibur custom car, the Miller beer “soft cross” logo, the “boomerang” patterned Formica, and yes, the Oscar Mayer Wienermobile!
Stevens grew up in Milwaukee, and his unpretentious Midwestern work ethic and pro-business attitude was clear in all his work and writing. Unlike other designers who indulged in fantastic and lofty, theoretical designs, Stevens applied his styling skills and practical design sensibilities to suit local manufacturers of lawn mowers, outboard motors, cookware, and vehicles, resulting in increased sales and efficient manufacturing (if not design awards).
One of his most famous creations is the phrase “planned obsolescence,” which was widely attacked at the time by Vance Packard in his book The Waste Makers as an example of the manipulation of consumers and crass commercialism. Stevens proudly defended his approach of constant improvements and questioned so-called “good design” as actually elitist, unpractical and most damning of all in his mind, ultimately unprofitable. The debate goes on and you’ll have to come to your own conclusion: are manufacturers’ frequent new product variations kaizen-like progress, or just needless churning of the consumer. (Do you really need that new iPhone9x?)
As an industrial designer trained in the old-school skills of drawing and rendering, I loved seeing the many samples of marker sketches, gouache renderings and airbrushed presentations drawings. Check out the crazy concept cars and boats – it’s like a trip back in time to a mid-sixties auto show. – Bob Knetzger
THE PET DRAGON – A WHIMSICAL GIRL-MEETS-DRAGON STORY THAT ALSO INTRODUCES CHINESE CHARACTERS
The Pet Dragon by Christopher Niemann Greenwillow Books 2008, 40 pages, 9 x 11.8 x 0.4 inches (hardcover)
Chinese characters are wonderfully expressive, straddling the fine line between the written word and illustration. Esteemed graphic designer and picture book creator Christoph Niemann realized as much with The Pet Dragon, a whimsical story about a Chinese girl who raises a baby dragon to adulthood. In his introduction to the book, Niemann states that he had fun imagining connections between the calligraphic characters and their meanings. Reading the book, it’s clear that the author has a love of his subject and was very much enjoying himself.
The story is straightforward. A young Chinese girl named Lin receives a baby dragon who grows too quickly to stay in her home. After breaking a vase, Lin’s father condemns the baby dragon to its cage. The wily dragon escapes, leading Lin on a quest to find her beloved pet. Niemann enriches his tale by transposing Chinese characters on top of his illustrations to demonstrate the relationship between each symbol and what it represents. A forest is shown as a series of trees with the symbol for tree superimposed on them, the curving lines below indicating the roots and the extended lines at the top stretching outward for the branches. The upraised slashes and crossed lines in the symbol for father become the raised eyebrows and nose on his face, while the character denoting mountain has its three upward prongs displayed over a towering mountain range. The story concludes with the twin calligraphic symbols denoting the word friend displayed atop the reunited Lin and the titular dragon.
Niemann’s artwork is clean and modernist in style, and his novel approach to integrating expressive, ebullient images with the sparse, minimalist strokes of traditional calligraphy proves both endearing and effective. Although this is a book that can be read quickly, the reader should also take time to examine and enjoy the interplay between pictures and meaning that the author meticulously constructs. – Lee Hollman
Books That Belong On Paper first appeared on the web as Wink Books and was edited by Carla Sinclair.Sign up here to get the issues a week early in your inbox.
