For those of you looking for a stringed instrument, consider the stone fiddle. It’s not really made of a stone but stoneware clay. If you can’t master the fiddle part, you can play the neck as a flute or the head as a drum. http://www.ninestones.com/stonefidl.html
If that doesn’t suit you click on “return to the gallery” at the bottom of the page and check out some others- the flowerpotophone is nice.
A friend of mine made one of those by tuning the flower pots and setting it up like a xylophone.
my son and i made one of the flowerpot things. we had a great time! he was taking percussion at school and love the idea. my favorite memory is driving all over town going to pottery stores. we would go with a percussion mallet in one hand and a pitch pipe in the other roaming up and down the isles looking for pots that had the tone we needed. he would hold the pot upside down and beat on its side while i would blow on the pitch pipe. oh, my the looks we got!
I’m not one to remember my dreams very well, but seeing that contraption made me recall one from a month ago or so. I dreamed I was in a small music shop, bought a PVC whistle and tried the whistle/drum thing that was being sold.
It had a fipple sticking out of a bowl-shaped drum. The idea was to tap on the drum while blowing the whistle. I didn’t dream any fingerholes, so it would really be just the overtones you could play.
Wild. What’s wrong with me that I’m dreaming up instruments like this?
Reminds me of an elderly man I know, that played saw. He would take his bow into Wal-Mart, and test out various saws, to find one that played in the key he wanted.
There was a hammered dulcimer player at a festival once who demonstrated making instruments out of found materials. One was a xylophone made from circular saw blades. I was talking to his wife and I asked if she knew how he got them in tune. She said he went to a salvage place and just tried out every saw blade until he found one for each pitch. It seems to me that those things could be tuned by using a grinder. The friend of mine who made the flower pot xylophone also made two bass trough xylophones out of wood. He hammered together a trough out of some sort of wood and then got some floorboards and tuned them by sanding in the middle of the board. We recorded a few tunes with these and hammered dulcimer but we were never really in tune and the recordings didn’t turn out very well.