This is a randomnly chosen YouTube video from a whole list of responses made to a young dude’s call out for people to show off their homemade instruments. I myself have made instruments in the past. I have nothing to show for this effort as I have left them all behind in various locations.

I am going to to some quick depictions of what I have made:

This was made entirely of softwood. I had found a bag of horseshoe nails in the pantry from when the farm was my grandfather’s. I fashioned them into frets and friction ‘machine heads’. Because of the materials, this instrument had good volume but it could not be tuned with a lot of tension. I composed one strange little song that I liked the sound of and then it became a decoration. I think that it has since been destroyed. I made it when I was 14. It took about 48 hours.

I am not going to bother drawing a picture of the lap steel that I made. It was basically just a hardwood slab.

When I was in my late teens, I used to host jam sessions and parties at an abandoned cape cod house on my parent’s farm. One of my friends was into a lot of the hard rock cliches and he just had to smash a guitar and set it on fire one evening. See my feelings on the subject here. Anyway, I grabbed the fretboard and machine heads so I could recyle them later. this is a drawing of what I made from recycled materials. I used some cut and paste recycling for the picture as well. I made this one with a built in piezo under the bridge. You can get generic piezo buzzers from electronics stores for a buck or two, and a female jack for a few more. Feedback was the issue with this thing.