[hat and bread]

Recently I found myself in dire need of a reedy sounding instrument, and lacking the proper funds to procure an item of such enormous value, I took it upon myself to create my own.
It occured to me then, that if only I possessed the proper mouthpiece, the rest would be a stone cold cinch. So I bought me a bag of rubber golf club grips, a funnel, the cheapest clarinet mouthpiece I could find, and some ALTO SAX reeds (since clarinet reeds sound like shit). I then proceeded to assemble the instrument using only the finest duct tapes available, and drilled holes in the proper* locations for a C major scale. And if you dont care about scales n' all that just drill holes randomly. That sounds good too.

* inches from tip of reed = 13526.5 / frequency of note / 2

Try it! It sounds like some sort of wheezy saxophone. And it is completely unnecessary to be familiar with reed instruments to play it ( I sure as shit aint!)

Happy Honking,

H&B

 

[gmku]

That reminds me. This one time at band camp...

[avantgarde1]

fucking brilliant.

[Everyneurotic]

it reminds of what smegma's conroy play.

[nicfit]

That's great. Sound samples, please?

[Bollocks_to_Pop]

That is freakin' awesome! I wanna make one myself.

[StevOK]

I think I'm going to try and find all of my childhood toys that were musical instruments and use them on an album. I have a keymonica.

[avantgarde1]

i've always wanted to make an album w/ nothing but toy instruments. i'm sure it's already been done, but it just sounds like an awesome thing to do.

[Iain]

Yeah, some sound samples and a walkthrough guide would be sweet. Is the main bit bendy...surely it would be bendy if it's a rubber golf grip. Or am I being stupid?

[sonicl]

I'm seriously impressed with the ingenuity of some of the folks on here. I want to hear an improv session with H&B's rubber clarinet and Terminal Pharmacy's home-made drumkit.

[hat and bread]

Originally Posted by Iain

Yeah, some sound samples and a walkthrough guide would be sweet. Is the main bit bendy...surely it would be bendy if it's a rubber golf grip. Or am I being stupid?

Sound Samples

Up to about 1:10 I am playing the golf club grip. After that you are hearing my vinyl tubing saxophone (see below). Forgiveness prease for lousy playing.

 

Iain - The rubber obviously does bend, but it is dense enough material so that it doesn't affect playability too much. Same thing goes for vinyl tubing.

If you want to make one it is quite simple to put together, though tuning it can be a bit tricky. When you get your grip cut off the top end (wide end) so that there is an opening on both sides. You'll probably have to shave off some of the rubber on the inside portion of the wide end, so there will be sufficient space to insert the mouth piece (be sure it's a clarinet mouth piece, because saxophone mouth pieces won't fit. It's also imporant to use an alto sax reed, because for reasons I don't quite understand clarinet reeds don't sound nearly as good). Once you have this done you have a right fine drone instrument. if you shove the mouthpiece into about 1.5 meters of vinyl tubing you'll have a nice alpehorn.

Tuning the thing is not easy, but can be done. I would suggest making the horn about 1 - 1.5 feet, anything more will be too hard to finger. There's a nifty formula for figuring the distance to place the holes: 13526.5 / frequency of note / 2 = inches from tip of reed (That's the speed of sound (in inches) divided by frequency divided by two (the hole should be placed where the peak of the wave occurs, thus half the distance of a single wave)). The density / diameter of the tubing has a pretty big influence on this too, so the best thing is to just approximate. The larger you make a tone hole the higher the note will be, so you can kind of adjust each note if it's not exactly right.

If anybody wants to try feel free to ask questions.