My latest piece is a droney violin prototype. Made from a violin body, piano tuning pegs, a motor from a RC Helicopter and my old favorite washing line for strings.
I’m going to think about adding some frets and seeing if i can play it like an automatic hurdy-gurdy of sorts.
This year I’ve made another moustache instrument for the Movember campaign! It’s currently on auction at ebay at this link here.
It’s made from 100% reclaimed materials including a Piano stool leg for the neck, a Picture frame for the body and a resonating body made from a shoe polish tin!
Some very awesome people are saying very nice things about the moustache!
This quick instrument was an experiment in three different things. It’s been made from the leg of a piano stool and some scrap wood, nails, washing line wire and a motor from an old cd player.
The main reason for this build was I wanted to see if an acoustic version of the Droneitar would work at all, so this little instrument has a motor embedded in the very base of the neck with a small piece of frayed string. This should, in theory, make the strings hum.
It didn’t work quite how I’d hoped, so I added a quick piezo contact mic to amplify the drone a bit and it sounded better.
Another thing I wanted to try out was a quick and dirty way to make a hollow bodied instrument, you can see how I did that in the progress pics.
Another thing I wanted to try was play with aesthetics, I tried scratching some of the paint off the piano leg into a ROA-ish fox head. Also the sides I’ve painted and scrawled lyrics to A Silver Mt Zion’s The Triumph of our Tired Eyes.
This latest instrument is an evolution of The Dronemachine I made a few months back. It uses the outer core of an electric fan motor as a pickup, a cassette player motor drives a piece of string which causes the musical strings to vibrate. The wooden peg looking things are actually part of the action in a Grand Piano, when you press down on the end, they raise the washers and shorten the length of the wire. It’s a pretty simple concept but it’s taken me ages to figure out how to put it into action!
Everything in this build was reclaimed from items that were broken where I work.
There’s tons more but some pages are even less coherent than these ones! Some instruments don’t need sketches and just develop naturally from the materials being used. Likewise a lot of sketches and ideas will likely never get turned into anything physical and just remain an idea in the notebook.
My latest instrument is a 2-stringed droning guitar for Mehdi from *Shels and owner of shelsmusic, one of the best independant record labels out there!
It uses a motor at one end of the neck to spin a small piece of string at the other, the string hits the wire and creates a droning noise.
It’s made from 100% recycled and reclaimed materials, using an old electric motor as a pickup, nails for frets, scrap wood for the body and neck, strings from a washing line and a motor from an old tape cassette player.
It’s being played by Rich Stephenson, who is fast becoming my instrument guinea pig.
More photos of the build and the finished product after the break
This latest Tinjo was commissioned for a friend of mine for his birthday (these make excellent birthday presents, hint hint). It was constructed from some scrap oak planks I found which were glued together, shaped, sanded, burnt, carved and varnished to end up with this:
The frets are simply nails chopped down and grinded to take away ane edges then glued on with araldite using an online fret calculator to get the exact position right. The tin has a basic piezo contact mic inside which is wired up to the socket.
Here’s 2 videos of it being played, one amped and one acoustic:
Here’s what it started out as
more photos of the build and finished product when you click the link
I’ve had a re-organise of the site to make it a bit easier to navigate, also I’m going to start posting some more tutorials and tips/ideas for aspiring instrument makers to show them just how easy it can be to make cheap but awesome instruments!
Also, using youtube’s new video editing service, I’ve thrown this mini ‘portfolio’ together. Enjoy and share with friends!
Vulpestruments 
