Junkyard Jam Band: DIY Musical Instruments and Noisemakers
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS It’s a well-worn cliché that any book is a team effort and even in our magical Information Information Age of disintermediated self-publishing millionaires that cliché still has more than a kernel of truth When I say This book wouldn’t have been possible without the hard work of all those great folks at No Starch Press I’m not glad-handling glad-handing or buttering up No Starch Press to buy another book from me It’s quite literally the truth I showed up with a jackstraw mash of words and some pretty threadbare photographs The folks at No Starch Press beat that unwieldy mess into something you can actually use to make some awesomeness From vague concept through completion this was a complete collaboration First and foremost I need to thank Jennifer Griffith-Delgado my editor Again I’m not overstating one iota when I say that these were crappy confusingly written projects prior to her efforts If you believe in a God Thing please ask it to bless JGD for her patience and good will While you’re at it please also ask Your Personal Notion of Grace and Forbearance to rain fortunes down upon Riley Hoffman who is a great friend and wonderful designer and who worked tirelessly to make this all beautiful My technical reader Ron Sloat brought several welcome improvements to these projects in addition to generally keeping me honest and figuring out the true build times Liz Chadwick and Julianne Jigour caught the vast majority of my diverse collection of mistakes malapropisms and unnecessarily confusing flights of fancy Any that remain are my bad not theirs The fact that you’re looking at these words right now indicates that you somehow heard about this book’s existence I have no clue how that happened but I know Marlon Rigel did it He is a peach Most of all I need to thank No Starch Press’s publisher Bill Pollock for his irrational faith in a book that was 26 months late and sort of crazy to begin with There are also plenty of folks who’ve never set foot in the No Starch Press offices who’ve done me great service Phil Proefrock lent me his material knowhow knowhow Jesse the Guitar Tech at the Southfield MI Guitar Center fronted me a geared tuner when I most needed one Eli Neiburger and the Ann Arbor District Library furnished me with not one but two digital oscilloscopes Craig W Van Otteren and Jim Jett shared the intricacies of their DIY tin-can washboards Joe Neely steadfastly steadfastly attempted to teach me piano and also introduced me to the Penguin of Fifths for which I am eternally grateful Vince Russo Adam Stein and John Churchville are all excellent musicians and affable chaps whose insights on practical instrument instrument design and construction as well as real-world musical techniques were truly invaluable
Most importantly I want to thank my strong patient and determined wife but I have no idea how If something comes to you please email me dave davideriknelson com Finally I want to reiterate something I brush up against in Appendix C I need to thank Everyone The making of music and more importantly the making making of musical tools is a deeply human thing that humans have done and continue continue to do often with little compensation beyond the constant reminders that they are wasting their time and just making a bunch of noise while everyone else is doing something important and earning money I’m deeply indebted to every anonymous rando who’s ever strummed a chord plucked out a melody looped a drum cut posted to a forum about her preferred sine-wave oscillator circuit or taken a shot at singing that One True Song which is to say odds are I’m deeply indebted to you Gentle Reader and Maker of Things Thank you xx Acknowledgments
INTRODUCTION Jack White best known as the front man for The White Stripes has a custom hollow-body hollow-body electric guitar with a built-in bullet mic on a spring-loaded retractable cable Bullet mics are traditionally harmonica mics but White uses his for vocals Spring-loaded cable reels are traditionally used in canister vacuum cleaners This same guitar he calls it the Triple Green Machine also has a built-in phototheremin which is a simple light-activated light-activated synthesizer you can build one using the schematics and notes found in Oscillators and a Metronome on page 359 In some respects building a guitar like the Triple Green Machine is patently insane White paid Randy Parsons a renowned luthier and master of traditional American
hand-building techniques to take a really nice stock Gretsch hollow body and then cut it up rout it out and rewire it in ways that would have likely made Fred Gretsch weep You could argue that there was no reason to do this Jack White made his career playing on a plastic department-store guitar from the 1960s He could have built his career playing a single guitar string nailed to a two-by-four something he demonstrates in the opening of the documentary It Might Get Loud He didn’t need to hack up a 4,000 guitar and add a bunch of bells and whistles But it was what he wanted and one of the great satisfactions in life is getting Exactly What You Want That’s why folks who’ve made it get custom cars and bespoke suits handmade furniture furniture and one-off guitars they get the supreme satisfaction of having it their way White and I are both from metro Detroit but I’m no rock star I don’t have a custom guitar with a rad-roaring bullet mic or built-in synth or the musicality to justify such a rig But I do have a Trek mountain bike I’ve had it for quite some time and as my lifestyle has changed getting married buying a house having kids leaving jobs starting businesses I’ve modded the thing to the point where any Trek engineer would weep to look at it I put a hard leather Brooks saddle on it because that’s what’s comfy for my particular butt I added a huge full rear fender so the tire would stop tossing broken broken glass and mud in my toddler’s face when I towed him in the trailer and then I swapped out the off-road nubbies for slick road tires to up my speed and lower my effort while towing said toddler As a result the geometry of the bike changed a tad and the front tire was throwing rocks and mud in my face so I added another big ugly black fender I’ve added a goat bell to ward off texting college kids who nonetheless still step blindly off the curb and into my path a computer I like knowing knowing how fast I’m going lights I like living to see tomorrow mirrors see previous parenthetical and an old-school waxed-canvas tool bag that’s exactly the right size to hold the lube rags and zip-ties I need to keep rolling I trashed the stock performance performance grips made of a gooey off-formula silicone that I hated and replaced them with strips of upcycled tire inner tube which I can wrap to the just-right diameter diameter They’re an absolutely perfect grip for me and I love them The bike is a totally irrational mess now but it’s Exactly What I Want I couldn’t buy another like it in any store and I wouldn’t trade it for any other bike in the universe And that’s the Big Picture here one of the essential satisfactions in life is getting Exactly What You Want and the one way that folks of any income level or renown can be sure to get exactly what they want is by breaking out the multi-pliers and zip-ties and doing it themselves What’s in This Book The 16 projects in this book are broken into two broad groups with the easier projects toward the front of each section Part I Quick Projects and Tinkering includes exclusively acoustic projects all-electric projects and hybrid electro-acoustic electro-acoustic projects It ends with chapters on circuit bending and improvised percussion percussion these focus more on exploring the material word and building skills than building a specific instrument Younger or less experienced makers will xxii Introduction
