Junkyard Jam Band: DIY Musical Instruments and Noisemakers
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
be comfortable with any of the projects in Part I A few such as the Slinkiphone Project 1 and Elephant Trumpet Project 3 make especially good quick start rainy day activities for kids of all ages The builds in Part II Weekend Projects are more complex There's more of a time commitment and the sawing snipping soldering and measuring take a bit more care and attention That said the early projects in this section are still designed for the total beginner Even the later projects are far from arduous the Mud n Sizzle Preamp Project 12 and Single Chip Space Invader Synth Project Project 15 are only a touch more complicated than the projects I used to introduce high schoolers to soldering back when I taught at the Hippie School for Troubled Youths This book is capped off with three appendices The first Electronic Components Tools and Skills is a compact primer on electronics including an introduction to common components and lessons on soldering desoldering using a multimeter prototyping troubleshooting and so on The second appendix appendix Extra Circuits is just that about a dozen extra circuits that might be fun or handy for the sort of person who digs Junkyard Jam Band The final appendix Music Theory Crash Course will bring you up to speed on some musical jargon jargon and concepts that can be a little opaque to beginners A Note on Safety Before you jump in I want to impress on you a few safety tips that I picked up while teaching at that Hippie School for Troubled Youths In order to build real things you need to use real tools nothing in this book is dumbed down or babyfied Show caution heed the warnings and wear goggles masks and work gloves when advised to do so Sawdust metal shavings and PVC chips can wreck your eyes soldering irons and fire can burn you saws and knives can cut you nails and needles can poke you electricity can zap you Take fumes seriously Work outside when advised and wear a mask when I suggest doing so Just like working out of a cookbook make a point of reading every step of a project before doing anything You want to have a full understanding of what you'll be doing and what you'll need at hand before launching into the build And lastly don't let these warnings dissuade you from making these projects Troubled teens were able to complete them without injury or mishap Further Reading Most DIY musical instrument books either limit themselves to a specific pro-quality pro-quality instrument as in build this maple ukulele focus on a single style of instrument such as cigar box guitars traditional hand drums and so on or are a grab bag of grade school activities involving say toilet paper tubes and Introduction xxiii
rubber bands If you dig what you find in Junkyard Jam Band a wide range of instruments many idiosyncratic then here are some other books you might like as well Making Simple Musical Instruments A Melodious Collection of Strings Winds Drums More by Bart Hopkin Lark Books 1999 This book includes 30 instruments with a wide variety of crazy innovative designs see for example his insanely awesome Styrofoam guitar There's a mix of kid-suitable kid-suitable projects and those calling for an adult helper plus lots of great info about the physics of sound How to Make Drums Tomtoms and Rattles Primitive Percussion Instruments for Modern Use by Bernard Mason Originally printed in 1938 and still available as a Dover Thrift Edition and ebook this is a classic when it comes to Native American percussion instruments It was a school library staple when I was a boy and it's one of my favorites Trigger warning although this book is wonderfully wonderfully informative and Mason demonstrates a deep and abiding respect and affection for Native cultures and their preservation he was still a white man writing in the 1930s and it shows Handmade Electronic Music The Art of Hardware Hacking by Nicolas Collins Routledge 2009 This is easily my favorite musical electronics book full of great projects and ideas and jammed to the gills with precious precious information Collins covers a wide range of experimental electronic instruments instruments even simple high quality microphones and how to create sound art installations Highly recommended Craig Anderton's Electronic Projects for Musicians Music Sales America 1992 and its companion Do It Yourself Projects for Guitarists Backbeat Books 1995 Although Anderton's pro grade designs are a little out of date he relies heavily on a few components that are no longer produced you can buy complete kits for them online mostly through PAIA http www paia com Both books offer plenty of great design ideas and improvements that can be adapted to a variety of electrified instruments Guerrilla Home Recording How to Get Great Sound from Any Studio by Karl Coryat Backbeat Books 2008 This is a hardware software agnostic primer on audio engineering If you decide to record Coryat's book will help you squeeze great results out of any old setup you can muster Electronic tinkerers and makers of all levels will also benefit from a handful handful of books by Forrest M Mims III A great place to start is Getting Started in Electronics Master Publishing 2003 which offers a solid foundation in basic electronic theory and skills as well as scads of great simple circuits circuits His books are mostly schematics with little further explanation but the designs are robust with lots of opportunities to adapt them to new and novel projects Circuit benders folks who make a hobby of torturing new noise musical sounds from old electronic toys love Mims's designs and frequently hack them into their creations xxiv Introduction
