The closest thing I have to a homemade instrument might be a pair of Sesame Street socks for babies, with rattles in the toes.
They were given to me for my older daughter after she was born. She always hated them, and would whip one off while you were trying to slip the second one on. Early in my home-recording adventures I was in need of some percussion — something like a shaker egg or maracas, which I didn’t have. I went looking through the kids’ old baby stuff in search of a rattle, and found the hated socks. They worked perfectly, but what’s more — they can be worn on your hands while drumming, which is an excellent option for someone using a digital right-track recorder who definitely needs to be economical. I’d record my drums with three mics in stereo over two tracks while wearing the socks on my hands for percussion, then mix those two tracks into one. But I certainly didn’t make those socks. Probably some kid in Bangladesh did.
Now that I think of it, I do have another homemade instrument: A three-string dobro made out of a cookie tin. It’s only slightly more complex than that one-string slide guitar Jack White builds on-camera in the film It Might Get Loud.
It’s this sort of thing that I’m highlighting here today. Let’s talk about musicians who crafted their own gear — either from scratch or through heavy-handed modification of an existing instrument.
Brian May
The Queen guitarist — who also has a PhD in astrophysics and an IQ of 180 — not only famously built his own guitar, but has used it as his primary instrument throughout his entire career. May and his father Harold built The Red Special, in 1963-64 when Brian was a teenager. The wood used for the guitar’s neck came from a Victorian fireplace mantel, while the semi-hollow body is made from the mahogany veneer of an old table and blockboard. Electronically, May and his father designed the guitar to feed back — something he wanted to achieve easily after watching Jeff Beck performing with The Yardbirds. It was built with three hand-wound single-coil pickups and a custom-made aluminium bridge. The tremolo arm was made from an old knife blade and two valve springs from a motorcycle. In 2010, May published a book chronicling how the instrument was made — and how to make one.
Tom Scholz
Another bonafide genius, Boston’s Tom Scholz is arguably more of an engineer than a guitarist. Truth be told, he played most of the instruments on Boston’s 1976 debut album, which he primarily recorded in his basement apartment on a four-track system he built himself. But the heart of his sound is an attenuator he developed called Power Soak, which is an in-line device between the guitar and recording console which essentially allows the musician to attain the tone of a full-volume amp and low volume. In 1980, the MIT-trained engineer founded Scholz Research & Development, and began marketing his inventions under the Rockman brand.
Laurie Anderson
The New York avant-garde musician invented the tape-bow violin in 1977.
It’s a regular violin, fitted with a magnetic tape head in the bridge — the kind that captures the sound from audio tape. Rather than horsehair, the bow is strung with recycled magnetic audio tape. Whatever was recorded on the section of tape used on the bow can be heard when it is drawn across the strings — forwards when bowed in one direction, and backwards when pulled the opposite direction. She has altered and updated the instrument over the years and more recently used a different variant featuring MIDI-based audio samples.
Dizzy Gillespie
Robert Fripp
King Crimson guitarist Robert Fripp first started using a rudimentary tape-loop system shown to him by Brian Eno in 1972. It wasn’t dubbed Frippertronics until his poet girlfriend started calling it that six years later. It utilizes two reel-to-reel recorders and a spool of tape that runs from one machine to the other. The first machine records sound and the second replays it a few seconds later — and that sound is fed back to the first machine, creating a loop that allows the player to build multiple layers of sound. To get a longer delay, you just move the machines further apart. These days, there are devices, pedals and digital plugins to replace all the bulky analog machines. But they doesn’t look as cool.
Kraftwerk
In 1973, Ralf Hütter and Florian Schneider had already made their third Kraftwerk album, Ralf und Florian, but were looking for a more futuristic drum sound. They brought in drummer Wolfgang Flür but didn’t really have a drum kit for him — apart from a broken kid’s set. What they did have, though, was the Farfisa Rhythm 10-drum machine they used on the previous album. The Farfisa sounded awesome, but wasn’t manual. That’s when Florian and Wolfgang came up with the idea of building something with metal pads or plates which could be struck with sticks to create an electronic contact. The device they created was not much more than a piece of plywood covered in tin foil, with an array of 10 metal plates which could be struck, triggering different sounds from the Farfisa. They basically invented electronic drums.
Eddie Van Halen
Apparently Eddie’s 1961 Stratocaster and his Gibson ES-335 weren’t good enough for him. In 1977 he set about crafting a hybrid guitar which would have the feel of a Fender Stratocaster and the sound of a Gibson. He cobbled together parts from the former, one of the pickups from the latter, and put them into a Strat-style body crafted by Schechter. He paid $50 for the guitar because it was a factory second — due to a knot in the wood on the lower cutaway. Eddie was no electronics pro, and wired the pickups in without a tone control, put the “TONE” knob on the volume controller, and hid the wires and guts behind a pickguard cover he crafted himself out of a vinyl record. The guitar was painted basic black, and later painted over with white Schwinn bicycle lacquer. Before this, Eddie ran strips of masking tape over the body to create the distinctive, signature black-stripe design. You can see this so-called Frankenstrat on the cover of the debut Van Halen album. On the cover of Van Halen II, he’s using a black-and-yellow Frankenstrat made for him by Wayne Charvel. This guitar was buried with Pantera’s Dimebag Darrell in December, 2004. Frankenstrat’s most famous version — red with black and white stripes — was created towards the end of March 1979.
Frank Zappa
One of Frank Zappa’s favourite guitars was homemade, but it is not known by whom. While playing an early ’70s show in Phoenix, “some guy” managed to get backstage with the guitar and successfully sell it to Zappa for $500. It looks like a brown 1970 SG, but isn’t — it has extra switches, different pickups, different neck inlays and an extra fret. Zappa also added an onboard preamp to make it louder. He used this guitar to record both Overnite Sensation and Apostrophe.
John Mayall
On the cover of John Mayall’s 1967 album, The Blues Alone, he’s seen holding a cheap Japanese guitar with the brand name Weldone. He got it in Tokyo while on leave from the army. Mayall was famous for modding, cutting and carving his guitars, but the Weldone underwent extensive, ultimately fatal modifications. He made it a nine-string guitar which he would open-tune. The added tension was too much for the cheap guitar, causing its neck to bend to the point where it was unplayable. Cool while it lasted, though.
Björk
For her seventh studio album, Icelandic singer-songwriter Björk conceived and commissioned the creation of a new instrument, the Gameleste. It is a combination of a gamelan and a celeste. By using bronze bars in the housing of a celeste, the sound of a toy piano is created, but with both a high and low register. You can hear it in the song Virus from Biophilia.
Les Paul
Musical innovator and inventor Les Paul is credited with creating the first solid-body electric guitar — but it wasn’t the Les Paul everyone is familiar with. In 1939, Paul set out to create a guitar which would offer more sustain and less feedback. He was given the keys to the Epiphone workshop, where he spent many nights coming up with his unconventional prototype, dubbed The Log. It worked as he’d hoped, but looked bizarre — a 4×4 of solid pine with a Gibson neck, frets, two homemade pickups, a crude bridge and a vibrato tailpiece. It didn’t look right, so Epiphone gave him the wings from a hollow-body guitar to attach to the sides, making it look more like a conventional guitar. In essence, it was what we refer to these days as a through-neck. He tried to sell it to Gibson, but they didn’t bite. After Fender finally developed the Broadcaster (the forerunner of the Telecaster), Gibson revisited Paul’s prototype and came up with their own, which Paul approved and was named after him. The first Les Paul guitars were made commercially available in 1952. But, you can hear him playing The Log on recordings he and his trio cut with Bing Crosby and The Andrews Sisters in 1940 and ’41.
Eugene Chadbourne
Banjoist, guitarist and writer Eugene Chadbourne invented an electric rake.
It’s one of those collapsible metal leaf rakes, to which he simply attached a pickup. When the forks of the rake are struck, sound is heard. Perhaps the best performance of the electric rake can be heard on Bob Wiseman’s 1991 album Presented By Lake Michigan Soda, where Chadbourne duets with Wiseman’s piano on Opus 10 #666.
Godley & Creme
In 1969, Kevin Godley and Lol Creme of 10cc invented a device which attaches to the body of an electric guitar and vibrates the strings via a system of motor-driven rubber wheels. They dubbed the device the Gizmotron and it was commercially manufactured by Musitronics beginning in 1979. Jimmy Page uses one on In Through The Out Door. This is how he does the intro to In The Evening.
Robert Schneider
Apples In Stereo frontman Rob Schneider invented The Teletron. He hacked Mattel’s mind-control game Mindflex and attached sensors to his head and some vintage Moog synths. What you get is brainwave-powered sounds. You need to agitate your mind to make different sounds.
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Area Resident is an Ottawa-based journalist, recording artist, music collector and re-seller. Hear (and buy) his music on Bandcamp, email him HERE, follow him on Instagram and check him out on Discogs.
