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By Scott Huntington

You’d probably be lying if you said that you didn’t spend at least a moderate amount of time during your childhood banging on various and sundry items that happened to be within reach. If we’re being honest, this particular sort of self-expression doesn’t seem to lessen with age; thankfully, our methods tend to get more sophisticated over time.

However, sometimes it’s fitting to go back to the primal days of beating anything that will make noise. Making your own percussion instruments can be a great way fully to understand sound, timbre, and tone. If you have music students or teach a drumline, having your students build their own drums can be a fantastic learning experience for everyone involved.

Before we get into the specifics about how to perfect your own DIY percussion instruments, let’s get some inspiration from some of the big names in homemade instruments.

Learn from the professionals

Most of us have some experience appropriating household items in our music-making endeavors, but the people behind the show STOMP have turned this pastime into an art form. This unique live show has a 20th anniversary quickly approaching, with tickets for the celebration show in New York City selling fast.

Using everything from trash-can lids to their own bodies, this is as good as it gets when it comes to DIY instruments.

If you’re looking for another great source of inspiration, look no further than Recycled Percussion – a “quintessentially Vegas” experience that boasts of having performed more than 4,000 shows worldwide. Quite a few of the band’s instruments will look quite familiar; they’re no strangers to homemade instruments made from pots, pans, scrap metal and even automobile parts.

Use What’s Around You

Tuning a steel drum with a Peterson strobe electronic tuner. Photo by Andrew Hitchcock. CC BY 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

Steel drums, or pans, has its roots in Western Africa, and its sound remains intrinsically linked with the spirit of the Caribbean. It really is a singular sound, and even the most basic steel pans – those made of recycled 55-gallon drums – are capable of producing utterly captivating sounds.

Building and tuning your own steelpan is time-intensive, but certainly not impossible, as this video from SmartyPansMusic demonstrates. Even if you don’t have the time or any spare oil drums lying around, there’s a good chance that you can find some suitable materials not far from where you live. Here are some ideas.

PVC Pipes: Whoever it was that first looked at a PVC pipe and said “I can make music with that” was clearly a visionary. PVC pipes are fairly inexpensive, as far as building materials go, and can produce an almost shocking range of sounds.

To get a sense of what’s possible with PVC pipes, check out this wonderful video from a guy who played some recognizable tunes including “In the Hall of the Mountain King” and “Viva la Vida.” The interesting thing about this type of instrument is that the sounds it produces is less about the sound of two objects colliding and more about the manipulation of the air within the pipes. The major variables you’ll be playing with are the lengths and widths of the pipes.

Scrap Metal: If you want to create your own STOMP experience at home, it may be time to “rescue” some scrap metal to create your own percussion instruments. Companies like McElroy Metal have sites in many states throughout the U.S., and offer a variety of materials to choose from, in different sizes and shapes.

Scrap metal / offcuts at Toruń Centre for Astronomy, Toruń, Poland. Photograph by Mike Peel. CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

Slum Drummers is a group of Kenyan-born musicians who have brilliantly combined scrap-metal instruments with public outreach; their mission is to spread not only a love of music, but also an awareness of cultural issues such as drug use. From humble beginnings in scrap yards, these musicians and their castaway pieces of metal have gone on to inspire audiences across the world.

Buckets: It really is amazing what can be accomplished with some ordinary household items. If you’re working with a somewhat tighter budget, or a trip to a scrap yard simply isn’t in the cards for you, buckets might just be the way to go.

You can experiment with different materials, such as plastic and metal, as well as with different thicknesses. Buckets are some of the simplest and most utilitarian household items at our disposal, but they can produce a wide array of sounds. You’ll also want to try different methods of striking the buckets; traditional drumsticks are great, but you could try differently sized pieces of wood or even metal to really get the perfect tone.

Street Drummer, by Nicholas Erwin. CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 via nickerwin Flickr.

Don’t Be Afraid to Experiment

No matter what materials you end up choosing, some experimentation will be in order before you get the sound you’re looking for. Modern drum kits work the way they do because of resonant heads and strategically placed air holes. Some trial and error is necessary to see what works best for the materials you’ve chosen.

Experimenting with different types of materials can be a really instructive experience for music students. It’s one thing to have a measure of skill as a musician, but quite another to understand precisely how it is that our favorite instruments create their sound. To that end, homemade drums are a great place to start.

Scott Huntington is a percussionist specializing in marimba. He’s also a writer, reporter and blogger. He lives in Pennsylvania with his wife and son and does Internet marketing for WebpageFX in Harrisburg. Scott strives to play music whenever and wherever possible. Follow him on Twitter at @SMHuntington.

Oxford Music Online is the gateway offering users the ability to access and cross-search multiple music reference resources in one location. With Grove Music Online as its cornerstone, Oxford Music Online also contains The Oxford Companion to Music, The Oxford Dictionary of Music, and The Encyclopedia of Popular Music.

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By Dennis Baron

Everybody knows that a noun is the name of a person, place, or thing. It’s one of those undeniable facts of daily life, a fact we seldom question until we meet up with a case that doesn’t quite fit the way we’re used to viewing things.

That’s exactly what happened to a student in Ohio when his English teacher decided to play the noun game. To the teacher, the noun game seemed a fun way to take the drudgery out of grammar. To the student it forced a metaphysical crisis. To me it shows what happens when cultures clash and children get lost in the tyranny of school. That’s a lot to get from a grammar game.

Anyway, here’s how you play. Every student gets a set of cards with nouns written on them. At the front of the classroom are three buckets, labeled “person,” “place,” and “thing.” The students take turns sorting their cards into the appropriate buckets. “Book” goes in the thing bucket. “city” goes in the place bucket. “Gandhi” goes in the person bucket.

Ganesh had a card with “horse” on it. Ganesh isn’t his real name, by the way. It’s actually my cousin’s name, so I’m going to use it here.

You might guess from his name that Ganesh is South Asian. In India, where he had been in school before coming to Ohio, Ganesh was taught that a noun named a person, place, thing, or animal. If he played the noun game in India he’d have four buckets and there would be no problem deciding what to do with “horse.” But in Ohio Ganesh had only three buckets, and it wasn’t clear to him which one he should put “horse” in.

In India, Ganesh’s religion taught him that all forms of life are continuous, interrelated parts of the universal plan. So when he surveyed the three buckets it never occurred to him that a horse, a living creature, could be a thing. He knew that horses weren’t people, but they had more in common with people than with places or things. Forced to choose, Ganesh put the horse card in the person bucket.

Blapp! Wrong! You lose. The teacher shook her head, and Ganesh sat down, mortified, with a C for his efforts. This was a game where you got a grade, and a C for a child from a South Asian family of overachievers is a disgrace. So his parents went to talk to the teacher.

It so happens that I’ve been in a similar situation. We spent a year in France some time back, and my oldest daughter did sixth grade in a French school. The teacher asked her, “How many continents are there?” and she replied, as she had been taught in the good old U.S. of A., “seven.” Blaap! Wrong! It turns out that in France there are only five.

So old dad goes to talk to the teacher about this. I may not be able to remember the seven dwarfs, but I rattled off Europe, Asia, Africa, Australia, Antarctica, North America, and South America. The teacher calmly walked me over to the map of the world. Couldn’t I see that Antarctica was an uninhabited island? And couldn’t I see that North and South America were connected? Any fool could see as much.

At that point I decided not to press the observation that Europe and Asia were also connected. Some things are not worth fighting for when you’re fighting your child’s teacher.

Photo: Longhorndave

Billy’s Bucket by Kes Gray, illustrated by Garry Parsons is both a wonderful celebration of the power of imagination and a warning to parents who do not take their children’s creativity seriously!

All Billy wants for his birthday is a bucket. Not a bike or a computer game. Just a bucket. His parents try unsuccessfully to persuade Billy otherwise but eventually a trip to Buckets-R-Us takes place. Billy returns home utterly delighted. He fills his bucket with water and so begin hours of play.

Every time Billy peers into his bucket he sees different watery worlds – crabs, sharks, divers, perhaps even a mermaid play in the water, and Billy is mesmerised by it all. His parents, on the other hand, are dismissive. They start off by humouring Billy (“What’s in your bucket now, Billy?” giggled his mum. “Seven sea lions and a walrus,” said Billy. “Of course there are, Billy,” laughed his mum and dad.) but soon they can’t resist teasing him a little; they try to persuade Billy to lend them his bucket so that they can use it for some household chores. Billy refuses. He loves his bucket and the worlds it contains. Indeed he goes to bed that night very happy – his bucket is “the best present in the world.”

The following morning Billy comes down to the kitchen to find his bucket missing. Although distraught it is Billy who ends up having the last laugh – it turns out his Dad borrowed the bucket to wash the car…and, well, let’s just say Billy’s Dad is now left looking somewhat foolish for not believing in Billy and the power of his imagination.

Please try to find a copy of Billy’s Bucket – the story is a fantastic testament to the power of imagination and a gentle reminder to those of us who might at times be far too sensible to believe in a little bit of magic. Kids will love it that Billy was proved right – there were, after all, marvellous sea creatures in his bucket, and parents will share a wry smile of recognition at the behaviour of Billy’s Mum and Dad. I also love the story for its delight in a simple birthday gift – a bucket – not a Wii or a trip to Disneyland – and in this respect it reminds me of Katie Cleminson’s Box of Tricks (which I reviewed here). Another book which could work well along side Billy’s Bucket is Polly Dunbar’s Penguin (which I reviewed here). All three are lovely birthday-themed books which rejoice in a child’s ability to imagine and create personal narratives.

The ill

A bucket list is a list some people put together of things they want to do before they die. A bucket list, in my opinion is really dumb, because once you have completed it, there is nothing of value left for you to do, except die. With that said, I have put together my own bucket list, a list of buckets.

Metal Buckets

http://www.flickr.com/photos/tudor/3255427501/

Metal buckets are always nice when they get wet, bashed around a bit, and become rusty. Here we see some lovely buckets containing railroad spikes, all good and rusty. Presumably the other buckets have rusted out the bottom thus can not hold water any longer. Pity, after all a bottomless bucket is not nearly as useful.

Beach Buckets

http://www.flickr.com/photos/tinkerroll21/2684563098/

These beauties have the advantage in that they can come in many colors and can be filled with wet sand, and flipped over, to create wonderful sand castles. Every year hundreds, or perhaps thousands, of beach buckets are swept away from their owners. Many wash ashore a short time later but some are pulled out into the ocean and are swept to foreign sands. Perhaps some are floating in the giant sea of garbage that has been reported in the Pacific Ocean.

Hydraulic Buckets

http://www.flickr.com/photos/lori_greig/2034382703/

Buckets that can lift people up are pretty cool too. I wonder how much they charge for a ride in one of those things? These buckets have to be made out of hard fiberglass and usually have holes in the bottom to let rain water out. Attached to a hydraulic lift they can be controlled by the people in them or at the bottom of the device.

Water Bucket

http://www.flickr.com/photos/garydenness/1500856927/

When in need of a drink, or putting out a fire, nothing beats a water bucket. As we have learned earlier, a plastic bucket is probably the best for the job. This mans life would not be the same if not for his water bucket.  It might be all he owns. 

Bucket Seats

http://www.flickr.com/photos/cosmic_spanner/2706706837/

Individual seats in a car, which separate the driver from the other front seat passenger are called bucket seats, especially so when they are form fitted. While they do not allow for cuddling as the bench seat does, they are certainly more popular. As always, be sure to buckle up. 

Head Bucket

http://www.flickr.com/photos/mugley/511939333/

When out with somebody more pretty than yourself, a head bucket might come in handy. Not too common, but possibly they are a relatively new thing in the bucket industry, look for them to gain popularity in the next few years. Perhaps we shall see them in new colors.   I would stay away from metal head buckets as they would probably be hot. 

Feed Bucket

http://www.flickr.com/photos/charliebrewer/78335363/

Probably a favorite of many, the feed bucket is certainly preferred by other animals. I would have to say it is one of my favorites too, I love taking food out to my critters. If you personally do not like feed buckets you might like the bucket next on the list.

Ice Cream Bucket

http://www.flickr.com/photos/brettlider/67051314/

I scream, you scream, we all scream for ice cream buckets. No matter how old we get, most of us still love ice cream. Nowadays we can buy ice cream by the bucket full, but it use to be we made it in wooden buckets. My favorites are licorice, Butter Pecan, Maple Walnut, and most recently Ginger ice cream.

Garbage Bucket

http://www.flickr.com/photos/devnull/140485451/

Don’t ever throw away ice cream, eat it all. Use the garbage bucket only for things you cannot eat, or recycle. Garbage buckets tend to get smelly and are not often a favorite bucket of anyones. They are usually plastic, which is not really a good choice, because plastic is porous, meaning it can contain odors and bacteria.  Even my garbage bucket is plastic, I’m tough and a few million bacteria do not scare me. 

Really Big Buckets

http://www.flickr.com/photos/cindy47452/55239683/

Usually the front end loader part of a tractor is called the bucket, but they get even bigger than that on earth movers. This bucket is not even as big as they come, it has been neglected for some time. In quarries and mines up north they have huge buckets.

Feel free to make your own Bucket list.  I am tired. 

A bucket list is a list some people put together of things they want to do before they die. A bucket list, in my opinion is really dumb, because once you have completed it, there is nothing of value left for you to do, except die. With that said, I have put together my own bucket list, a list of buckets.

Metal Buckets

http://www.flickr.com/photos/tudor/3255427501/

Metal buckets are always nice when they get wet, bashed around a bit, and become rusty. Here we see some lovely buckets containing railroad spikes, all good and rusty. Presumably the other buckets have rusted out the bottom thus can not hold water any longer. Pity, after all a bottomless bucket is not nearly as useful.

Beach Buckets

http://www.flickr.com/photos/tinkerroll21/2684563098/

These beauties have the advantage in that they can come in many colors and can be filled with wet sand, and flipped over, to create wonderful sand castles. Every year hundreds, or perhaps thousands, of beach buckets are swept away from their owners. Many wash ashore a short time later but some are pulled out into the ocean and are swept to foreign sands. Perhaps some are floating in the giant sea of garbage that has been reported in the Pacific Ocean.

Hydraulic Buckets

http://www.flickr.com/photos/lori_greig/2034382703/

Buckets that can lift people up are pretty cool too. I wonder how much they charge for a ride in one of those things? These buckets have to be made out of hard fiberglass and usually have holes in the bottom to let rain water out. Attached to a hydraulic lift they can be controlled by the people in them or at the bottom of the device.

Water Bucket

http://www.flickr.com/photos/garydenness/1500856927/

When in need of a drink, or putting out a fire, nothing beats a water bucket. As we have learned earlier, a plastic bucket is probably the best for the job. This mans life would not be the same if not for his water bucket.  It might be all he owns. 

Bucket Seats

http://www.flickr.com/photos/cosmic_spanner/2706706837/

Individual seats in a car, which separate the driver from the other front seat passenger are called bucket seats, especially so when they are form fitted. While they do not allow for cuddling as the bench seat does, they are certainly more popular. As always, be sure to buckle up. 

Head Bucket

http://www.flickr.com/photos/mugley/511939333/

When out with somebody more pretty than yourself, a head bucket might come in handy. Not too common, but possibly they are a relatively new thing in the bucket industry, look for them to gain popularity in the next few years. Perhaps we shall see them in new colors.   I would stay away from metal head buckets as they would probably be hot. 

Feed Bucket

http://www.flickr.com/photos/charliebrewer/78335363/

Probably a favorite of many, the feed bucket is certainly preferred by other animals. I would have to say it is one of my favorites too, I love taking food out to my critters. If you personally do not like feed buckets you might like the bucket next on the list.

Ice Cream Bucket

http://www.flickr.com/photos/brettlider/67051314/

I scream, you scream, we all scream for ice cream buckets. No matter how old we get, most of us still love ice cream. Nowadays we can buy ice cream by the bucket full, but it use to be we made it in wooden buckets. My favorites are licorice, Butter Pecan, Maple Walnut, and most recently Ginger ice cream.

Garbage Bucket

http://www.flickr.com/photos/devnull/140485451/

Don’t ever throw away ice cream, eat it all. Use the garbage bucket only for things you cannot eat, or recycle. Garbage buckets tend to get smelly and are not often a favorite bucket of anyones. They are usually plastic, which is not really a good choice, because plastic is porous, meaning it can contain odors and bacteria.  Even my garbage bucket is plastic, I’m tough and a few million bacteria do not scare me. 

Really Big Buckets

http://www.flickr.com/photos/cindy47452/55239683/

Usually the front end loader part of a tractor is called the bucket, but they get even bigger than that on earth movers. This bucket is not even as big as they come, it has been neglected for some time. In quarries and mines up north they have huge buckets.

Feel free to make your own Bucket list.  I am tired. 

Those of you who have been following the saga of The Bees over at the birdchick blog (http://www.birdchick.com/labels/beekeeping.html) will know that of the two hives we started out with, which we called Olga and Kitty, Olga has thrived, while Kitty did so well that she swarmed in late summer and took off to see the world. We got a new queen, but the remaining bees in Kitty never got her population back up in time for winter.

Which meant that when it got really cold this year, Olga had enough bees to keep the hive warm and Kitty simply didn't. I went out in January and noticed that the snow had melted around Olga, she was removing her dead and, on warm days, bees were nipping out and pooping yellow in the snow, whereas Kitty was just a green box with nothing going on.

So I did what anyone would do. I sent a few thousand dead bees to Lisa Snellings, to make into art.

A couple of days ago I noticed that someone -- probably a raccoon -- had tried to get in to Kitty, and clean out the honey, which meant it was time to do something. I called Sharon, who was down with hellflu, and got the greenlight from her.

Lorraine and I moved the empty kitty hive into the garage.

And then I had to decide what to do with the honey in Kitty. I went onto the Internet to find out if there was anything I could do that didn't involve buying centrifugal honey extractors, and learned that if it was honey I wanted, a bucket and some cheesecloth would do just fine...



So I mashed up the leftover comb and honey into a bucket, tipped the resulting scary-looking gloop into the cheesecloth at the top of another bucket...



Then nipped out to the garage every three or four hours to add more gloop as the honey trickled through the cheescloth into the bottom bucket.



And this morning Lorraine came over and we took the cheesecloth off bucket #1 and poured the honey into jars. Astonishingly, the cheesecloth had done its job, and we had wax and crud on the outside of the bucket and clear honey on the inside.



There's probably the same amount again still in the garage right now trickling through the cheesecloth into buckets.

The honey is wonderful. It tastes like wildflowers and spring. I'd rather have Kitty out there filled with bees (although the Kitty hive that swarmed is undoubtedly fine, in a hollow tree somewhere), but the honey's good too.

...

The Graveyard Book is pretty much ready to be copy-edited now. I was scared that my editors in the UK and the US would point out somewhere I'd messed up that would need a whole new chapter (much as Sarah Odedina at Bloomsbury did when she read Coraline in manuscript and said, "It needs a chapter where she confronts the Other Father, who in what you've given me just goes offstage and stays off," and I said "oh Bugger it does, doesn't it?" and had to go and write it. I mean, I knew about the scene in the cellar. I just thought I could get away with not having written it.).

But nothing like that happened. Sarah's biggest concern was a scene where a fifteen-year old girl accepts a ride from a stranger (obviously, she shouldn't have, but Sarah wanted it to be convincing that she did) and Elise only had small points -- the biggest change was that she wanted a sentence removed that spelled out how ghouls got their names, which I'd put in slightly under protest because a few people had been confused as to whether the small, leathery corpse-eaters were the real Duke of Westminster, 35th President of the United States, Bishop of Bath and Wells, or not, and I was happy to see it go away again.

I got an email today from Diana Wynne Jones saying "It is FABULOUS, WONDERFUL, TRIFFIC. One of your best! I love it," which is better than gold and rubies (and if Diana doesn't like something, she tells me). Jon Levin at CAA, my long-suffering movie agent, is starting to fend off the phone calls as people call him wanting to see it, and we have to decide who we're showing it to, which is a good problem to have.

Everything's sort of accelerated right now. The book comes out in six months (30 Sept in the US, a month later in the UK), and there's not really much time for the normal routes of book promotion.

I'll see if we can get a countdown to publication date timer for the front page of the website. I don't think I've had one of those since American Gods.