Simple(ish) instrument building ideas

September 19, 2021 5:29 AM

What are some great ideas for musical instruments that grade 4/5ers can make?

Most of the classroom musical instrument making examples online I find are for Early Childhood Ed, which is great, but I want to make it a bit more interesting for almost-middle schoolers, while being a project simple enough that can be completed in 4 1-hour blocks. I have access to scrap wood, a small bench, and real hand tools (if they need power tool work, I can do that for them). I've got some wood boxes for ukes (would fishing line work as strings?) and we can make some percussion stuff, but I wanted to see if there were any more inspired ideas that can be done on a school budget.

posted by transient to Education (16 answers total)

Cigar box banjo or guitar. Can be something other than a cigar box.
My Goodwill outlet frequently has popcorn tins of varying sizes, they'd make good drums, possible steel drums. Post on freecycle for popcorn tins if you don't find them at Goodwill. Large, sturdy balloons can be drum skins. Find somebody like me who saves oatmeal containers, Pringles can, coffee cans (metal or plastic) for more drums. And bottle caps for tambourines. I saw and heard a wood 'xylophone' - varied lengths or varied thickness of branches, these were up to maybe @ 8" diameter, with 2 holes drilled for rope to mount them between 2 trees, you play them with wood mallets.
Rain sticks are fun.
posted by theora55 at 5:58 AM on September 19, 2021 [1 favorite]

My son built a single-string dulcimer at about that age, as a school project. Cardboard box for the body, piece of wood to mount the string and tuning knob, and staples into the wood for frets. He still pulls it out of the closet once in a while to pick out a tune.
posted by caution live frogs at 7:14 AM on September 19, 2021 [1 favorite]

I bet you could make slide whistles with PVC pipe and dowel rods. Oh also udderbots! They can easily be made with plastic bottles instead of glass. High probability of the kids squirting each other, though.
posted by daisystomper at 7:28 AM on September 19, 2021 [4 favorites]

Fill up a row of glasses with different levels of water for a xylophone?
posted by storybored at 7:42 AM on September 19, 2021 [1 favorite]

Best answer: End-blown PVC whistles or flutes seems quite doable. Holes could be made with power tools, or with an appropriate vise and hand-drill or some variety of hand auger or reamer. Technical level for crafting the mouthpiece and playing might be high/unsatisfactory. You might be able to get wholesale lots of cheap premade mouthpieces..

Xylophone/marimba style instrument. Cut lengths of EMT conduit or copper pipe, using a pipe-cutter for length. Creating a structure to mount the tubes would be a bit more difficult, but could props be done with a cigar box or plastic container/small nails/rubber bands. Feel free to DM to come up with a design.

Those tubes you can spin around and make sound? There's not much to them, but maybe popping holes in one end would change the pitch? So a combo of PVC and hole drilling + a length of vacuum tube. Not so much work to do, but maybe some time spent adjusting pitches and learning to harmonize or create games around melody?

Fishing line will absolutely work as strings. That's basically what is on classical guitars anyway.
posted by Jack Karaoke at 7:54 AM on September 19, 2021 [1 favorite]

I bet you could make slide whistles with PVC pipe and dowel rods

Show the kids pictures of Bob Burns' Bazooka and maybe they can make one, too.
posted by Rash at 8:48 AM on September 19, 2021 [1 favorite]

Best answer: I’ve done this and learned that 90% of the students will be happy to tap two existing objects together and declare themselves done. It’s not work avoidance per se, they just have a very hard time imagining how sound could be produced, and they already like the sound of things being clicked together. So I would suggest inviting to students to look at existing instruments that are strummed (cigar box guitar), plucked (thumb piano), blown across or into (flute), or bowed and insist that they create a variation on that model. So no claves or triangles.
posted by argybarg at 9:41 AM on September 19, 2021 [5 favorites]

Pan pipes can be easy. PVC is common and not very expensive. 1/2" PVC pipe is easily cut with a hand saw or pipecutter (less messy). the inner diameter is nominally 1/2", and can be plugged with 1/2" wooden dowel. Usually. It might have to be sanded down or built up with tape to fit snugly. Move the plug to tune the pipe. Pre made PVC caps can be found, usually intended to be glued on. Several pipes can be glued together with pipe glue (the glue can be messy). Hot melt glue works ok, but it can be less secure gluing pipe side to side. Probably good enough for this application. PEX pipe is common these days and also cheap, easy to cut, comes in a wider variety of diameters and colors, but I don't know how they match up with other easily made plug material, and I suspect it isn't easily glue-able. Actual pipe isn't the sole material here. Any kind of tube less than about 1/2" diameter that can be easily cut to length and plugged on one end will work.

Single string "diddley bow" isn't usually too hard. A dan bau is very similar. Fastening and tuning the string might be the trickiest part.

A bottle cap "tambourine" can be made with a stick handle, and a nail driven through several flattened bottle caps.

A "fipple flute" (not needing a sophisticated embrochure) isn't too hard on PCV. Way back in the day, I put this up on geocities. The mouthpiece is the trickiest part. These will take more finesse than you or your students may be willing to do.

If you are going to be drilling holes in PVC with a hand drill, a step drill bit is probably easiest to use.
posted by 2N2222 at 9:54 AM on September 19, 2021 [1 favorite]

Thumb piano! You can get a set of keys and screw them onto a wooden box. Here’s an example set of keys.
posted by mai at 12:21 PM on September 19, 2021 [2 favorites]

As a kid I always got frustrated with projects like this because the sound the instruments produced was never very good. If time permits, it would be cool to work with them on experimenting with ways to iterate and improve the sound, like different resonators, different string lengths/tensions, different materials, etc. Or to figure out how to get their instrument to produce specific notes.
posted by trig at 4:51 PM on September 19, 2021 [2 favorites]

A PVC didgeridoo is easy. If they can handle a heat gun they can add a lot of character.
posted by tinker at 6:00 PM on September 19, 2021

I went to a Waldorf school, around that age one of the projects was making a bamboo recorder like whistle. The big problem was the bamboo splitting, PVC would be a much easier material to work.

But... In high school my mom was teaching English as a second language to Cambodian refugees, and at one of their picnics there was a guy playing a stringed coconut body instrument he called what I can only transliterate as "Hsee Saw-u", but that was similar to a Tro. I built one for a Boy Scout merit badge; found some very thin steel wire to use as strings, and used a skein of monofilament fishing line for the bow, and ended up with a fairly playable instrument.

I'm sure there are ways to do this with nylon strings, which let the neck and pegs have to be less strong.
posted by straw at 10:00 PM on September 19, 2021

Also, if you can do this as a group project, those PVC percussion instruments that are played with a neoprene paddle over the open end have a really cool sound that isn't like any instrument they've already heard, and so isn't a crappy version of something else, and could be built friction fit. And give a good demonstration of length vs pitch.
posted by straw at 10:12 PM on September 19, 2021

I did this slide whistle project with my kids a while back and it was super fun. It takes some set up and there are a few steps that you can be prepared to do yourself, but much of it the kids can do with just a bit of help. If you can supervise enough to let them use saws to cut the PVC and dowels (hacksaw works great and is pretty easy to use) then the element of actual danger and real adult tools tends to increase engagement. Plus getting a sound out of the finished product is trivially easy, and the slide is undeniably fun to use.
posted by cubby at 6:38 AM on September 20, 2021

There is the classic Toilet Paper Roll Kazoo. Was around when I was a kid fifty-some years ago.
posted by agatha_magatha at 9:21 AM on September 20, 2021

Sorry for the profusion of answers here, but I've also been thinking about non-traditional instrument building lately, and as an introduction to instrument building, you might also introduce them to things like the Apprehension Engine, as a good reminder that not all instruments need to be from European classical music traditions, or indeed any classical music traditions.
posted by straw at 1:57 PM on September 20, 2021