Music
The strangest instruments made by musicians
When you want a sound but there’s nothing to make it on… build your own instrument.
A pikasso guitar
© Nigel Osbourne/Redferns/Getty Images
The world is full of strange instruments. There’s the badgermin – a theremin built into a dead badger; a singing Tesla coil that shoots light, called a zeusaphone; and an adapted clarinet and holograph machine, called a holophonor. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg. But a lot of them were made by boffins without any idea of how they might actually be used. Better, then, are the instruments musicians themselves have been building (or collaborating on) for decades. Here are just a few.
Gameleste
Of course Björk has built an instrument. She’s not exactly backward in pushing things forward. The Icelandic pop experimentalist had a handful of new instruments made for her 2011 album Biophilia. The most impressive of which is the gameleste – a mash-up of two pre-existing strange instruments, the ancient Indonesian gamelan (an ensemble of tuned bronze percussion) and the celeste, a tiny piano featuring small steel bars. British percussionist Matt Nolan and Icelandic organ builder Björgvin Tómasson put the two together to realise Björk’s idea.
Carrot recorders
Easily the most organic instrument on our list. Inspired by some highfalutin arts movements, like Fluxus, Vienna’s Vegetable Orchestra make music that’s informed by experimental, electronic and neo-classical music… but they do it playing an array of different vegetables. Hollowing out and adapting their harvested produce an hour before gigs, the orchestra make carrot recorders, courgette trumpets and aubergine percussion, perform with it, then turn it all into soup. They worked with Matthew Herbert on his 2005 album Plat Du Jour.
Kling Klang
So it's actually their studio but Kraftwerk always thought of Kling Klang as one big musical instrument – a place where Ralf Hütter and Florian Schneider could experiment unimpeded. It was full of instruments they made for their various albums and live tours. They used custom-built vocoders; built their own drum kits and machines (watch them hitting them with metal sticks in the video below); and, in 1976, came up with the drum cage. Wolfgang Flür was supposed to stand in it, activating percussive sounds by moving his arms through light beams. It didn’t quite work out.
Teletron
The frontman of Elijah Wood’s favourite band – psych-pop outfit Apples In Stereo – had already come up with a new music scale by the time he unveiled his self-made instrument: the teletron. Robert Schneider made it by hacking Mattel’s mind-control game Mindflex and attaching sensors to both brain and vintage Moog synths. The result is brain-wave-powered sound. “You have to be very conscious of your thoughts, and alter the music by agitating your mind,” Schneider told Wired.
The Chu
Long before Mica Levi was Oscar-nominated for her Jackie score, the Londoner was making ambitious compositions inspired by radio static, putting together odd mixtapes and building instruments for her eccentric art-pop trio Micachu And The Shapes. Inspired by US composer Harry Partch, Levi would adapt vacuum cleaners for live shows and once built a stringed instrument out of old CD racks. She also constructed the chu – a natty old thing adapted from a half-sized acoustic guitar and featuring electronics and effects. You can hear it all over her early work.
Mica Levi playing The Chu
© Andy Sheppard/Contributor/Getty Images
Piano No. 1
This one is mind-bogglingly complicated. Artist and musician Sam Grant, who’s worked with Richard Dawson and Jenny Hval, turned an old, unloved piano into a complex mechanical music player – the sort of thing rich people used in the 1800s in lieu of a decent hi-fi. Changing its innards, Grant’s new mechanism performs a score, inspired by artist James Hugonin’s paintings, that's informed by prime numbers. It's over the head of most of us but it sure plays a pretty song.
Sharpsichord
It took British sound sculptor and musician Henry Dagg five years and £90,000 to make an instrument that has to remain indoors and can only play 90 seconds of music at a time. Dagg's solar-powered sharpsichord is an enormous pin-barrel harp with adjustable pins that strike 46 internal strings when its 11 cylinders turn. It also stays permanently in tune, makes a wonderful sound, and is very, very easy to play. Björk (her again) used it during her Biophilia showcase.
Pikasso
Jazz guitar legend Pat Metheny didn’t build this bonkers guitar himself, which isn't surprising really, but he did ask renowned Canadian lute and guitar maker Linda Manzer to make it for him in the early '80s. Named after its likeness to Picasso’s cubist art, which inspired Manzer, this implausible harp guitar has four necks, two sound holes and 42 strings. Mere mortals simply hold the thing with a bemused look on their faces – but not Metheny. He's used it on several albums.
Trimba
Moondog was, to most people who passed him in New York, the Viking Of 6th Avenue. He would stand on a street corner between 52nd and 55th wearing a cloak and viking-style helmet, sometimes busking, sometimes not. He was also blind. And yet away from the street corner, Moondog was a massively influential avant-garde composer and musician. He also invented countless instruments, including the oo, ooo-ya-tsu and hüs. But it’s his trimba that lives on – a triangular percussive instrument that’s still peformed today by his old friend Stefan Lakatos.
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