Friday’s Recycled Instrument: Paper & Plastic Flutes & Oboes
Paper tube flutes. Drinking-straw oboes. Drinking-straw panpipes. This video is misleading; the straws need to be closed at the bottom end to work.
Paper tube flutes. Drinking-straw oboes. Drinking-straw panpipes. This video is misleading; the straws need to be closed at the bottom end to work.
This extremely satisfying instrument can be made in less than 20 minutes. A random piece of not-too-thick board. In the photos it’s a piece of 3/8″ plywood that I had lying around, about 4 by 7 inches. A random piece of narrow wood that’s about as long as the board is wide. I had a […]
Baltimore is lucky. One of the city’s local fixtures is a fascinating cat who goes by the name of Abu The Flute Maker. He started out life as William Emerson, growing up poor in West Baltimore and shifting homes from one relative to another. But by the mid-70s, he’d begun making instruments out of whatever […]
Here are some real simple instruments you can do without hassle: I found a discarded wicker laundry basket in the trash a few years ago. I took it to my shop and carefully disassembled it, saving the wicker pieces in a cardboard box. In a workshop the following year, my students cut the pieces into […]