The Musicians Who Build Their Own Instruments

Harry Partch spent decades building an orchestra of instruments that could play the forty-three-tone scale he believed necessary to capture human speech. His Cloud Chamber Bowls, made from Pyrex carboys salvaged from a radiation laboratory, produce otherworldly tones no conventional instrument can approximate. His instruments were inseparable from his music.

Partch set out the theory behind the instruments in Genesis of a Music, published in 1949 and revised for a second edition in 1974. The instruments themselves survived him. The Chromelodeon, a reed organ retuned to his forty-three tones, the Diamond Marimba, the Boo built from lengths of bamboo and the Quadrangularis Reversum are still played, maintained by ensembles who must also train their own performers, since no conservatoire teaches them. Preservation here means keeping a body of physical technique alive rather than storing objects in a vitrine.

The tradition extends across cultures. The West African kora, a twenty-one-string harp-lute, is traditionally constructed by the griot families who play it, using calabash gourd, cowhide, and hardwood. The instrument's design reflects generations of accumulated knowledge about resonance and string tension.

In contemporary experimental music, instrument building has become a movement. Bart Hopkin, through his journal Experimental Musical Instruments, documented hundreds of practitioners creating sound-producing objects from found materials, electronic components, and unconventional acoustic principles.

Yuri Landman builds electromagnetic string instruments for musicians including Sonic Youth and Liars. His instruments exploit harmonic overtone principles that conventional guitars cannot access, producing textures that blur the boundary between stringed instrument and synthesiser.

The modular synthesiser community drives the impulse further. Practitioners design and assemble electronic circuits that generate and transform sound. Companies like Make Noise and Mutable Instruments produce modules with both engineering precision and aesthetic sensibility.

Eurorack, the format most of that modular work now uses, was published by Doepfer in the mid-1990s as an open standard: three-unit panels, a sixteen-pin power bus, three-and-a-half-millimetre patch cables. Because nobody owns the specification, a builder can make a hundred units of a strange idea and find buyers. Mutable Instruments wound down in 2022 with its circuit designs and firmware already released under open licences, so its modules are still manufactured by other people, which is a rare case of an instrument outliving the company that invented it.

Building an instrument creates an intimate understanding of sound that playing a manufactured one cannot provide. The builder learns why a particular chamber shape produces a particular timbre, how string gauge affects tone, and how the physical interface shapes musical expression.

The entry cost is lower than the results suggest. Nicolas Collins's Handmade Electronic Music, first published in 2006, teaches you to solder a contact microphone from a piezo disc costing less than a pound, which is enough to turn a bedspring or a bicycle wheel into an instrument. Hopkin's Musical Instrument Design covers the acoustic side: the arithmetic relating bar length to pitch, the volume of a resonator against the note it reinforces. Neither book assumes a workshop beyond a drill, a saw and patience.

Explore instrument building at https://www.experimentalmusicalinstruments.org. The musician who builds their own instrument makes a statement: that the truest musical expression sometimes requires inventing the means of expression itself.