#weird instrument

[wild-saber1337]

MY GOD WHAT HAVE I FOUND XD

I'm not sorry for having you know this exists XD

[the-iron-shoulder]

new… instrument?? get!

[video description: a person holding a lute-shaped synthesizer and poorly playing Korobeiniki, also known as Tetris Type A, on it by plucking springs near its pickups. End description.]

this is probably the weirdest shit I’ve gotten from Kickstarter, lol. It’s called the “ResoLute”! It’s a synth where you determine the tone by pressing on one of two little strips on the neck, but then you have to “pluck” it by making magnetic resonance, either by twanging these springs you’ve got down at the bottom or by waving a magnetic pick over the pickups.

It’s bizarre as fuck but I kind of love it? It’s fretless and so I’m having a hard time generating consistent pitches, but that’s to be expected for something so new and so wacky. I bet it’ll probably play nice with my synth pedal, too.

no idea what I’m gonna use it for, but there will probably come a day when I’ll point at it and say “for some reason, YOU are the perfect sound for this song!” We’ll see lmao

[rachaelmayo]

This is Jazzdragon 19, one of the largest and most complex in the series. I made this in 2011.

A DA friend sent me a video of a musician playing a contrabass flute - these instruments are amazing, and the player must have had the lungs of a dragon in order to move air through the thing. It was huge! Taller than she was! I wanted to take that up a notch with the Jazzdragon, and make playing the flute a whole-body exercise. So Jazz 19 is playing the sub-sub-contrabass flute with his toes.

The dragon was done in two layers - the main body and that large wing on the left side of the picture. He's colored with Prismacolor pencils and gold paint pen.

Behind the dragon is copper-colored repousse metal tooled with... Bach, I think. I can't remember what I referenced for the musical notation. The dark round things are acrylic "dragon tears" I nabbed from a convention, and the green/brown discs are dyed shell. The deep background is a mix of acrylic, ink, and glitter with tiny rhinestones attached.

[alphachromeyayo]

Finally getting another go at this taishōgoto synthesizer - I love it!

Here's some Shura no Hana (Flower of Carnage) from Lady Snowblood 🌸

I definitely need more practice with this thing, but it's such a delight to play tbh

[bawdyknocker]

this is completely binkers, and I love it??

[dennys]

Remember when we would just jam on the hamonica? What a weird phase.

[the-iron-shoulder]

hammered dulcimer update

[video ID: a person playing the first part of the leads to Wily Castle 1, from Mega Man 2, on a hammered dulcimer. End ID.]

I got the paint on the strings last week, but then I got distracted by Monster Hunter Wilds and didn’t bother tuning it back up until now. The paint doesn’t seem to have negatively affected the tone, which was my biggest worry (or biggest gamble, maybe) in this little update. It’s also a bit easier to tune now just because it’s easier to see which string you’re messing with!

[image Id: the hammered dulcimer in question. The strings are painted in rainbow colors. End ID.]

doesn’t show up flawlessly in the pic, but this is a big improvement. It was previously extremely hard for me to see which strings I was aiming any given swing at! It’s still a bit of a challenge, but significantly less so. If anyone’s contemplating a similar project, I just used undiluted enamel paint straight out of the jar. The colors weren’t all equally easy to use, but they all ended up more or less working.

still gonna take a lot of practice to get good at it! But at least one major barrier to practicing it has been, if not removed, meaningfully lessened.

[the-iron-shoulder]

I need a new weird instrument to get obsessed with