Jack White (best known as the front man for The White Stripes) has a custom hollow-body electric guitar with a built-in bullet mic on a spring-loaded retractable cable. Bullet mics are traditionally harmonica mics, but White uses his for vocals. Spring-loaded cable reels are traditionally used in canister vacuum cleaners. This same guitar—he calls it the Triple Green Machine—also has a built-in phototheremin, which is a simple lightactivated synthesizer; you can build one using the schematics and notes found in “Oscillators and a Metronome” on page 359.
In some respects, building a guitar like the Triple Green Machine is patently insane. White paid Randy Parsons—a renowned luthier and master of traditional American hand-building techniques—to take a really nice stock Gretsch hollow body and then cut it up, rout it out, and rewire it in ways that would have likely made Fred Gretsch weep.
You could argue that there was no reason to do this: Jack White made his career playing on a plastic department-store guitar from the 1960s. He could have built his career playing a single guitar string nailed to a two-by-four, something he demonstrates in the opening of the documentary It Might Get Loud. He didn’t need to hack up a $4,000 guitar and add a bunch of bells and whistles. But it was what he wanted, and one of the great satisfactions in life is getting Exactly What You Want. That’s why folks who’ve made it get custom cars and bespoke suits, handmade furniture and one-off guitars: they get the supreme satisfaction of having it their way.
White and I are both from metro Detroit, but I’m no rock star. I don’t have a custom guitar with a rad-roaring bullet mic or built-in synth, or the musicality to justify such a rig. But I do have a Trek mountain bike. I’ve had it for quite some time, and as my lifestyle has changed—getting married, buying a house, having kids, leaving jobs, starting businesses—I’ve modded the thing to the point where any Trek engineer would weep to look at it.
I put a hard leather Brooks saddle on it because that’s what’s comfy for my particular butt. I added a huge full rear fender so the tire would stop tossing broken glass and mud in my toddler’s face when I towed him in the trailer, and then I swapped out the off-road nubbies for slick road tires to up my speed and lower my effort while towing said toddler. As a result, the geometry of the bike changed a tad, and the front tire was throwing rocks and mud in my face, so I added another big ugly black fender. I’ve added a goat bell (to ward off texting college kids, who nonetheless still step blindly off the curb and into my path), a computer (I like knowing how fast I’m going), lights (I like living to see tomorrow), mirrors (see previous parenthetical), and an old-school waxed-canvas tool bag that’s exactly the right size to hold the lube, rags, and zip-ties I need to keep rolling. I trashed the stock “performance” grips—made of a gooey off-formula silicone that I hated—and replaced them with strips of upcycled tire inner tube, which I can wrap to the just-right diameter. They’re an absolutely perfect grip for me, and I love them.
The bike is a totally irrational mess now, but it’s Exactly What I Want. I couldn’t buy another like it in any store, and I wouldn’t trade it for any other bike in the universe. And that’s the Big Picture here: one of the essential satisfactions in life is getting Exactly What You Want, and the one way that folks of any income level or renown can be sure to get exactly what they want is by breaking out the multi-pliers and zip-ties and doing it themselves.
The 16 projects in this book are broken into two broad groups, with the easier projects toward the front of each section. Part I: Quick Projects and Tinkering includes exclusively acoustic projects, all-electric projects, and hybrid electro-acoustic projects. It ends with chapters on circuit bending and improvised percussion; these focus more on exploring the material word and building skills than building a specific instrument. Younger or less experienced makers will be comfortable with any of the projects in Part I. A few, such as the Slinkiphone (Project 1) and Elephant Trumpet (Project 3), make especially good quick-start, rainy-day activities for kids of all ages.
The builds in Part II: Weekend Projects are more complex. There’s more of a time commitment, and the sawing, snipping, soldering, and measuring take a bit more care and attention. That said, the early projects in this section are still designed for the total beginner. Even the later projects are far from arduous: the Mud-n-Sizzle Preamp (Project 12) and Single-Chip Space Invader Synth (Project 15) are only a touch more complicated than the projects I used to introduce high schoolers to soldering back when I taught at the Hippie School for Troubled Youths.
This book is capped off with three appendices. The first, Electronic Components, Tools, and Skills, is a compact primer on electronics, including an introduction to common components and lessons on soldering, desoldering, using a multimeter, prototyping, troubleshooting, and so on. The second appendix, Extra Circuits, is just that: about a dozen extra circuits that might be fun or handy for the sort of person who digs Junkyard Jam Band. The final appendix, Music Theory Crash Course, will bring you up to speed on some musical jargon and concepts that can be a little opaque to beginners.
Before you jump in, I want to impress on you a few safety tips that I picked up while teaching at that Hippie School for Troubled Youths:
In order to build real things, you need to use real tools; nothing in this book is dumbed down or babyfied. Show caution, heed the warnings, and wear goggles, masks, and work gloves when advised to do so. Sawdust, metal shavings, and PVC chips can wreck your eyes; soldering irons and fire can burn you; saws and knives can cut you; nails and needles can poke you; electricity can zap you.
Take fumes seriously! Work outside when advised and wear a mask when I suggest doing so.
Just like working out of a cookbook, make a point of reading every step of a project before doing anything. You want to have a full understanding of what you’ll be doing and what you’ll need at hand before launching into the build.
And lastly, don’t let these warnings dissuade you from making these projects! Troubled teens were able to complete them without injury or mishap.
Most “DIY musical instrument” books either limit themselves to a specific pro-quality instrument (as in, build this maple ukulele), focus on a single style of instrument (such as cigar-box guitars, traditional hand drums, and so on), or are a grab bag of grade school activities (involving, say, toilet paper tubes and rubber bands). If you dig what you find in Junkyard Jam Band—a wide range of instruments, many idiosyncratic—then here are some other books you might like as well:
Making Simple Musical Instruments: A Melodious Collection of Strings, Winds, Drums & More by Bart Hopkin (Lark Books, 1999). This book includes 30 instruments with a wide variety of crazy, innovative designs (see, for example, his insanely awesome “Styrofoam guitar”). There’s a mix of kidsuitable projects and those calling for an adult helper, plus lots of great info about the physics of sound.
How to Make Drums, Tomtoms, and Rattles: Primitive Percussion Instruments for Modern Use by Bernard Mason. Originally printed in 1938 and still available as a Dover Thrift Edition and ebook, this is a classic when it comes to Native American percussion instruments. It was a school library staple when I was a boy, and it’s one of my favorites. Trigger warning: although this book is wonderfully informative and Mason demonstrates a deep and abiding respect and affection for Native cultures and their preservation, he was still a white man writing in the 1930s, and it shows.
Handmade Electronic Music: The Art of Hardware Hacking by Nicolas Collins (Routledge, 2009). This is easily my favorite musical electronics book, full of great projects and ideas and jammed to the gills with precious, precious information. Collins covers a wide range of experimental electronic instruments (even simple, high-quality microphones) and how to create sound-art installations. Highly recommended.
Craig Anderton’s Electronic Projects for Musicians (Music Sales America, 1992) and its companion, Do-It-Yourself Projects for Guitarists (Backbeat Books, 1995). Although Anderton’s pro-grade designs are a little out-of-date (he relies heavily on a few components that are no longer produced), you can buy complete kits for them online (mostly through PAiA, http://www.paia.com/). Both books offer plenty of great design ideas and improvements that can be adapted to a variety of electrified instruments.
Guerrilla Home Recording: How to Get Great Sound from Any Studio by Karl Coryat (Backbeat Books, 2008). This is a hardware/software-agnostic primer on audio engineering. If you decide to record, Coryat’s book will help you squeeze great results out of any old setup you can muster.
Electronic tinkerers and makers of all levels will also benefit from a handful of books by Forrest M. Mims III. A great place to start is Getting Started in Electronics (Master Publishing, 2003), which offers a solid foundation in basic electronic theory and skills as well as scads of great, simple circuits. His books are mostly schematics with little further explanation, but the designs are robust, with lots of opportunities to adapt them to new and novel projects. Circuit benders—folks who make a hobby of torturing new, noise-musical sounds from old electronic toys—love Mims’s designs and frequently hack them into their creations.
Finally, my first book, Snip, Burn, Solder, Shred: Seriously Geeky Stuff to Make with Your Kids (No Starch Press, 2011), includes 24 projects; about half the book is dedicated to musical instruments (electric and acoustic, suitable for both kids and adults). Other projects include sock squids and Cthulhus, cardboard boomerangs, water rockets, cheap-and-easy screen printing—if you have busy kids, this book’s got ways to keep them busy.
My blog lives at http://www.davideriknelson.com/sbsb/ and features videos, tutorials, Q&As, templates, and archived web pages of some DIY instrument resources that have become scarce online. The best way to contact me is through my website. If you drop me links to pictures and videos of what you make, I’ll add them to the online gallery.
All the designs in this book are mine, but I’d be hard-pressed to claim that they’re all that “original.” I’m using components in fairly standard ways and riffing on tried-and-true designs from old textbooks, manufacturer datasheets, and the like. The schematics and diagrams themselves, as they appear in this book, are my original work, licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-SA 4.0) license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/). Share them as you like, as long as you tell folks I made them. Riff on them as you choose, as long as you also allow people to share and riff on your riffs. This license does not extend to the text of the projects themselves. If you want to reprint or distribute the build instructions or collaborate on something extra special, please be in touch; I can always be contacted through my website.
Folks occasionally contact me for permission to build my projects and sell them commercially. If you want to build something using these designs and sell it—or riff off the design and do likewise—then more power to you. Just make sure to give me a shout-out; something as simple as “Inspired by a project in David Erik Nelson’s book Junkyard Jam Band (davideriknelson.com/sbsb)” would be super rad.