Quick Projects and Tinkering
When you were small and someone showed you a musical instrument, you didn’t say, “Rad! How do I play an augmented ninth on this thing?” You touched it with your hands, eager to make the instrument make noise (probably despite brittle warnings of “Be gentle—this is expensive!”). Once you figured out how to get noise out of the thing, your next question wasn’t about that augmented ninth, either. In all likelihood, you didn’t have a next question. You found a way to make noise, and then you started feeling your way toward making a different noise so that you could make patterns you liked out of those noises. You used your hands and ears and breath to explore the instrument and thus used the instrument to explore yourself. What am I hearing? What do I want to hear next? Why do I want that? How can I do it?
Touching objects in a quest to find the Good Noise is the core human relationship to music-making tools. The projects in Part I of this book are designed to lower the barrier between you and the Good Noise: they’re quick projects requiring few tools and no previous experience, but they richly reward exploration. Many are also highly kid friendly, even for the youngest. This is a great place to start if you want to build and hone skills—both in construction and in feeling your way toward the Good Noise.