Junkyard Jam Band: DIY Musical Instruments and Noisemakers

Making music doesn’t have to be about dropping big bucks in the guitar shop or endlessly fiddling with expensive software. You can make good noise out of bits of wood and wire, plastic and steel. When you build your own instruments, creating your own sound comes naturally.

Junkyard Jam Band is a step-by-step guide to making a full array of complete musical projects—no previous carpentry or electronics experience required. Each build includes tips on how to coax the best sounds out of the instrument and encourages you to mod the project to fit your own style.

Learn how to:
–Bust up your old tape decks for a handheld old-skool Scratchbox
–Give your voice a robotic makeover with the Droid Voicebox
–Circuit-bend unsuspecting childhood toys into mutant glitching jazz-punk machines
–Transform cigar boxes into thumb pianos and electric ukuleles
–Build a crackling, multifunction Mud-n-Sizzle Preamp to attach to any electric music machine

Along the way, you’ll explore the physics behind wind instruments, discover how harmonics work, and get your feet wet with some music theory. To top it all off, the back of the book includes a soldering primer for total beginners, along with extra circuits to customize your instruments even further.

Build your own band your way!

David Erik Nelson is an essayist, freelance writer, and award-winning science fiction author whose stories have appeared in Asimov’s and The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, among others. He is the author of Snip, Burn, Solder, Shred (No Starch Press).