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MUSICAL INSTRUMENTS

Welcome to our musical instrument building zone! Here you can find out how musical instruments work and learn how to build your own.

GETTING STARTED: Choose an instrument section from the following three categories: 

STRINGS

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Trash bow, styrocello, rubber band guitar and tube guitar. 

PERCUSSION

Styrobells, 4-in-1 coffee can, balloon drums, finger piano (Kalimba), and the xylophone.

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WINDS

Straw oboe, straw panpipes and bottle flutes, french hose, tube trumpet and tube trombone. 

INSTRUMENT

GALLERY

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WHY TRASH ROCKS.

What often amazes people is the quality of the sound of the homemade instruments.  They sound fantastic, often very close to the real thing.  And why not?  After all, the physics of the instruments work the same way regardless of the simplicity of the materials.  In countries around the world, whenever people build instruments they tend to build them from whatever happens to be in their backyard.  What happens to be in our backyards is trash.

 

And that is another great thing about building homemade instruments – it makes good environmental sense.   The concept of using found objects to build cool stuff reinforces the center leg of the ecological troika of Reduce-Reuse-Recycle.  From our point of view anything that can even incrementally change our society’s attitude toward trash is a good thing.  Like many of the poorer cultures in the world, we view trash not as something extraneous, but as a resource.

Website by Rivertowns Marketing;  Art by TB Ward; Photos on this site thanks to:  Erika Kapin Photography, John Maggiotto Studios, India Lena Gonzalez, Ananda Naima Gonzalez, Shandor Patrick, Lili Fenner, Kim Russell: Courtesy of the Smith Center, Jaye McLaughlin: The Life in Your Years Photography LLC, Risdon Photography, Dariel Sneed: Courtesy of Brookfield Place NY, Tanya Ahmed: the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum.

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Bash the Trash Environmental Arts LLC

11 Wilson Place

Hastings-on-Hudson, NY 10706

info@bashthetrash.com

© 2021  Bash the Trash Environmental Arts LLC

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