Homemade Musical Instruments: 14 DIY Musical Instruments

With a little ingenuity and elbow grease, you can use craft sticks, rubber bands, cereal boxes, and other household items to build a full band of DIY musical instruments. They make great birthday party crafts for kids or instruments for experimental musicians seeking out different sounds.

1. 1. Wooden xylophone: Make a xylophone out of thin strips of wood mounted to 2x4 wooden boards. You'll need a saw and wood that is thin enough to resonate when you strike it but not so thin that it snaps. Cut the wood into bars of different lengths and nail them to the 2x4 boards. Use a photo of a real xylophone as a template. Create mallets by wrapping rubber bands around the ends of chopsticks.
2. 2. Cereal box guitar: Another way to use rubber bands is to string them around a cereal box to produce a sound like a guitar or a banjo. Cut a sound hole in the box so that the sound will resonate when you strum. You can also use a shoebox for this, which may make the strumming easier.
3. 3. Easter egg maracas: Create maracas by taping plastic easter eggs into the curved parts of plastic or wooden spoons. Fill the eggs with rice or beads so they make a sound when you shake them, and tape the seams to prevent them from cracking open. You can also skip the spoons and use the filled and taped eggs as egg shakers. Easter egg maracas are great percussion instruments for preschoolers.
4. 4. Bottle cap castanets: Two bottle caps glued to a folded strip of cardboard make excellent castanets.
5. 5. Popsicle stick harmonica: You can quickly assemble a homemade harmonica using two popsicle or wooden craft sticks, two toothpicks, some rubber bands, and a piece of paper. This is one of the quickest DIY instrument craft ideas, but it's also one of the easiest to break.
6. 6. Jingle bells: You can turn clothing into jingle bell shakers by fastening individual bells to the cloth using bobby pins or thread.
7. 7. Paper plate tambourine: Jingle bells also pair nicely with a couple of thick paper plates glued together. Attach jingle bells around the rim of the two plates.
8. 8. Paper plate cymbals: A close cousin of the paper plate tambourine is the paper plate cymbal. Take a single plate and glue pieces of thin metal—such as coins or metal washers—around its inner perimeter. Do the same with another paper plate and now you have two cymbals you can crash together. Attach little cardboard hand grips to the center of the plates to more easily control them.
9. 9. Didgeridoo: A hollowed-out cardboard tube can become a didgeridoo in no time. Tubes of different lengths will produce different sounds, so try to find as long a tube as possible for optimal results.
10. 10. Kazoo: Cardboard tubes also make good kazoos. Cover one end of the tube with wax paper and hold it in place with rubber bands. Poke some small holes in the shaft of the kazoo so you can sound different pitches when you cover the holes.
11. 11. Rain stick: Create a homemade rain stick by filling a cardboard tube with beads or rice and sealing off the ends. PVC pipe also works nicely.
12. 12. Pan flute: Use PVC piping to create a DIY pan flute. Cut the piping into different lengths and glue them together. It should look like xylophone keys stacked next to one another. Blow through the PVC pipes to create a homemade woodwind instrument.
13. 13. Funnel French horn: If you have a cooking funnel and a utility hose, you can create a mini French horn by gluing them together.
14. 14. Tin can bongo: Use tin cans to make hand percussion instruments. Cover the open ends with a plastic membrane like a cut-up balloon. Attach the balloon tightly using a combination of rubber bands and glue. Strike the cans as though they were mini bongos.

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