
It’s official! My new DIY book—Junkyard Jam Band: DIY Musical Instruments and Noisemakers—will be in stores early next year. This is what I’ve been working on over the past couple years, as a follow-up to Snip, Burn, Solder, Shred: Seriously Geeky Stuff to Make with Your Kids, and offers a whole new slew of musical instruments and noise toys:
Junkyard Jam Band is a step-by-step guide to making a full array of complete musical projects on the cheap, 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.
Wanna Sneak-Peak?
Here are a few of the videos I shot while prototyping projects (FUN FACT: While I live in Michigan, where my DIY books are actually physically printed, my publisher is in San Francisco, and I’ve only ever met one person in the company—and I knew her from back in knucklehead days. So, these books are entirely developed and executed as a series of disjoint emails, YouTube videos, Dropbox uploads, and disorientingly time-delayed VoIP calls.)
First off is the Elephant Trumpet, which is one of the bone-simplest projects in the book, a quick goofy-fun build (that’s my nephew tooting that rubber shofar, FYI):
And here’s the prototype of the core of what ultimately became the Twin-T Phaser/Wah, one of the more complicated builds (although still pretty accessible, even to folks new to hobby electronics—one of the things we’ve done in this book with the more complex projects is broken them into modular components that can be combined flexibly, so you can level them up into more complicated instruments and effects):
We’re also including a section on improvised percussion, which I wrote based on interviews and chats with Vince Russo, who’s featured on lead vocals and washboard with the Appleseed Collective in this video (their shows are tons o’ fun; definitely check them out if they tour through your town):
Wanna Pre-Order?
In all honesty, I’m flattered—’cause it’s a remarkable leap of faith on your part, as I’m actually still drafting the copy for the last several projects (if you caught my recent tweet-of-existential-relief when I discovered that a critical failure in a circuit was just a bum switch, that was in reference to the finalized production version of the Twin-T Phaser/Wah circuit demoed above). But, for reals, there’ll be a book come my baby girl’s third birthday in 2015, so order away!
PRO-TIP: The publisher, No Starch Press, is mos def offering the sweetest pre-order deal: 30% off plus free DRM-free ebooks (the PDFs of these books are *sweet-ass*! It’s the PDF of my first book that I use as a reference when I’m building projects and doing demos.)
Pre-order Junkyard Jam Band: DIY Musical Instruments and Noisemakers from No Starch Press and save!
And, of course, Amazon will hook you up: