Monday, December 5, 2011

Rare and interesting instruments - part 1

We live in the internet era.

We can count ourselves lucky, because anyone who interested in music have the ability to explore rare/ancient or other types of instruments via the internet. In fact, 15 years ago I couldn't imagine these instruments even exist. So this list could be useful or interesting for anyone - even you grown up on electronic music like me.

In these posts (this is part one),  I will show you some songs played with that particular instrument. If you have other interesting instruments (or songs) just drop me a comment, and I can expand the lists.



Zither

Zither is most commonly found in Central Europe. (Austria, Hungary..)
You can hear a hungarian folk song 'remixed' with zither:


Click to see in bigger

'Street' drums

Well, a street drum could be 'anything' (like buckets..etc), yeah it sounds weird. But trust me, sometimes better then the original drums. You can find a lots of shots of these type of drummers on Youtube, here is a sample:


I know that somewhere these drummers not rare, but for example in my country (Hungary) we can't see these type of streen musicians.


Shamisen

This instrument came from Japan. Its just only have 3 strings, and its got an extremely thin shape.


You can find here a Japanese rock sample from the Yoshida Brothers :)

Hang Drum

This instrument , which is called 'hangdrum', sometimes 'handpan' or simply 'hang' is a very interesting one. Its got an UFO shape. There is nothing inside in it but air.
This instrument utilizes an interesting physial phenomema called Helmholtz resonance. But I dont want to speak more, turn up your speaker.


Another recording which is one of my favourites, you can see here.


One peculiarity is that basically impossible to buy this drum. (Two individuals was made these in Switzerland, but in 2008 the manifacturing was stopped.)

On the next part I will show you some other interesting instruments, stay tuned :)



11 comments:

  1. I had never actually heard a zither before I do remember it being on my ABC chart as the word for Z in kindergarten. Its got a nice sound, reminds me of a cross between a mandolin and a banjo

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  2. These are great, honestly I don't think I've ever heard of any of these before so this has been very educational for me. Great post as always mate!

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  3. This was posted on reddit, please join reddit we need people like you on reddit. Also, hello from reddit!! we internet now.

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  4. Harry Partch, man. Look him up.

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  5. Where are the cigar box guitars?

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  6. FYI - PANArt is still making what they consider to be the Hang, but it's a bit different from what most folks have seen/heard. They've stopped using standard western tuning (A440), but tuning the Hang 'to itself'. This is supposedly making the creation more balanced 'to itself' but it does make it harder for folks to play with others.

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  7. I really like the sounds of it.
    Great, great post.

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  8. Cool instruments. You might also find the Eigenharp interesting: http://www.hangdrumsandhandpans.com/2011/12/panart-hang-meets-eigenharp-alpha.html

    Enjoy. :)

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