Kouxian

Chinese advanced jaw harp or set from some "dan moi"

Some information from Wikipedia:

Kouxian is the Chinese generic term for the jaw harp, and as such is used to refer to all such instruments originating in China. In the Chinese language, however, the term is used to refer to all jaw harps, whether from China or elsewhere.

The kouxian, which likely originated in Asia, is used throughout China, and is particularly popular among non-Han ethnic groups living in China's southwest (including Yunnan, Guangxi, and Guizhou). Each of these ethnic groups has its own name for the instrument in that ethnic group's own language. Such names include ho-hos. Kouxian may be made from bamboo or metal, and are often used as a courting instrument.

One variety of kouxian consists of between one and five brass leaves which are plucked in front of the opened mouth, using the mouth as a resonance chamber. Each leaf produces a different pitched sound when plucked, and notes' pitches are further refined by changing the volume and shape of the oral cavity. Leaves may be plucked one at a time or many at once to produce synthesizer-like melody.

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Aulos

I really like double instruments. They have smaller scale but their sounds becomes much better. Well it doesn't work if second pipe just give one constant sound like in bagpipes.

Some information from Wikipedia:

An aulos was an ancient Greek wind instrument, depicted often in art and also attested by archaeology.

There were several kinds of aulos. A single pipe without a reed was called the monaulos. A single pipe held horizontally, as the modern flute, was the plagiaulos. The most common variety must have been a reed instrument. Archeological finds, surviving iconography and other evidence indicate that it was usually double-reeded, like an oboe, although simple variants with a single clarinet-type reed cannot be ruled out.

Though aulos is often and erroneously translated as "flute", its sound — described as "penetrating, insisting and exciting" — was more akin to that of the bagpipes, with a chanter and (modulated) drone. Like the Great Highland Bagpipe, the aulos might be used for martial music, but it is more frequently depicted in other social settings. It accompanied physical activities such as wrestling matches, the broad jump, the discus throw and to mark the rowing cadence on triremes, as well as sacrifices and dramas.

It appears that some variants of the instrument were loud, shrill, and therefore very hard to blow. A leather strap, called a phorbeiá in Greek or capistrum in Latin, was worn by the auletai to avoid excessive strain on the lips and cheeks due to continuous blowing. Aulus players are sometimes depicted with puffed cheeks. The playing technique almost certainly made use of circular breathing, very much like the Sardinian launeddas which would give the aulos a continuous sound.

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How 10 people can play piano?

I'm again here. It was a long time. now i have two jobs and one desease, want to buy bansuri and maybe khaen, teach one guy to play recorder and hope to gather my own folk group.

if anyone interested in such information ^_^_^"

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Carillon

Organ interface for bells.

Some information from Wikipedia:

A carillon is a musical instrument that is usually housed in a free-standing bell tower, or the belfry of a church or other municipal building. The instrument consists of at least 23 cast bronze cup-shaped bells, which are played serially to play a melody, or sounded together to play a chord. A carillon is played by striking a keyboard the keys of which are sometimes called "batons" with the fists and by pressing the keys of a pedal keyboard with the feet. The keys mechanically activate levers and wires that connect to metal clappers that strike the bells, allowing the performer, the carillonneur, to vary the intensity of the note according to the force applied to the key.

The carillon is the heaviest of all extant musical instruments; the total weight of bells alone can be 100 tons in the largest instruments. The greatest concentration of carillons is still found in the Netherlands, Belgium, and Northern France, where they were symbols of civic pride and status. Some of the most spectacular are now protected by UNESCO as part of the world heritage site the Belfries of Belgium and France.

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Mountain dulcimer

Some information from Wikipedia:

The mountain dulcimer is a fretted string instrument of the zither family, typically with three or four strings. It is native to the Appalachian region of the United States. The body extends the length of the fingerboard, and its fretting is generally diatonic.

The traditional way to play the instrument is to lay it flat on the lap and pluck or strum the strings with the right hand, while fretting with the other. The dulcimer may also be placed in a similar position on a piece of furniture, such as a table or chest of drawers, to enhance the sound. There are two predominant methods of fretting. First, the strings may be depressed with the fingertips of the fretting hand. Using this technique, all the strings may be fretted, allowing the player to produce chords. Second, the melody string, the string closest to the player, may be depressed with a "noter," typically a short length of dowel or bamboo. Using this method, only the melody string is fretted and the other strings act as drone strings (the melody string may be doubled, so that the melody can be better heard over the drones). In this second style of playing, the combination of the drone strings and the buzz of the noter on the melody strings produces a unique sound.

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Berimbau

Musical bow from Africa.

Some information from Wikipedia:

The berimbau is a single-string percussion instrument, a musical bow, from Brazil. The berimbau's origins are not entirely clear, but there is not much doubt on its African origin, as no Indigenous Brazilian or European people use musical bows, and very similar instruments are played in the southern parts of Africa. The berimbau was eventually incorporated into the practice of the Afro-Brazilian martial art capoeira, where it commands how the capoeiristas move in the roda.

The berimbau consists of a wooden bow (verga), about 1.2 to 1.5 m, with a steel string (arame) tightly strung and secured from one end of the verga to the other. A gourd (cabaça), dried, opened and hollowed-out, attached to the lower portion of the Verga by a loop of tough string, acts as a resonator.

To play the berimbau, one holds it in one hand, wrapping the two middle fingers around the verga, and placing the little finger under the cabaça's string loop (the "anel"), and balancing the weight there. A small stone or coin (pedra or dobrão) is held between the index and thumb of the same hand that holds the berimbau. The cabaça is rested against the abdomen. In the other hand, one holds a stick (baqueta or "vaqueta" – usually wooden, very rarely made of metal) and a shaker (caxixi). One strikes the arame with the vaqueta to produce the sound. The caxixi accompanies the vaqueta. The dobrão is moved back and forth from the arame to change the pitch produced by the berimbau. The sound can also be altered by moving the cabaça back and forth from the abdomen, producing a wah-like sound.

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Kora

Harp with two rows of strings. It changes play technique and make harp more mobile.

Some information from Wikipedia:

The kora is a 21-string bridge-harp used extensively by people in West Africa.

A kora is built from a large calabash cut in half and covered with cow skin to make a resonator, and has a notched bridge like a lute or guitar. The sound of a kora resembles that of a harp, though when played in the traditional style, it bears a closer resemblance to flamenco and delta blues guitar techniques. The player uses only the thumb and index finger of both hands to pluck the strings in polyrhythmic patterns (using the remaining fingers to secure the instrument by holding the hand posts on either side of the strings).

Traditional koras feature 21 strings, eleven played by the left hand and ten by the right. Modern koras made in the Casamance region of southern Senegal sometimes feature additional bass strings, adding up to four strings to the traditional 21. Strings were traditionally made from thin strips of hide, for example antelope skin - now most strings are made from harp strings or nylon fishing line, sometimes plaited together to create thicker strings.

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Membrane pipe

Couldn't find information about this instrument, but as i understand it's like kazoo with play holes. You can see the process of creating such thing here

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Rubab

Some information from Wikipedia:

Rubab or robab is a lute-like musical instrument originally from Afghanistan but is also played in the neighbouring countries, especially Pakistan. It derives its name from the Arab rebab which means "played with a bow" but the Central Asian instrument is plucked, and is distinctly different in construction. The rubab is mainly used by Tajik, Pashtun, Kashmiri and Iranian Kurdish classical musicians.

The rubab is a short-necked lute whose body is carved out of a single piece of wood, with a membrane, covering the hollow bowl of the sound-chamber, upon which the bridge is positioned. It has three melody strings tuned in fourths, three drone strings and 11 or 12 sympathetic strings. The instrument is made from the trunk of a mulberry tree, the head from an animal skin such as a goat skin, and the strings either gut (from the intestines of young goats, brought to the size of thread) or nylon.

The rubab is attested from the 7th century CE. It is mentioned in old Persian books, and many Sufi poets mention it in their poems. It is the traditional instrument of Khorasan.

In Tajikistan a similar but somewhat distinct rubab-i-pamir (Pamiri rubab) is played, having a shallower body and neck. The rubab of the Pamir area has six gut strings, one of which, rather than running from the head to the bridge, is attached partway down the neck, similar to the fifth string of the American banjo.

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Feed-Drum

You cannot make 10-20 hits in second? Then this drum definitely for you ^_^_^

Some information from Wikipedia:

The Feed-Drum is an imperial bass drum with a system of electronic conditioning of the skin conceived by composer Michelangelo Lupone and produced at CRM - Centro Ricerche Musicali, Rome. Through the principle of feed-back, the signal produced by the excitation of the skin was returned to the skin itself in the form of acoustic pressure. The result was the infinite prolongation of the sound. The system controls the damping of the movement of the skin, and therefore the decay rate of the sound, and permits isolation of high frequency modes by the combined action of nodes present on the skin and the amount of feed-back input energy. The design on the skin surface is a simplified map of the oscillatory modes based on the Bessel functions. The map was limited to 13 diameters and 8 nodal circles, the latter divided into even semicircles (to the left) and odd semicircles (to the right).

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Harpejji

One more variant with tapping style of play.

Some information from Here:

The harpejji is a member of a small family of stringed musical instruments known as tapping instruments. Tapping instruments are descendents of the electric guitar but are optimized for a style of playing that involves tapping on the strings to produce a note. One of the primary benefits of this style of playing is that it only requires one finger to make each note, unlike strumming which requires at least one finger on each hand to make a note.

By freeing up more fingers, the player has the freedom to play arrangements that are physically too difficult to play with the more traditional playing techniques. Unlike all other commercially available tapping instruments, the harpejji has a keyboard-inspired playing interface that many will find easier to learn, more comfortable to play and more interesting to explore.

The harpejji is played on a stand, horizontally or on a slight incline or decline. A decline position allows the audience to see more of your playing, whereas an incline position makes it easiest to reach the top frets.

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Guzheng

Looks like modified gusli or hammered dulcimer without hammers.

Some information from Wikipedia:

The guzheng, is a Chinese plucked zither. The guzheng is a similar instrument to many Asian instruments such as the Japanese koto, the Mongolian yatga, the Korean gayageum, and the Vietnamese đàn tranh.

The guzheng should not to be confused with the guqin (another ancient Chinese zither but a fewer number of strings and without bridges).

The origin of the guzheng can be traced back to two other Chinese plucked zithers, the se. The guzheng has existed since the Warring States Period and became especially popular during the Qin dynasty. The number of strings on the guzheng has always fluctuated, as we have as few as 6 to as many as 23 strings during the Tang dynasty. The earliest record of the guzheng or gu-jirn in Shi Ji is attributed to the historian Sima Qian in 91 BC.

Until 1961, the common guzheng had 16 strings, although by the mid-20th century 18-string guzhengs were also in use. In 1961 Xu Zhengao together with Wang Xunzhi introduced the first 21-string guzheng after two years of research and development. In 1961, they also invented the "S-shaped" left string rest, which was quickly adopted by all guzheng makers and is still used today, whether in the shape of the letter "S", "C", etc. This curve allows for greater ease in tuning the strings and, combined with strings of varied thickness, allows for greater resonance in both the deeper and higher pitch ranges. The 21-string zheng is the most commonly used, but some traditional musicians still use the 16-string, especially along the southeastern coastal provinces of China and in Taiwan.

The guzheng is tuned to a pentatonic scale, the 16-string zheng is tuned to give three complete octaves, while the 21-string zheng has four complete octaves.

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Bells

Popular in many religions. Cannot understand a reason but even if religion don't like music it still allows bells.

Some information from Wikipedia:

A bell is a simple sound-making device. The bell is a percussion instrument. Its form is usually a hollow, cup-shaped object, which resonates upon being struck. The striking implement can be a tongue suspended within the bell, known as a clapper, a small, free sphere enclosed within the body of the bell or a separate mallet or hammer.

Bells are usually made of cast metal, but small bells can also be made from ceramic or glass. Bells can be of all sizes: from tiny dress accessories to church bells weighing many tons. Historically, many bells were made to commemorate important events or people and have been associated with the concepts of peace and freedom. The study of bells is called campanology.

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Eigenharp

Some more electronic wind instruments with additional abilities. Most of information in video.

Some information from Wikipedia:

Eigenharp is a brand of electronic instrument made by Eigenlabs, a company based in Devon, UK, invented by John Lambert and released in 2009 after developing it for eight years.

Characteristics of all of the instruments are:

* A matrix of velocity sensitive multi-expressive keys, each of which act like a 4-way analog joystick. This allows the simultaneous pitch bend and modulation (or other parameters) of each played note individually.
* A stick-like vertical form factor akin to a sitar for the larger models or a flute in the smaller ones.
* A built-in wind controller, giving the larger versions of the instrument an appearance similar to a bassoon.
* One or two ribbon controller strips
* Macintosh-based control software, with an early Windows version now available.

Additionally, the larger models have:

* A series of percussion keys
* A built-in step sequencer with indicator LEDs for each key.

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Eigenharp Pico



Eigenharp Alpha


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Shakuhachi

Some information from Wikipedia:

The shakuhachi is a Japanese end-blown flute. It is traditionally made of bamboo, but versions now exist in ABS and hardwoods. It was used by the monks of the Fuke school of Zen Buddhism in the practice of suizen (吹禅?, blowing meditation). Its soulful sound made it popular in 1980s pop music in the English-speaking world.

Shakuhachi are usually made from the root end of a bamboo culm and are extremely versatile instruments. Professional players can produce virtually any pitch they wish from the instrument, and play a wide repertoire of original Zen music, ensemble music with koto, biwa, and shamisen, folk music, jazz, and other modern pieces.

Much of the shakuhachi's subtlety (and player's skill) lies in its rich tone colouring, and the ability for its variation. Different fingerings, embouchures and amounts of meri can produce notes of the same pitch, but with subtle or dramatic differences in the tone colouring. Holes can be covered partially (1/3 covered, 1/2, 2/3, etc.) and pitch varied subtly or substantially by changing the blowing angle. The honkyoku pieces rely heavily on this aspect of the instrument to enhance their subtlety and depth.

Unlike a recorder, where the player blows into a duct—a narrow airway over a block which is called a "fipple"—and thus has limited pitch control, the shakuhachi player blows as one would blow across the top of an empty bottle (though the shakuhachi has a sharp edge to blow against) and therefore has substantial pitch control. The five finger holes are tuned to a pentatonic scale with no half-tones, but using techniques called meri and kari, in which the blowing angle is adjusted to bend the pitch downward and upward, respectively, the player can bend each pitch as much as a whole tone or more. Pitches may also be lowered by shading or partially covering finger holes. Since most pitches can be achieved via several different fingering or blowing techniques on the shakuhachi, the timbre of each possibility is taken into account when composing or playing. The shakuhachi has a range of two full octaves and a partial third octave. The various octaves are produced using subtle variations of breath and embouchure.

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Glass armonica

Advanced glass harp.

Some information from Wikipedia:

The glass harmonica is a type of musical instrument that uses a series of glass bowls or goblets graduated in size to produce musical tones by means of friction (instruments of this type are known as friction idiophones).

The phenomenon of rubbing a wet finger around the rim of a wine goblet to produce tones is documented back to Renaissance times; Galileo considered the phenomenon (in his Two New Sciences), as did Athanasius Kircher.

Benjamin Franklin invented a radically new arrangement of the glasses in 1761 after seeing water-filled wine glasses played by Edmund Delaval at Cambridge in England in 1758. Franklin, who called his invention the "armonica" after the Italian word for harmony, worked with London glassblower Charles James to build one, and it had its world premiere in early 1762. A modern glass armonica built using Benjamin Franklin's design.

In Franklin's treadle-operated version, 37 bowls were mounted horizontally on an iron spindle. The whole spindle turned by means of a foot pedal. The sound was produced by touching the rims of the bowls with moistened fingers. Rims were painted different colors according to the pitch of the note. With the Franklin design it is possible to play ten glasses simultaneously if desired, a technique that is very difficult if not impossible to execute using upright goblets. Franklin also advocated the use of a small amount of powdered chalk on the fingers, which helped produce a clear tone in the same way rosin does for the bows of string instruments.

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Banjo

Some information from Wikipedia:

The banjo is a stringed instrument with, typically, four or five strings, which vibrate a membrane of plastic material or animal hide stretched over a circular frame. Simpler forms of the instrument were fashioned by enslaved Africans in Colonial America, adapted from several African instruments of the same basic design. There are several theories concerning the origin of the name banjo. It may derive from the Kimbundu term mbanza. Some etymologists believe it comes from a dialectal pronunciation of the Portuguese "bandore" or from an early anglicisation of the Spanish word "bandurria", though other research suggests that it may come from a Senegambian term for a bamboo stick formerly used for the instrument's neck.

Enslaved Africans, living in Appalachia, fashioned gourd-bodied instruments like those they knew in Africa. 18th and early 19th century writers transcribed the name of these instruments variously as bangie, banza, banjer and banjar. The modern banjo was popularized by the American minstrel performer Joel Sweeney in the 1830s. Banjos were introduced in Britain in the 1840s by Sweeney's group, the American Virginia Minstrels, and became very popular in music halls.

The modern banjo comes in a variety of forms, including four- and five-string versions. A six-string version, tuned and played similar to a guitar, has gained popularity. In almost all of its forms, the banjo's playing is characterized by a fast arpeggiated plucking, although there are many different playing styles.

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Trombone

Slide brass instrument. I like sliding instruments because they can make not only tones and half tones but all sounds in diapason.

Some information from Wikipedia:

The trombone is a musical instrument in the brass family. Like all brass instruments, sound is produced when the player’s vibrating lips (embouchure) cause the air column inside the instrument to vibrate. The trombone is usually characterised by a telescopic slide with which the player varies the length of the tube to change pitches, although the valve trombone uses three valves like those on a trumpet.

The word trombone derives from Italian tromba (trumpet) and -one (a suffix meaning "large"), so the name literally means "large trumpet". Trombones and trumpets share the important characteristic of having predominantly cylindrical bores. Therefore, the most frequently encountered trombones—the tenor and bass trombone—are the tenor and bass counterparts of the trumpet. Trombone music, along with music for euphonium and tuba, is typically written in concert pitch while trumpet music is transposed to B♭, although exceptions do occur, the most notably being in brass band music. Most trombones are pitched in B♭, an octave below the trumpet and an octave above the tuba.

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Chapman stick

Nice instrument. Good choice for people who want to play guitar, but want more functionality from instrument.

Some information from Wikipedia:

The Chapman Stick (the Stick) is an electric musical instrument devised by Emmett Chapman in the early 1970s. A member of the guitar family, the Chapman Stick usually has ten or twelve individually tuned strings and has been used on music recordings to play bass lines, melody lines, chords or textures. Designed as a fully polyphonic chordal instrument, it can also cover several of these musical parts simultaneously.

A Stick looks like a wide version of the fretboard of an electric guitar, but having 8, 10 or 12 strings. It is, however, considerably longer and wider than a guitar fretboard. Unlike the electric guitar, it is usually played by tapping or fretting the strings, rather than plucking them. Instead of one hand fretting and the other hand plucking, both hands sound notes by striking the strings against the fingerboard just behind the appropriate frets for the desired notes.

For this reason, it can sound many more notes at once than some other stringed instruments, making it more comparable to a keyboard instrument than to other stringed instruments. This arrangement lends itself to playing multiple lines at once and many Stick players have mastered performing bass, chords and melody lines simultaneously.

The technique is very similar to that of piano in as much as the player covers both bass and melody notes together with both hands and each note is struck with one finger of one hand. Typically, one hand plays the melody on the treble strings and the other plays rhythm on the bass strings.

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Shamisen

Some information from Wikipedia:

The shamisen (三味線?, literally "three flavor strings"), also called sangen (三絃?, literally "three strings") is a three-stringed musical instrument played with a plectrum called a bachi.

The shamisen is similar in length to a guitar, but its neck is much much slimmer and has no frets. Its drum-like rounded rectangular body, known as the dō, is taut front and back with skin in the manner of a banjo, and amplifies the sound of the strings. The skin is usually from a dog or cat, but in the past a special type of paper was used and recently various types of plastics are being tried. On the skin of some of the best shamisen, the position of the cat's nipples can still be seen.

The neck of the shamisen is usually constructed such that it is divided into three or four pieces that fit and lock together. Indeed, some shamisens are made so that they can be easily disassembled and stowed to save space. The pegs used to wind the strings were traditionally fashioned out of ivory, but as it has become a rare resource, they have been recently fashioned out of other materials, such as various kinds of wood and plastic.

The three strings are traditionally made of silk, or, more recently, nylon. The lowest passes over a small hump at the "nut" end so that it buzzes, creating a characteristic sound known as sawari (somewhat reminiscent of the "buzzing" of a sitar, which is called jivari). The upper part of the dō is almost always protected by a cover known as a dō kake, and players often wear a little band of cloth on their left hand to facilitate sliding up and down the neck. This band is known as a yubikake. There may also be a cover on the head of the instrument, known as a tenjin.

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