Make a Balloon Bassoon – a simple reed musical instrument

Posted on September 13, 2013 by Alec @ Child's Play Music

Make a balloon bassoon

Finding simple wind instruments suitable to make with very young children is hard, but the balloon bassoon is perfect. Easy to make and satisfying to play, children love this instrument, not least because it’s loud! In my early childhood education music incursion programs this is always one of the most popular instruments.

Balloon bassoons are also inexpensive – about A$4 if you use PVC pressure pipe, much less if you use cardboard tube. It sounds like a very cheap saxophone, and it only plays one note. Technically it’s more like a sax or clarinet than a bassoon, but hey! The name was to good to pass up!

How easy is it to make? I can make one from scratch in less than 3 minutes, including measuring and cutting the pipe. I use this instrument in my program to show children how easy and quick it is to make a musical instrument (I pre-cut the pipe, but that’s all).

Children from about 4 and up can make it themselves with some adult assistance – you will have to cut the hose for them, and they will need assistance and close supervision if they are going to saw the PVC pipe.

Children as young as 3 can play it, although most 3 year olds will need to have the instrument held for them. 4 year olds and up can hold it for themselves, but learning the right way to hold it takes practice.

The full instructions are below, but if you prefer a visual guide watch this video:

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Building a PVC Frame for Scrap Metal Musical Instruments

Posted on July 10, 2013 by Alec @ Child's Play Music

In my last blog post I walked you through selecting scrap metal for making musical instruments; now it’s time to show you how I built a strong and easy to build PVC frame and turned some scrap aluminium castings into a bell tree. I use these instruments in my Child’s Play Music hands-on play-based music incursions with young children in all kinds of Early Childhood Education settings here in Perth.

You can use this frame design for many different instruments – even for hanging old pots and pans. I have 3 frames: for my stainless steel cymbals, my aluminium gongs, and now this one for my aluminium castings bell tree.

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Turn Scrap Metal into Musical Instruments: Sourcing and Choosing Metal

Posted on June 28, 2013 by Alec @ Child's Play Music

Making musical instruments from scrap metal

In my Child’s Play Music early childhood education incursion programs I tell children that they can make music from practically anything that makes a sound – and it’s true! And if you are looking for metal to make your own musical instruments you can’t beat a real old-fashioned ‘scrappie’, a scrap yard piled high with with all sort of interesting metal bits carefully sorted by type of metal.

Metal + imagination = musical instruments

I design my instruments to be simple, safe and tough, because I work with very young children in all kinds of early childhood education and care settings here in Perth. Wherever possible I use recycled materials; I get a real kick out of upcycling scrap metal to make great sounding instruments that children love to play, and I love to spread that message of sustainability.

Stainless steel cymbals – CRASH!

In this post I’ll be sharing with you:

What kind of scrap metal dealer to look for
The best scrappie in Perth, WA!
The kinds of instruments you can make from scrap metal
Types of scrap metal, and what instruments they are best-suited to
How to test the scrap metal for its sonic qualities
My most recent scrap yard score 🙂

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The Secret of my Success – Bart Hopkin!

Posted on April 25, 2012 by Alec @ Child's Play Music

Over many years people have asked me about how I come up with the crazy instruments I build. Surely I must have a phenomenally creative mind. Um, no. I just look at other “real” instruments and think “what’s the simplest possible way to make a version of this, preferably one that is incredibly cheap and extremely hard to break, and that very young children will be able to play successfully”.

I’m very proud of my instruments – I think they are pretty darn wonderful, and other people seem to think so too, especially the children I work with – but they are not complex. My over-riding design principle is KISS. If I cant build it simply I don’t build it at all. If I can also make it from recycled junk that’s a bonus.

People also assume that I must have wonderful manual arts skills, that I am a trained woodworker and metal machinist. Nope. To be honest, my skills are very limited. I’m not proud of this, but I failed woodwork and metalwork in first year high school, and I think of myself as a self-taught wood-butcher and metal-hacker. OK, I had a lot of experience working with PVC pipe when I used to be a professional gardener, but a 5 year old child can cut PVC pipe just as well as I can.

Nor do I have a state-of the art workshop with milling machines, band saws, thicknessers, router tables and the like. I mainly work with manual hand tools of the simplest kind. In fact the only power tools I use are:

a cordless drill
a drill press
an angle grinder;
an electric jigsaw
a 1/3rd sheet electric sander
a hand-held electric planer

You could outfit my entire workshop by going to any major hardware store with $1000 and come away with plenty of change. Indeed there is not one of my instruments that actually requires power tools to make – they just save a lot of time, but if necessary I could make them just with hand tools.