Music to our ears
When he was in grad school, one of my son-in-laws' several jobs was to teach part-time in early elementary school in Memphis, Tenn.
He taught music.
As I recall learning music in first, second and third grades it was pretty simple -- at least for me. I was the kid with the sticks or with the triangle.
Even then, I just hit the sticks and the triangle when I felt like it, earning nothing but stern looks from the teacher lucky enough to have me at the moment.
But my son-in-law took music, which he loves with a passion, in a whole new direction for his young charges.
Instead of handing out sticks and triangles and kazoos and whatever else teachers find in closets to "make" music, he had kids build their own instruments.
One memorable instrument required only a certain length of PVC, the kind with a small diameter, and a bucket or pie plate. You'd string, well, string or something like it from the top of the PVC to the bottom or connect it to the bucket or plate and strum the thing like a bass.
He did a bunch of stuff like that, and the kids loved it. I'd have loved it myself. Talk about something I could master!
But, the dangest homemade instrument I've ever seen was a guitar fashioned out of an AK-47. I saw it the other night on TV.
The sound was off and I couldn't find the darn remote, so all I could do was look at him jamming.
No, the idea was not to fire off a magazine of 7.62 mm rounds. He had somehow strung guitar strings from the barrell to the stock.
It doesn't take much to imagine a whole band with instruments made from weapons. It's already a no-brainer to pluck the string on a bow.
Put together a few ammo boxes, each filled with a certain number of rounds so you get a different sound, and you got a drum set.
And for extra zing to the tympany section, you actually could punctuate specific bars with the firing of one kind of weapon or another.
I have not actually tried this, but I would bet that if you blew down the barrell of a .45 pistol, you'd get the kind of toot sound you can coax from a Coke bottle.
Back when I was in the Army, we had a weapon called a "dooper," which was actually a hand-carried grenade-launcher. We called it a "dooper" because when the grenade left the barrell, it made a "dooper" sound.
The obvious problem here is horns.
Any ideas?
