The electric cello is a bowed stringed instrument, member of the violin family. To produce its sound it depends on electronic amplification instead of relying on acoustic resonance and that’s the reason why many of them have little or no body shape.

The advantage of the electric cello is that it can produce a wider range of sounds and effects, like an electric guitar, but this is also the disadvantage since the sound is less organic and rich than a traditional violoncello.

You can make your own electric cello.

Check out this Argentine Indie Rock band, Contramano, lead by Pablo Cubarle who uses an electric cello.

The Reactable is an electronic musical instrument that allows expressive collaborative live performances for musicians, the Icelandic singer Björk introduced it for the first time to a mainstream event in the Coachella Festival. Created by the Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona, under the direction of Dr. Sergi Jordà, it can simultaneously perform & share complete control to the musicians by moving and rotating physical objects on the luminous round table surface representing components of a modular synthesizer. It can be collaborative (locally and remotely), intuitive, learneable, masterable and suitable for novices and advanced musicians. The basic principle is very similar to Microsoft’s Surface, that’s going to be launched at the end of this year.

The Rhodes piano was invented in 1940s by Harorld Rhodes, the basic sound of this ultra sweet instrument is very similar to the celesta or the electric guitar nevertheless it fulfils all the rules to be considered a piano.

Each key causes felt-covered hammers to strike over sets of strings, in a Rhodes piano felt-tipped hammers, also neoprene rubber tips on plastic hammers, strike metal dowels called “tines” to create a ping sound which also resonate the tone bars over each tine creating a juicy ring.

This electromechanical instrument was very popular from the beginning of the 70’s to the mid 80’s. It has been used by artists like The Doors, Stevie Wonder, Bob Dylan and Pink Floyd, maybe Harorld Rhodes never thought that his invention will be used until these times, in fact this instrument has contributed to a lot of genres such as hip-hop, house and drum & bass by adding a mellow jazzy style.

It’s a shame that Rhodes pianos aren’t manufactured anymore as a real instrument because all the sample-based software doesn’t have this profound sweetness and warmth of a real Rhodes, you can listen to the difference here:

A real Rhodes

An emulation

These simple percussion instruments of prehistoric American origin, part of the idiophones family and also known as shakers, consist of a pair of leather, wood, plastic or dried gourd shell filled with seeds, rice, or dried beans with a handle that also covers the filling entrance hole. Often one maraca is pitched higher than the other and are played by scraping them.Make your own maracas or shakers.

This relatively easy to make instrument consists of several glasses of different sizes mounted upright on a wooden base, the sound is produced by moving wet fingers along the rims of glass bowls, the glasses are arranged in rows to make chords easier to play. You only have to tune it once when putting the glasses in the correct order.Listen to samples here, and here. More info here.

Is a wind instrument similar to a flute, it can be made of plastic, ceramic, wood, clay, metal or even glass, it is usually formed by an acoustic space shaped like an egg, a blow hole, and a variety in the number of holes from 4 to 13, it is a very simple instrument and for that matter one of the oldest instruments ever built.

Make your own ocarina, get more information or listen to a sample.

One of our favourite sounds here at Suite303Server is not an instrument in a strict sense. Created in 1940, by the famous Homer Dudley, to break the speech patterns of telephonic communications into smaller components for them to be able to fit a more narrow bandwith, the resulting machine the Voice Coder (hence the name Vocoder) is a sound effect tool that makes the human voice sound synthetic. The synthesized sound that comes through the output of the vocoder preserves the tonal characteristics of the voice that was placed through the input signal, making its characteristic “robotic” sound.

Download your own free vocoder software, or listen to samples: normal and vocoded.

This is a very large instrument mainly made by Honduras rosewood, it has 19 wavelength resonators and 5 cavity resonators under the 24 bars, to ensure an exceptionally low frequency sound. Created by Cris Forster in 1986 this powerful device is over 3.65 meters (12 feet) long and it is basically a low-toned marimba. Listen to a sample here.

A 21 string harp-lute from West Africa. It is made by a round bowl covered with a streched material as a resonator, with a notched bridge like the one in a guitar or a lute. The sound has a close resemblance to a harp, but when it’s played in the traditional West Africa style, sounds closer to a Flamenco guitar. It is played only with four fingers, thumb and index on both hands.

Make your own and listen… or listen to another sample.

The weird looking mutantrumpet is a hybrid instrument invented by Ben Neill in the beginning of the 1990’s, the electro-acoustic-visual trumpet contains three bells, two sets of valves (that is, six valves instead of three) and a trombone slide. In the mouthpiece there is a pickup that converts the sound to MIDI information, there are also momentary switches next to the valves as well as four MIDI controllers made by pressure sensing pads and potentiometers. It has a computer interface that enables the player to launch and modify sequences, record samples and handle them in real time and it also controls lighting and video or slide projection.