What is Your Favorite Alternative Instrument?

[EndersDame]

You know outside of the usual guitar bass drums etc line up

[BurtWorm]

1. I can't believe you left out____

kazoo
toy piano
celesta
sitar
vacuum cleaner
saw

[EndersDame]

3. Thanks for the suggestions

I got to the post early enough to change some to the options but only have ten slots

[hobbit709]

2. Didgeridoo.

[rucky]

4. Auto-Tune

[Rambis]

5. Theremin

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cd4jvtAr8JM

[EndersDame]

6. There is a band called The Phenomenauts

They used to have a band member Joebot , were a helmet with a theremin on his helmet!

[Symarip]

8. The Phenomenauts came to my house one time

Long story short, we have mutual friends and they stopped by on tour and cleaned up at my house.

A year or two later, my band played this festival with them called "Three Floors of Ska" in Hollywood.

True story.

[EndersDame]

9. They lkook like they would be so much fun to hang out with

[Lionel Mandrake]

13. Unusual Scoring of "The Day the Earth Stood Still" (1951)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TRc6f2oVdlw

[LynneSin]

7. I cannot believe the lack of respect for the Tromboon!!!!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tromboon

The tromboon is a musical instrument made up of the reed and bocal of the bassoon attached to the body of a trombone in place of the trombone's leadpipe, combining the reed and the slide for a distinctive and unusual instrument. The name of the instrument is a portmanteau of "trombone" and "bassoon". The sound quality of the instrument is best described as comical and loud; its creator Peter Schickele called it "a hybrid —that's the nicer word— constructed from the parts of a bassoon and a trombone; it has all the disadvantages of both."<1><2> This instrument is called for in the scores of the fictional P. D. Q. Bach in his oratorio The Seasonings,<3> as well as the Serenude (for devious instruments).

[ZombieHorde]

10. What makes an intrument "Alternative"? nt

[HughBeaumont]

11. Slide Piano Log

The band uses many homemade devices as instruments, such as the Viking Rowboat.<1> Dan Rathbun — who has created most of the band's idiosyncratic instruments — plays, among other custom-made instruments (though he uses a common bass guitar most of the time), a custom-stringed bass instrument referred to as the Sledgehammer Dulcimer (or, alternately, the Slide Piano Log), which uses piano strings and is possibly more than 7 feet long; it is played with two sticks: one in the left hand generally used as a fret, and another in the right hand to strike the strings.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sleepytime_Gorilla_Museum

[frogmarch]

12. Bowed Psaltery

I recently bought one and am having a lot of fun playing it.

Here's a You Tube video of someone playing pseveral psongs on one and giving a bowed psaltery lesson:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aD_dsfp1Uyk

[mitchum]

Ouija Board with a contact mike

[mitchum]

14. delete: crazy double post

[DFW]

15. Balalaika!

I learned how to play one in college. We were the only college in the USA with its own balalaika orchestra.
I played one on the second Holland-America Line album back in the 80s, along with a Croatian bisernica (sacrilege
to use one in a Russian tune, I know, but the statue of limitations has expired).

[Bertha Venation]

16. i have had enough cowbell to last ten lifetimes --

you see, I am a Blue Crabs fan, and there must be 500 cowbells at every game. the most dastardly noisemaker ever allowed into a stadium. :grr:

[EndersDame]

17. That would suck so much

I am sorry you have to put up with that

[HughBeaumont]

18. Not really an instrument but a device - the eBow.

For the type of stuff I make, it's useful at times.

[J-Lo Biafra]

19. The Mellotron.

[Zomby Woof]

20. I love the bassoon

Maybe it's not alternative, but it doesn't get the attention I feel it deserves.

[MilesColtrane]

21. Drum suit?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6mRq1xgKykM

[Beer on a stick]

22. My cock.

[cemaphonic]

23. I like all those buzzy, nasal predecessors of modern wind and brass instruments

shawms, crumhorns, sackbutts, racketts, etc.

[MilesColtrane]

24. Octobass?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Octobass

[Zomby Woof]

25. The Kazoo!

I can't believe I forgot that one.

[MilesColtrane]

26. Schalmei?

It's a valved,double reed instrument made out of metal that looks like a Dr. Seuss design.

[MilesColtrane]

27. Bog Horn AKA Toiletophone?

[Taverner]

28. "Guitar can make you sing, but only a pedal steel can make you CRY"

[EndersDame]

29. I totally agree