Making Music

Because this is the week the NAMM Show happens in Anaheim, Calif. (see our past post on NAMM here) and because we love music (see our music posts here) and we're proud of showing off how integral fasteners are to many instruments, like the classic Fender Electric Guitar (see our post on the Fender here), we're introducing you to a great website called:

Vulpestruments.com

"An assortment of hand crafted instruments, made from recycled, reused and readily available parts"

There is a guy named Tom who just loves trying to recreate sounds he hears acoustically, or he finds something and thinks to himself how can I make a sound of this...and then he does. 

The site is wonderful for us because we love seeing nuts and bolts helping to facilitate such cleverness; we simply love seeing fasteners being used. Then, when they are used for something as cool as these instruments, we're just over the moon!

Here are some photos of his homemade instruments - he's made many more but we only picked a few. Click on each photo and it will take you to his website where he includes a video of him playing the specific instrument...he's just awesome.

And if you want to learn more about Tom, here's a short documentary about him. 

Tom is the best.

NAMM-tastic!

The NAMM Show was last week and we've got some photos to share.

Amplifiers

Hand-painted Amplifiers

Boutique Amplifiers

Guitars

Ukeleles

 Saxaphones

Drums

 Cymbals

Cajóns

Fender had the assembly tee from our other post on display!

And here we are, the Freeway Street Team

(All of us had fastener jewelry on and we didn't even plan it.)

All of the things I took photos of at NAMM are being held together with fasteners. Fasteners are a huge component to the manufacturing of most musical instruments.

To demonstrate this best, below is a video I watched at NAMM 2014. 

Here's a still photo of the video to get you excited.

The video is from Electro Voice demonstrating the sound quality of their system, ETX. Watch as the video deconstructs the product and you can see exactly where all the fasteners go...it's so cool.

Click here to see more from ElectroVoice.

And that's it - Fasteners Rock!

Music Month is Here!

It's January and our blog focuses on music and sound this month, in honor of the NAMM SHOW.

If you don't know what the NAMM SHOW is check out our post from a 2012. But basically NAMM is an acronym for National Association of Music Merchants; it is a huge convention in Southern California where everyone who sells a musical instrument, or music related products, gets together.

So we're starting the month off with this clever musical instrument that

someone made out of fastener related items.

.  

My instinct is to call it a xylophone but the word comes from the Greek words ξύλον - xylon - meaning "wood" and φωνή - phonē - meaning "sound, voice".  So xylophone translates to "wooden sound" but this one isn't made of wood! So we can't call it that. But what should we call it? 

Let's figure it out.

I looked up the word WRENCH in Greek and it is κλειδί, pronounced kleidí, so I'm thinking this should be a kleidíphone.

There you have it - it's a homemade kleidíphone!

Did you notice what they used for mallets in the video - screwdrivers!

Pretty clever...I'm going to go watch the video again.