I recently came across these strange and beautiful hand-made musical instruments on Etsy. I find it inspiring that all those people are putting their time and talent into such creative ways of making new sounds. And so I was inspired to make my own and here it is, dubbed the TiN-0-SiZeR.

The body is a sweet tin left over after Christmas. The most important step was to spray it black, without which it simply wouldn’t be hovercraft music. I drilled holes in the lid and fixed longish bolts in them so I could stretch the springs between them. Lastly I glued a piezo-electric transducer under the lid and connected it to a 1/4″ jack.

The instrument produces a good sound level and can be connected directly to a mixer input. There are lots of ways of playing it: you can hit the body or the springs by hand or with chopsticks, you can pluck or scrape the springs, but my favourite is to bow them using an ordinary cheap violin bow – but don’t use your best bow because the springs do a lot of damage to it. Finally, it sounds a bit like this (with some added delay and reverb):