Junkyard Jam Band

Part I

Quick Projects and Tinkering

When you were small and someone showed you a musical instrument, you didn’t say, “Rad! How do I play an augmented ninth on this thing?” You touched it with your hands, eager to make the instrument make noise (probably despite brittle warnings of “Be gentle—this is expensive!”). Once you figured out how to get noise out of the thing, your next question wasn’t about that augmented ninth, either. In all likelihood, you didn’t have a next question. You found a way to make noise, and then you started feeling your way toward making a different noise so that you could make patterns you liked out of those noises. You used your hands and ears and breath to explore the instrument and thus used the instrument to explore ...