Question Of The Week: What Gadgets And Improvisations Do You Use?

My brother sometimes uses an iPad to display his music. My Dad has a small piece of steel rod that he uses as a partial capo (see picture below). I've seen credit cards and milk jugs (at least small pieces of milk jugs) used as picks.

A small piece of steel rod underneath the middle and bass strings acts as a partial capo at fret one. My real capo is clamped to the head to keep it out of the way.

And now for my question... What gadgets and improvisations have you seen or used? Do you use rubber bands to stop vibrations, post it notes for position dots, paper clips or toothpicks for extra frets, or anything else just for fun?

Your Answers

Last week I asked if any of you had any non-musical gadgets or tricks that you use in your music making. Here are your replies!

Name: Jan P.
Location: Lexington, KY
"if you want to practice strumming without bothering either people or cats, look for a pack of Post-it flags (the kind that are gummed at one end). Break the pack in half or thirds (depending on how stiff you want it to be). Then hold it near the gummed end and strum away! You can strum as vigorously as you want with those and you can hear what you're playing, but nobody else can! This is great for playing late at night or in crowded quarters, or if you're living some place with paper-thin walls."

Name: Chuck L.
Location: Huntington Beach, CA
"Gadgets? Sometimes I will weave a piece of wax paper or fabric thru the strings at the bridge to get special effects when playing...and while not a gadget, back-in-the-day (before Snark et. al.) I made this bamboo tuning fork case...on one end is a carved wooden plug and on the other is a wine bottle cork. Since all the pieces are soft and round it is less likely to damage an instrument rolling around in the instrument case...but the best part about using a tuning fork is that it forced me to actually listen to the tone, not simply hear and wait for the tuner to tell me what is correct."

Name: Steve Ash
Location: Woodburn, IN
"When I asked this question last week, I had given a couple of examples. One more that we see pretty regularly is folks using either a piece of leather or yarn on the short pieces of string between nut and machine heads or between bridge and tail to reduce sympathetic vibrations. The same technique also works on hammered dulcimers to reduce sustain.

Another "fix" is that when a dulcimer player goes from 4 strings to 3 strings, sometimes the unused machine head can get a tiny rattle. Just wrapping a rubber band around the machine head fixes the issue (Thanks Bing)"

This is a picture of Bing Futch's original doubleneck. He used a rubberband on the first machine head when he played 3 string.