Do you want to make your own music? Have you ever wondered how to make musical instruments? It really isn’t that hard when you know how to do it, but all too often when we try to do an online search for such things, we come across a plethora of websites showing how to make them for young children.

I’m not sure about you, but I’d get really fed up trying to figure out how to make, say, a saxophone out of bamboo, and I’d end up finding sites on how to make a kazoo out of a toilet paper roll. I’m sorry, but that’s not going to be enough for me.

Or looking for a place to make a guitar and finding thousands wrapping rubber bands around a shoebox, I mean, can you imagine playing a nightclub gig in one of those things? How about with paper cup rattles and oatmeal box drums? The time has come for a change in all this…

See, to make your own music, there are just a few things you need to know to make quality instruments, and I’m not just talking about kids. To make musical instruments, that is, proper instruments that you can actually craft and play with pride, requires a bit of math. One of the most important parts of mathematics that can be applied to almost any type of instrument is figuring out what the wavelength of a particular note is in inches or centimeters. With these data, you can start to make your own musical instruments perfectly.

It is a very simple formula; first you need to know the linear distance sound travels, at sea level, at about 70 degrees F (or about 21 degrees C), in one second… which is 13526.5 inches (or 34357.31 centimeters) – now take this number and divide it by the number of Hertz at a given frequency, and there you have it. For example, the frequency of the note “A” is 440 Hertz…so, using the formula above, we can know that the actual length of the wavelength for “A” is 30.742 inches, or 30 and 3/ 34 inches in length (or, 70.08 centimeters). With this data, you can start making musical instruments with precision.

That particular formula above can be useful, for example, for making flutes. That resulting length, when divided by two, will give us the length of the body of an open flute with “A” being the root note (the lowest note played with all holes closed) in this particular case, making this flute example comes with a length of about 15 3/8 inches long.

There are also other factors involved that can change this slightly, such as hole width to length ratios and such, and also finding fingering hole locations. The above formula and others can also be used for other types of instruments to create your own music with, including some tubular percussion ensembles, basically anything that uses a closed column of air to make notes with.

Learn this and other online rules and formulas for making real instruments, and then you’ll be able to make musical instruments worthy of playing proudly at a jam session. Look online for math formulas like this.