Enter the MIMForum, acoustic guitar building, electric guitar making, guitar repair, violin making, dulcimer making
MIMForum Links, Page 2

We link to over 400 pages on acoustic guitar building, electric guitar making, violin making, dulcimer making, mandolin building, and all other types of lutherie; pickup making, winding, and rewinding; flute, recorder, and bagpipe making; brass instrument building and repair; drum making; experimental musical instruments construction and design; as well as pages on woodworking, metalworking, and guitar finishing and refinishing. We list these webpages as a service to folks visiting The Musical Instrument Makers Forum, whom we assume are here because of an interest in building musical instruments. Therefore these links are heavily weighted towards pages that provide information for instrument builders and musicians, with a few non-musical sites we have found useful thrown in for good measure. We do not include commercial sites that are little more than advertisements for a particular product or service but only link to sites that are themselves valuable resources and/or have useful links pages. Note that overseas sites may load slowly, or not at all. We hope you find these pages useful and will e-mail us if you find any broken links or have new links to recommend.

Please DO NOT ask us to link to your website unless it includes significant online instructional resources for instrument builders, and is pop-up free! We're not interested in promoting your website, but in helping our members and visitors find online information about how to build musical instruments. Thanks for stopping by, and if you want to discuss instrument making we hope to see you on our Forum!


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Links Pages Contents
Page 1:
For The Builder

General and Miscellaneous
Strings
     General Lutherie
     Acoustic and Electric Guitars and Bass Guitars
     Other Fretted Instruments
     Non-Fretted Stringed Instruments
Electronics
Woodwinds and Brass
     General Interest
     Flutes, Recorders, and Whistles
     Bagpipes
     Brass and Other Horns
     Reeds and Reed Instruments
Page 2:
Acknowledgements
For The Builder, Continued
Percussion
Keyboards
Woods and Woodworking
Finishing and Refinishing
Tools and Toolmaking
Music and Instrument Links
Specific Instrument Links, alphabetically by instrument type
Other Music and Instrument Links
Other Useful Links


The Musical Instrument Makers Forum gratefully acknowledges the financial support of our sponsors:

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Help support the MIMForum by supporting our sponsors:
For The Builder, Continued
Percussion:
  • Brent Santin's bodhran-making instructions.
  • Jim McGill presents an alternative bodhran rim-making option.
  • Bob Denton's El Cheapo Bodhráns. Make your own out of a garden sifter!
  • Building a Goblet Drum, a step-by-step description of making a pretty large hand-drum from bandsawed sections of 3/4-inch floor underlayment.
  • Chris Bittner's page on Building A Djembe.
  • Two downloadable videos on how to make and tune a djembe. The videos are poor quality, but may be useful to a builder.
  • How to Make a Macedonian Tupan by David Golber
  • Making a simple conga out of plywood.
  • Online Calculator for Stave Shell Drum Construction.
  • Tabla and Baya Re-heading.
  • How to make a Shekere.
  • Handbook for Steel Pan Making and Tuning. This is a complete book, available online as HTML files and in PDF format.
  • Making a set of Double Seconds (pans). Lots of pictures, intended for use with the book above, the site isn't complete yet.
  • Greg Phillips' wind-chime tuning program. Greg now works making electronic mobility aids for the blind and visually impaired. One of our members says, "Chime is a great little program. I've used it to create wind chimes and to test the sounds of various scales. It comes with many different theoretical and historical scales, and it allows you to specify your own tuning based on cents or wholenumber ratios. The output it uses is a chime-like sample through the sound card, but the tuning accuracy is limited by the sound card. You may also output via the PC speaker which is unpleasant but far more accurate. The user interface is a bit quirky, but once you learn how to work around the bugs it's easy to use. It includes a simple calculator that allows you to calculate the theoretical length of a new tube given the length of the first tube and the frequency of the first. It does not work (no sound output) on my new machine with win98 and the soundblaster 128 card: the problem could be caused by either. --Darren Burgess"
  • Le Tambourin A Cordes, also called Tambour du Béarn or String Drum. Page in French with two pictures and a few dimensions. One of our members says the 6 strings are tuned C g C g C g.
Keyboards:
Woods and Woodworking: Finishing and Refinishing: Tools and Toolmaking:
Music and Instrument Links

Specific Instrument Links, alphabetically by instrument type: Other Music and Instrument Links:

Other Useful Links
  • We are proud to say that the MIMForum raised over $20,000 for tsunami and hurricane relief in 2005. In our quest to find organizations worthy of our donations we used Give.org and ChatityNavigator.org, of which the latter was more useful with hurricane relief organizations as it lists more small local charities, and rates them. We donated our money to a variety of charities, and used some of it to fund a trip to New Orleans by a crew of carpenters to help rebuild one home in cooperation with the New Orleans Musicians Clinic. We were able to put the NOMC in touch with Direct Relief International, which then awarded the NOMC a grant to pay the salary for one nurse practitioner. The MIMF/NOMC home rebuilding project received help from The Home Depot in the form of a $3,000 Home Depot Community Impact Grant, for which we thank them.
  • By now we've all learned that we need to practice safe computing, or see our PCs overrun with scumware installed without our permission to spy on us and steal our personal information. CWShredder is still by far the best tool out there to remove Cool Web Search (CWS) if that's your problem. The following programs have all been found to work well by our members, we recommend you run at least two regularly, all three would be better.
    SpyBot Search & Destroy (freeware)
    Ad Aware (freeware)
    Spy Sweeper
  • Stay up-to-date on the latest Viruses and Virus Hoaxes.
  • Tucows, the best site on the net for web-related freeware and shareware.
  • The "Editor's Picks" Shareware page at Ziff Davis. Lots of freeware/shareware you can download from this site, constantly updated, with ratings and information on how many downloads there have been so you can compare the relative value and popularity of similar programs.
  • Your hobby can surprise you by growing into a business almost overnight. Making Money The Old Fashioned Way is a long online article by Joe Martin, founder of Sherline Products, on starting and running a successful business.
  • If you're new to the Web, this excellent HTML Primer will introduce you to writing simple HTML to produce your own web pages.
  • Another Intro to HTML.
  • Special Characters, a list of the escape codes you need for placing special characters in your web pages.
  • Confused about copyright issues? Read Brad Templeton's 10 Big Myths about copyright explained.
  • How to be a Web Whore Just Like Me is not an adult website, but a fascinating, funny, and rather depressing look at what author Philip Greenspun went through in the process of writing and publishing a book about Web publishing. A website you'll want to spend some reading.
  • Want to buy something over the Web but don't know current exchange rates between the ducat and "US dead Presidents" (or whatever)? Try the International Currency Converter.
  • Interested in giving instead of buying? The © PEP National Directory of Computer Recycling Programs is a directory of state, national and international agencies that facilitate donations of used computer hardware for schools and community groups. Keep in mind that the Taxpayer Relief Act of 1997 gives special tax breaks to companies that donate computers less than two years old to schools.
  • PubMed, the National Library of Medicine, with access to online articles from internationally recognized medical and scientific journals.
  • Clock repair has come up a couple of times on the MIMForum. Check out National Association of Watch and Clock Collectors, and S. LaRose, Inc.
  • How far is it? Find out the distance from here to there.
  • The Department of Zoology at the University of Bergen, Norway, has put three books by Charles Darwin online: "The Origin of Species," "The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex," and "The Voyage of the Beagle."
  • SpaceWeather.com. See what's up in space! Includes near-realtime monitoring of solar activity, with reports on sunspots, solar flares, and aurora activity. A must-monitor site for those skywatchers in the mid-northern or mid-southern latitudes where aurora are rare but do occur. Subscribe to get e-mail reports when geomagnetic activity is high and auroras most likely.
  • Sky & Telescope Magazine has a Weekly News Bulletin and Sky at a Glance mailing list (scroll down to the bottom of that page to subscribe). Great for amateur and back-porch star gazers.
  • NASA's Astronomy Picture of the Day. A nice addition to your daily internet routine.
  • Atmospheric Optics is a website devoted to exploring and explaining visual phenomena caused by water droplets and ice crystals in the air, like sun and moon halos, sundogs, and rainbows. There are some wonderful pictures of rare halos and unusual clouds. A very enjoyable site, it will make you more aware of the potential for spotting unusual atmospheric optics in your locale.
  • The Earth At Night, a composit image from space showing the lights of Earth. This popular link has been posted in discussions on the MIMForum several times. Here's the Astronomy Picture of the Day story that goes with it.
  • Hubble Space Telescope Picture Gallery. Go to their wallpaper page to dress up your PC screen.
  • The American Stirling Company is a website devoted to the Stirling engine. This came up in a discussion on the MIMForum about how to make a perpetual motion rain stick out of a hula-hoop, of all things. It's a fascinating website for teachers and anyone with an inquiring mind. Read about How Stirling Engines Work.
  • The totally cool Terra-server site will show you what your portion of the world looks like from a satellite in space!
  • Practical Language Guide for musicians traveling in Finland (scroll down), so you can learn such phrases as "First violins a bit louder, thank you!" in Finnish.
  • The Mojave Phone Booth Website, one individual's entertaining obsession with a phone booth in the middle of the Mojave Desert. Why are we including this link here? Because the "Mr. N." who sparked this lunatic's interest in the Mojave phone booth was none other than Nick von Robison, the late co-founder of the MIMForum.
  • Is Hell exothermic or endothermic?
  • Gary Daum's entertaining webpage on predictions worth remembering.
  • Our members really like these two online miniature golf games, Mini-putt and Mini-putt2.
  • Are you an idiot? Any more than ten seconds with this and you'll have to make your own assessment ;-)


Return to Page 1

Links Pages Contents
Page 1:
For The Builder

General and Miscellaneous
Strings
     General Lutherie
     Acoustic and Electric Guitars and Bass Guitars
     Other Fretted Instruments
     Non-Fretted Stringed Instruments
Electronics
Woodwinds and Brass
     General Interest
     Flutes, Recorders, and Whistles
     Bagpipes
     Brass and Other Horns
     Reeds and Reed Instruments
Page 2:
Acknowledgements
For The Builder, Continued
Percussion
Keyboards
Woods and Woodworking
Finishing and Refinishing
Tools and Toolmaking
Music and Instrument Links
Specific Instrument Links, alphabetically by instrument type
Other Music and Instrument Links
Other Useful Links


Enter the ForumMIMForum BookstoreMIMForum Tool StoreMIMF HomeE-Mail


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