The musical instrument that I created is a thumb piano, or a Kalimba. This homemade instrument is made out of half a shoe box and popsicle sticks hot glued to the top. At first I wanted to be able to tune the instrument but due to the popsicle sticks not being flexible enough and possible because of how thick they are, it became to complicated and I had to simply glue them on at different lengths. It also became hard to tune them in any way because when plucked the note shown on the tuner wasn't consistent enough to say that that was the note. or pitch, being played. So there is a noticeable change in tone on each stick when plucked, but it isn't tuned to any specific note.
After watching multiple tutorials on how to make this instrument i finally decided to follow one and do the best that I could with the materials that I had. Most people would make their thumb pianos out wood for a base and small pieces of metal from an old rake and tune them to specific notes, there were some people who had also used popsicle sticks, which are the ones that i paid attention to the most because I knew that they were what I wanted to use. This project at first seemed like it would be difficult, but once I knew what I wanted to make and what materials I wanted to use, it became pretty simple to do. I do think that there could have been some changes made to how I prepared the box before gluing on the popsicle sticks in order to give it a better sound and possibly more volume when played.
