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Oil-can guitars
These are electric guitars made from an engine oil can and a wooden or steel neck. In South Africa guitars have been home-made like this for a long time, based on traditional instruments and the influences of early European settlers.
Afri-Can and Township guitars have taken this idea a step further and now produce fully playable hand crafted instruments. The sound is similar to steel body resonator guitars played by bottleneck wielding blues players, but the Afri-Can is much slicker to play due to a low string action and narrower neck.
Exactly how they are made is a bit of a mystery - there's no back panel for access and the only visible way in to the body is either via a small opening for the neck, or the big red plastic cap which appears never to have been opened, it must be a bit like building a ship in a bottle!
Cahon
There is a number of spellings for this, Wikipedia cites the Spanish word for 'crate, draw or box' as the origin of the name.
It is a simple design: a wooden box made from oak, with an ash front plate, a sound hole in the back and an adjustable snare on the inside. It's played by slapping different parts of the front plate with the palm and fingers to produce high and low hits.
Copyright 2009 Hoopy Frood