WMSi Electric Rubber Band Instruments

Recently I was working on a lesson plan for electric guitars made out of rubber bands and cardboard.

Now at first that may sound strange, how can you make a guitar out of cardboard?
Well I’ll describe the process I went through.

I started the project by rounding up the materials I guessed that I’d need.
I gathered up cardboard, rubber bands, pencils or popsicle sticks, an aux cord, an amp, alligator clips, and a piezo.

My first prototype was nothing more than a cardboard square with the rubber bands wrapped around it, but unless the rubber bands were lifted up off the cardboard a small amount they weren’t going to make much noise at all.

I added a popsicle stick on each end of the cardboard underneath the strings. Now the rubber band guitar could actually be played and the pencils helped it make a more acoustic sound.

Next I added a piezo to the back of the guitar under the strings. A piezo is a small device that picks up changes in pressure, acceleration, temperature, strain, or force and converts it into an electric signal. In this project I’m using it to pick up the vibrations of the cardboard, but it has many other uses outside of this.

Next I hooked up one alligator clip to each of the piezo’s wires, made sure that they were holding the wires tight so they didn’t come loose later, and attached the other ends of the alligator clips to the aux cord.

Then I hooked up the aux cord to the amplifier and there it was! A working electric guitar made out of cardboard and rubber bands. When the rubber band guitar was strummed the sound would be played through the amplifier!

But that wasn’t the end of it just yet. So far at that point I had only made a rubber band guitar out of a square of cardboard, but what other shapes would work?

I started by taking a square of cardboard and cutting out a large square in one of its sides, then I wrapped the rubber bands around the piece of cardboard so that they went over the hole I cut.
To my surprise the hole in the cardboard didn’t seem to negatively affect the instrument at all!

Next I tested whether other materials would work for the instrument. I used  a piece of wood instead of cardboard for the base and it made the sound much clearer!

I tried using straws and popsicle sticks instead of pencils for the instrument and found that while popsicle sticks and pencils make similar noise quality the straws seem to dampen the noise somewhat, possibly because they’re hollow.

To finish my project I wanted to experiment with how crazy I could make the design of the instrument, as I had previously only made the instruments as simple squares and rectangles, so I tried making more possibly guitar-shaped designs for the cardboard bodies of the instruments.

With that I finished creating the Electric Rubber Band Instruments lesson plan.
I hope you enjoyed reading about my process of experimentation and iteration!