Make Your Own Music Table

What kid doesn't like making noise?

Give a kids a couple old instruments and noise can be turned into music! If you don't have instruments, old kitchen utensils are just as good! With this in mind, we set out to make a music table for our son.

Collecting 'Instruments'

As a family of non-musical crafters, we have more construction materials than musical instruments lying around, so we decided to use unconventional things to make music.

We looked around the house and found Christmas bells, jingly bracelets, empty tins, a bamboo trivet and a copper pipe — stuff that looks like junk, but sounds great! Then my husband discovered a real treasure: a broken cymbal!

You may not have a cymbal, but you probably have a pot lid. You may also be the owner of an old toy xylophone or a drum, wind chime or a cookie tin. Any of these things would come in handy for this project!

Once we collected our “musical instruments,” it was time to make a base.

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Making The Table

For the table top, we cut a square out of a piece of plywood (50 x 50 cm).

Most of the instruments needed to be elevated to ensure proper vibration, so we glued some scraps of wood on top of the plywood. Two rectangular pieces provide the base for the xylophone, while a block with a wooden spindle on top holds the cymbal in place.

At the edge of the table, an arch made from two spindles with a dowel in between holds the bells and the bangles.

Before attaching anything else, we painted the wood and the tins white. You can use whatever paint is available: spray paint (which is what we used on the tins), wall paint (which is what we used on the table, because it provided a better coverage) or acrylic paint. Kids may want to help painting the table!

The tins were the easiest to attach to the table. We used hot glue to keep them in place.

We didn't trouble much with the cymbal either. It sat nicely on a wooden spindle, secured with a wooden cap on top.

Making The Xylophone

To make the xylophone, we cut 5 pieces of 1/2” copper pipe, ranging from 17 to 21 cm (you can find accurate lengths for a properly tuned copper pipe xylophone online).

We marked suspension holes and drilled them 22 per cent of the total length from each end of the pipe, then strung them up inside the wooden frame with strong nylon cord and bits of drinking straw cut as spacers. (It sounds so good that we will have to make a properly tuned, full-sized version in a few years!)

We attached the trivet to the side of a xylophone with hot glue.

Finally, we added the little metal bangles and jingling Christmas ornaments to the dowel, between two spindles.

All the musical instruments were in place, but we needed something to play them with! A couple of extra dowels were perfect (a pair of wooden spoons would work too).

And how did our little one like the music table? The cymbal and the xylophone were the biggest success, but the impromptu drums got a fair bit of attention as well.

Daddy couldn't help but join the fun and I had the pleasure of watching the first-ever performance of The Daddy & Son Band.