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Music is the greatest communication in the world. Even if people don’t understand the language that you’re singing in, they still know good music when they hear it. ~ Lou Rawls Finding new music, incorporating the best of that into your repertoire, is not only fun, it's stretching your boundaries. We ran across this post on Facebook and not only did it have some fun, unique instruments, it threw in some oddities like the smoke. Throw in some weirdly painted props and there you have it something that will not only tickle the ears but be visually stimulating. Oh, and...

I was born with music inside me. Music was one of my parts. Like my ribs, my kidneys, my liver, my heart. Like my blood. It was a force already within me when I arrived on the scene. It was a necessity for me – like food or water. ~ Ray Charles When I was returning to music after a 30-year hiatus, I used the Community Band and Orchestra Contact list to identify the many, many community bands in the Seattle and surrounding area. Most of the community bands at the time had either no Web presence, or a limited Web page that...

The Story Since the beginning of Quinn the Eskimo, certainly well before breaking into the new band instrument market, we have dealt with vintage instruments. On a quest for world domination, “Supreme Commander” Matt Stoecker has scoured the country in whatever form he could, trying to unearth the most intriguing band instruments in the world, or simply those that had died long ago, but had the potential to be something more after being passed on to either myself, or our senior tech, Brad Wherry. As such, many of the instruments we get into our shop are not what might be considered...

This striking Pan American “Violin Finish” clarinet (made by Conn) was mistakenly described on eBay as made from pear wood. It is more commonly known as a propeller wood clarinet. This particular instrument was dirt cheap and at this point unplayable without an overhaul. This instrument was an ingenious solution by Conn to the scarcity of Grenadilla wood during the Second World War. Unsubstantiated sources say the same wood was used in the manufacture of WWII B24 Liberator Bomber Propellers’, hence the nick name; “Propeller wood clarinet”. That has since be debunked. They came in plastic or Cocobolo plywood. Bill Hausmann says...

Meet my little friend, the Keilwerth Toneking 3000 Jazzophone. We love finding unique and playable vintage music instruments This was our write-up:. “This is an EXTREMELY RARE Keilwerth Toneking 3000 Jazzophone. The jazzophone is a bit of an odd duck-it’s a trumpet but is wrapped like a saxophone. Looks really funky and cool and sounds great, though you can’t use mutes with it. In over 10 years of dealing in vintage instruments I’ve never seen another one of these in person.” In a recent email Gerhard Julius Keilwerth sa7s of this instrument: “Schreiber & Keilwerth redirected your questions about the...