You've mastered the recorder. Now what? Here's what Daniel wrote to us.
Gentlemen. We discussed before how one could master the flute to cultivate an impression of medieval eccentricity during a visit to the in-laws — and Herman did a masterful job outlining the whole gambit. But perhaps the flute was aiming too low. It is, after all, fairly well known and commonplace. If the objective is maximum eccentricity, we should have gone much more obscure. In a world where everybody picks up the guitar at some point, what are five less conventional, weird, eccentric, even bizarre instruments one can begin playing? Give me your top five countdown of options that are strange and downright odd — but also either possible to acquire or manufacture.
I love this. Daniel's basically saying the flute was the gateway drug and now he wants the hard stuff.
The flute was the training wheels. Now he wants a unicycle made of tentacles.
And I appreciate the compliment buried in there, but he's right. The flute is a known quantity. You pull out a flute at a dinner party and people nod politely. They might even say "oh, my niece played flute in middle school." That's the problem. You're not exotic — you're a school band flashback. You pull out something nobody's ever seen and suddenly you're not a guest — you're an event.
Right. The flute has been culturally processed. Everyone has a category for it. The moment someone sees a flute case, their brain files you under "person who plays flute" and moves on. What Daniel's really asking for is an instrument that short-circuits the filing system entirely.
No pre-existing category. No "oh, my uncle plays one of those." Just pure, unfiltered bewilderment.
So today we're ranking five instruments that are strange, possible to get or build, and engineered for one thing — making your next family dinner unforgettable.
And we're not just listing weird instruments. We've got three criteria. First, the instrument has to be weird enough to signal genuine eccentricity — not just unusual, but the kind of thing that makes people stop mid-sentence and ask what exactly they're looking at. Second, it has to be acquirable without a million-dollar budget or a physics degree. Third, it has to be playable enough that you can produce recognizable music within about a month of practice.
Because the goal here isn't musical virtuosity. This is social theater. The instrument is a prop as much as a tool for sound. You're not trying to win a Grammy. You're trying to change the energy of a room. You want your mother-in-law to still be talking about it at Thanksgiving three years later.
The performance is the point. And the beautiful thing about weird instruments is that mistakes don't read as mistakes — they read as the instrument being mysterious. If you hit a wrong note on a guitar, everyone knows. If you produce an unearthly wail on something nobody's ever heard, that might just be what it's supposed to sound like.
The weirdness is a shield. It's like cooking an obscure regional dish — if it tastes strange, nobody can tell you it's wrong because they have no reference point. You could serve a burnt casserole and get complaints. You serve a traditional Icelandic fermented shark dish and suddenly everyone's just impressed you know what that is.
That's the perfect analogy. The obscurity provides immunity from judgment. And honestly, that's liberating. You can be genuinely terrible at the waterphone and still come across as fascinating. Try being terrible at the piano and see how that goes.
You'll clear the room. Alright, let's get into the countdown. We're going from number five — the most normal of the weird — to number one, the most bizarre. Herman, take us to number five.
Number five is the hurdy-gurdy. And I want to be clear — this is the most normal on this list, but it's still deeply strange to anyone who hasn't seen one. The mechanism is this: you've got a hand-cranked wheel that rubs against strings, like a violin bow that never stops. While you're cranking with one hand, your other hand presses keys that stop the strings at different points to change the pitch. The result is this continuous, droning, medieval sound — hypnotic, instantly recognizable as old-timey weird.
So it's a mechanical violin that you operate like a pepper grinder.
That's... not inaccurate. The crank is the whole visual hook. You're sitting there turning a handle while your fingers dance on these wooden keys, and the drone just fills the room. It looks like you're operating some kind of ancient machinery. And I want to paint the full picture here — a hurdy-gurdy isn't small. It's about the size of a large loaf of bread, often made of dark wood with ornate carvings. Some models have a small carved head at the top of the pegbox. You're not tucking this under your chin like a violin. It sits on your lap like a small piece of furniture.
So you walk in with what looks like a wooden artifact from a Renaissance fair, sit down, and start cranking.
And the sound hits immediately. That continuous drone — it's almost bagpipe-like in how it fills the space. But unlike bagpipes, which announce themselves aggressively, the hurdy-gurdy has this hypnotic, trance-inducing quality. It's the sound of a medieval tavern, of minstrels in a great hall. You can play dance tunes, you can play mournful airs. It's versatile within its very specific aesthetic lane.
And what does it cost to become the proud owner of a mechanical violin pepper grinder?
Beginner models from luthiers like GurdyWorld run about eight hundred to fifteen hundred dollars. If you're handy, there are kits from MusicMakers and GurdyWorld starting around four hundred. It's not cheap, but for a committed hobbyist it's within reach. And here's the thing — the hurdy-gurdy has modern credibility. Folk metal bands like Eluveitie use it. There are hurdy-gurdy covers of modern pop songs on YouTube with millions of views. This isn't just a museum piece. You can crank out something that sounds like it belongs in a mead hall, or you can play a haunting version of a Taylor Swift song and watch people's brains melt.
Wait, Eluveitie — that's the Swiss folk metal band, right? With the growling and the flutes and the whole pagan battle aesthetic?
That's them. And their hurdy-gurdy player, Anna Murphy — now Michalina Malisz, actually, she took over — she's absolutely shredding on this thing while the band thunders around her. It's not a novelty. It's a legitimate lead instrument in a metal context. So when you show up with a hurdy-gurdy, you're not just a medieval reenactor. You can credibly say "this is a metal instrument" and watch the confusion deepen.
So the deployment strategy is show up, start cranking slowly while making eye contact, and launch into a droning folk tune.
The eye contact is crucial. You don't look away. You're not performing for them — they're witnessing something. The visual of the crank and keys is inherently theatrical. You look like a medieval street performer who somehow got invited to dinner. And here's a fun detail — many hurdy-gurdies have what's called a "dog" or a "trompette" string. It's a drone string that rides on a loose bridge, and when you give the crank a sharp acceleration, that bridge vibrates against the soundboard and produces this rhythmic buzzing sound. It's percussion built into the instrument. So you can be playing a melody and suddenly the instrument is buzzing like an angry insect, and nobody knows how you're doing it.
You're telling me there's a technique called "making the dog bark" and it's a legitimate musical effect?
That's exactly what it's called. The coup de quatre — four quick cranks that make the trompette string buzz. It's a signature hurdy-gurdy technique and it sounds completely alien to modern ears. You throw that into a performance and you've gone from "interesting instrument" to "what sorcery is this."
And the learning curve?
Manageable. The coordination between cranking and keying takes practice, but it's easier than learning violin. The drone does a lot of the atmospheric heavy lifting for you. You can be playing simple melodies within a few weeks. The trompette stuff takes longer, but for basic social disruption, you don't need it. Just the crank and the keys will get you there.
Alright. From the crank-driven medieval drone, let's move to something that looks like it fell out of a Viking ship. Number four.
The nyckelharpa. This is a Swedish keyed fiddle, and it might be the most visually baffling instrument on this list. Picture a violin that had some kind of encounter with a wooden spaceship. It's got a long rectangular body, and along the neck there's a row of keys. When you press a key, it pushes a tangent against the string — same basic idea as a hurdy-gurdy but you're bowing it instead of cranking. The sound is this haunting cross between a violin and a hurdy-gurdy, but the look is what sells it. Most people have never seen anything like it.
A violin crossed with a typewriter.
A haunted typewriter, yes. And the sound is beautiful in a way that catches people off guard. You expect something this strange-looking to sound harsh, but it's warm and resonant. Play a Swedish polska at the dinner table and watch the room go quiet. The nyckelharpa has this incredible resonance because it typically has sympathetic strings — strings that run underneath the main strings, never touched directly, but they vibrate in sympathy when you play. It creates this shimmering halo of sound around every note.
So it's got built-in reverb, essentially.
Natural reverb, exactly. And that's what gives it that haunting, cathedral-like quality. You're playing in a living room and it sounds like you're in a stone church from the fourteenth century. It's an instrument that makes any space feel sacred.
But how do you even find one? I've never seen a nyckelharpa in a music store.
You won't. This is not a Guitar Center instrument. Swedish luthiers like Ålins and Hedlund sell them for fifteen hundred to three thousand dollars. But here's the good news — used models show up on forums like Nyckelharpa dot org for under a thousand. Kits are rare but they exist. The community is small and passionate, which means if you're serious about it, people will help you. There's actually an annual nyckelharpa gathering in Sweden where players from around the world converge. It's a whole subculture.
So you're buying into a secret society of Swedish keyed-fiddle enthusiasts.
That's a feature, not a bug. You don't just show up with a weird instrument — you show up with lore. When someone asks what it is, you get to say the word nyckelharpa and watch them try to process it. And then you get to explain that it dates back to at least the fourteenth century, that there are medieval church frescoes in Sweden depicting people playing them, that it nearly went extinct in the early twentieth century before a revival movement saved it. You're not just a musician — you're a historical preservationist.
The name alone is worth at least thirty seconds of stunned silence. "Nyckelharpa." It sounds like something you'd find in an IKEA instruction manual for a portal to another dimension.
And that's the metric we're optimizing for. How many seconds of baffled staring does this instrument buy you before you even play a note. The nyckelharpa is a solid forty-five seconds. People will circle it. They'll point at the keys. They'll ask if you built it yourself. It's a conversation piece before it's even a musical instrument.
Alright. Now we go from touched to untouched. Number three.
The theremin. And this is where we cross into genuine sci-fi territory. The theremin is played without touching anything. It's got two antennas — one controls pitch, one controls volume — and they sense the position of your hands through capacitance. You move your hands in the air and sound emerges. It's the instrument behind every classic sci-fi movie effect, the Beach Boys' Good Vibrations, old horror film scores. That wavering, ethereal tone is the theremin.
So you're a wizard now. You wave your hands and music happens.
That's exactly what it looks like. Set it up on the coffee table, wave your hands like a mad conductor, and play Somewhere Over the Rainbow with wobbly, haunting pitch. The lack of physical contact is what makes it so unsettling. There's no string, no key, no crank — just empty air and sound. It looks like magic or madness. And here's what's fascinating — the theremin was invented in 1920 by a Russian physicist named Leon Theremin, and it was originally marketed as a serious classical instrument. Lenin himself took lessons. The Soviet government saw it as a symbol of technological progress.
Lenin played the theremin?
He took a few lessons, reportedly. There's a famous story that Theremin demonstrated it for Lenin, and Lenin was so impressed he asked to try it himself. The instrument that became the sound of 1950s B-movie aliens was briefly a Soviet propaganda tool. That's the kind of backstory you get to deploy at the dinner table.
So it's not just a weird instrument — it's a weird instrument with communist credentials. That's a conversation layer right there.
And the price is surprisingly reasonable.
Very accessible. An entry-level Moog Theremini runs about three to four hundred dollars. DIY kits from Theremin World are around a hundred. This is one of the cheapest entries on the list, and it's also one of the most visually striking.
But you said the learning curve is steep.
Notoriously steep. There's no tactile feedback — you're finding pitches in empty space. It requires extremely precise hand control. Clara Rockmore, the great theremin virtuoso, showed it can be played with real classical precision, but she was exceptional. She developed a whole technique involving specific finger positions, almost like a sign language for pitch. Most people who try the theremin sound like a drunk ghost for the first several weeks. For our purposes, the wobbliness is the point. You're not aiming for perfection. You're aiming for haunting.
The mistakes are the aesthetic.
A wobbly theremin sounds like a ghost trying to remember a song. That's a feature. And the visual of you standing there with your hands hovering in the air, brows furrowed in concentration, producing these eerie wails — it's pure performance art. Even if you never hit a clean note, people will be mesmerized.
If the theremin is sci-fi, number two is horror. Take us there.
The waterphone. This thing looks like a musical weapon from an alien civilization. It's a stainless steel resonator bowl with bronze rods of different lengths sticking out around the rim. You fill the bowl with water, and then you bow or strike the rods. The water inside shifts and bends the resonance, producing this ethereal, eerie, completely alien sound — like a whale singing in a haunted house.
I've seen these. They look like someone weaponized a salad bowl.
They look like a UFO that crash-landed in an orchestra pit. And the sound is impossible to ignore. Horror film composers love it — it's all over scores like The Grudge from two thousand four, The Matrix, even some of the Star Trek films. You bow a rod gently and the whole room fills with these ghostly, shimmering harmonics that seem to come from everywhere at once. The water inside moves as you tilt the instrument, so the pitch bends and warps. You can create these long, keening glissandos that sound like nothing else on earth.
So it's not just that it sounds weird. It sounds actively unsettling.
Profoundly unsettling. It triggers something primal. I think it's because the sounds it makes are similar to whale songs or certain bird calls — it's almost biological. Your brain can't categorize it as music or noise. It sits in this uncanny valley of sound. And that's what makes it so powerful in a social setting. You play a waterphone and the room doesn't just go quiet — the room gets nervous, in a good way. People lean forward. They want to know what's happening.
And you can build one yourself.
Handmade waterphones from artisans like Richard Waters — the original inventor — or Brook Taylor run four hundred to twelve hundred dollars. But the DIY route is viable. A stainless steel bowl, some threaded bronze rods, and water. Plans are available online, and you can build one for under a hundred dollars in materials. You need some basic workshop skills, but it's not complicated. The rods are tuned by length, and you can experiment with different rod materials for different timbres. Bronze is traditional, but some builders use aluminum or even glass rods.
So the deployment is fill it with water at the in-laws' house, bow it gently, and let the room fill with ghost noises.
The visual alone is worth the price of admission. You're holding this metallic, spiky object, pouring water into it at the dinner table, and then drawing a bow across it while unearthly sounds emerge. It's impossible to categorize and impossible to ignore. Your father-in-law will have no frame of reference. That's the goal. He might try to make a joke about it, but he won't know how. What's the joke? "Nice spiky bowl, son"? There's no cultural script for the waterphone.
The waterphone doesn't just change the room's energy. It creates a new room.
That's beautifully — that's exactly right. It's not background music. It's an environmental event. The waterphone changes the physics of the social space. Suddenly everyone's in a horror film, and you're the composer. You're not entertaining them — you're scoring their experience in real time.
Alright. And now, number one. The most bizarre of them all.
The hydraulophone. This is an instrument that plays water. Literally. It was invented by Steve Mann at the University of Toronto, and the mechanism is this: you've got a series of water jets, each corresponding to a note. You block a jet with your finger, and the water flow changes the pitch. It sounds like a watery, bubbling flute — like music being played by a fountain. You are literally playing water.
You're a musical sprinkler.
A musical sprinkler with a PhD. Custom-built hydraulophones from Mann's lab run five thousand dollars and up. But again — DIY is the path. PVC pipes, a water pump, a series of nozzles. Plans are online, and you can build one for under two hundred dollars in materials. It needs water and power, so it's an outdoor instrument. Set it up on the patio. And here's the thing — the hydraulophone isn't just a novelty. Mann is a serious researcher. He's written papers on the hydraulophone as an accessibility instrument, because the water jets provide tactile feedback. Visually impaired musicians can play it by feel. It's a real instrument with real academic backing.
If anyone questions whether it's a legitimate instrument, you can cite the academic literature.
You can say "actually, this is a recognized musical interface from the University of Toronto's Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering" and watch them retreat. That's power.
The deployment is play Happy Birthday with water jets spraying everywhere.
That's the play. It's messy, it's novel, the sheer absurdity of making music by blocking streams of water — it's peak eccentricity. The Ontario Science Centre has a permanent hydraulophone installation, so this is a real, recognized instrument. But to your in-laws, it will look like you've invented something. They won't know it exists in museums. They'll think you built a water organ in your garage and brought it to their house.
You show up with a PVC contraption, a pump, and a hose, and you announce that you'll be providing the evening's entertainment via water.
The setup is part of the performance. You're assembling this thing on their patio while they watch, and they have no idea what's happening until water starts spraying and music comes out. The mess is a feature. You're not just playing an instrument — you're staging an installation. And here's a practical tip — do a test run at home first. You need to know how the pump behaves, how much water pressure you're working with, whether your nozzles are adjusted correctly. You don't want to debut a hydraulophone that just dribbles weakly. You want jets. You want drama.
Let's step back and compare all five. We've got an arc here. The hurdy-gurdy is medieval, crank-driven, the most normal weird. The nyckelharpa is Viking-adjacent, keyed, visually baffling. The theremin is sci-fi, touchless, pure performance. The waterphone is horror, aquatic, visually alien. And the hydraulophone is... I don't even know what category that is.
It's its own category. The arc goes from medieval to alien, from mechanical to fluid. And the social payoff increases as you go. The hurdy-gurdy makes you a curiosity. The hydraulophone makes you a legend. If you play the hurdy-gurdy, people will remember you as "the person with that medieval crank thing." If you play the hydraulophone, they'll remember you as "the person who made music with water on our patio." That's a different tier of memory.
How do you choose? Daniel's going to want a practical answer.
Budget and DIY tolerance are your filters. If you want the lowest barrier to entry — three hundred dollars, no building required, plug it in and start waving your hands — go theremin. If you're willing to spend a bit more and want something with more tactile satisfaction and medieval cred, the hurdy-gurdy at eight hundred to fifteen hundred. If you're committed to the bit and have a workshop, the waterphone at under a hundred in materials or the hydraulophone at under two hundred. The nyckelharpa sits in the middle — harder to find, but unforgettable once you've got one.
Let's talk about the persona alignment here, because I think that's what Daniel is really optimizing for. The eccentricity payoff isn't just about sound. It's about visual and story. A theremin looks like magic. A waterphone looks like an artifact from another planet. A hydraulophone looks like you're conducting a fountain. Choose the one that matches the persona you're cultivating.
Right. Are you the mysterious wizard? The medieval crank-turner? The mad inventor with PVC pipes on the lawn? Each instrument tells a different story about who you are. The theremin says "I understand forces you cannot perceive." The hurdy-gurdy says "I remember things your ancestors forgot." The hydraulophone says "I reject the distinction between music and plumbing."
That last one is a very specific energy. That's the energy of someone who brings a homemade water organ to Thanksgiving. That's not just eccentricity — that's a manifesto.
It's a statement about the nature of music itself. You're saying "I believe that water is a legitimate musical medium, and I'm willing to get your patio wet to prove it." That's conviction.
Start practicing now. These all have learning curves. The hurdy-gurdy requires coordinating crank and keys. The theremin requires precise hand control in empty space. The nyckelharpa requires bowing technique plus key coordination. Don't debut at the in-laws' without at least a month of practice. You need to be comfortable enough that the weirdness looks intentional, not accidental.
Although — and this is important — embrace the failure. If you hit a wrong note on a waterphone, it sounds like a ghost moaning. That's still on-brand. If your theremin wobbles, that's the theremin being a theremin. The weirdness covers mistakes in a way that a guitar never will. Nobody knows what these things are supposed to sound like. You could play a waterphone perfectly and someone might still say "is it supposed to sound like that?" You say yes. You say it with confidence.
The goal isn't perfection. It's memorability. You want your mother-in-law to say "remember when Daniel showed up with that... thing?" for years afterward. And she won't remember whether you played it well. She'll remember that you played it at all. She'll remember the water spraying, or the ghostly wailing, or the sight of you waving your hands in the air while unearthly tones emerged from a box.
The beautiful thing is, even if you're terrible, you're still the most interesting person at the gathering. A bad guitarist is just a bad guitarist. A bad waterphone player is a performance artist. The frame is completely different. You've changed the rules of evaluation before anyone had a chance to apply them.
That's the real insight here. Conventional instruments have a success-failure binary. Weird instruments don't. The attempt itself is the content. You're not being judged on musicianship — you're being judged on audacity. And audacity is a much easier standard to meet.
To Daniel's question — the flute was aiming too low. The flute says "I'm cultured." The hydraulophone says "I've transcended your categories." The flute is a pleasant addition to an evening. The waterphone is the evening.
The flute is a conversation starter. The waterphone is a conversation ender, in the best way. Nobody's going to follow that with small talk about the weather. Nobody's going to say "so, how's work?" after you've produced whale songs from a metal bowl full of water. You've fundamentally altered the social trajectory of the gathering.
Alright, let's go on the record. Predictions. I'll go first. Within two years, we're going to see a viral video of someone playing a DIY hydraulophone at a wedding, and it's going to launch a brief but intense internet debate about whether water is a legitimate musical medium.
I'll say within eighteen months, some enterprising maker is going to start selling waterphone kits on Etsy for under two hundred dollars, and they'll sell out immediately. The demand is there — people just don't know these things exist yet. Someone's going to figure out that you can sell a stainless steel bowl, some bronze rods, and an instruction manual as a weekend project, and it's going to be the hot gift for the eccentric in your life.
That's a solid bet. The DIY community around these instruments is small but growing, and the waterphone is the most visually striking thing you can build in an afternoon. It's also the one that photographs best. Instagram is going to discover the waterphone and it's going to have a moment.
What's the weirdest instrument you've ever seen or played? Send us a voice memo. We might feature it in a future episode. If you enjoyed this one, leave a review on your favorite podcast app — it helps other weirdos find us.
This episode was produced by Hilbert Flumingtop. This has been My Weird Prompts. Find us at my weird prompts dot com.
Remember, the goal isn't to play well. It's to be unforgettable. Now go crank something.
