The plastic-reels-with-the-pencil-sticking-up-thing was my 'cymbal' stand. The reels were from 8-track tape cartridges. The actual symbol is not shown because I do not know where it is. It was never mine anyway. It was part of my mother's fancy crystal candy and confection dish. I used to borrow the metallic lid to use for recordings because it was the closest thing I had that sounded like a cymbal, even though it sounded nothing like a cymbal. But hey, it was round and remained suspended on the tip of the pencil. So it looked cool.
Those things are from trees that have pods that fall to the ground in the fall or spring or whenever it is. When they're dry the seeds inside are loose and they make a nice shaker sound. I used them as maracas and as snares underneath my 'snare' drum.
This was my tambourine made from little holiday jingle bells. Gave every recording an instant Christmas feel. Hence, I did not overly use it.
Here is my snare drum. Made from an old, red Fannie May (?) candy can. The bottom was cut out and I tried using cardboard, sheets of paper and plastic as the drum head. As you can tell, by the time I last used this thing I had settled on a sheet of plastic as the drum head. I also added those seed pods underneath to give the snare sound. My drum sticks were markers that no longer worked and a couple of paint brushes for that 'jazz brush' sound.
Finally, as far as my percussion instruments go, these were my toms. Just two coffee cans with plastic lids on top. The brown (or dark) one had just the top metal lid removed. The green one had both the top and bottom metal lids cut and were replaced by the plastic lid. This can also doubled as my bass drum. When I wanted to record bass drum parts I would play it with another non-working marker that had a lot of cloth wrapped around it to give a nice deep sound. Had to be recorded separately though. Could not play the snare, toms, cymbal and bass at the same time. Didn't have the proper set up. In my early recordings I didn't even use the bass drum option. It was just snare, toms and cymbal. Later is when I started using the bass in the way described. In the final stages of using this equipment I was just alternating between playing the snare and the bass just to keep it all in one whole track. When you're doing analog recording--and especially with cheap cassettes--quality starts going down very quickly as you add more and more layers of tracks.
So those items are part of my music history. I still have them and want to keep them as a reminder of what I used to do with much of my spare time when I was in school. Maybe they'll end up in a museum someday?
There is some other gear which I no longer have and others which I do. I'll have to post photos of them when I come across them.
