Diego Stocco in an accomplished musician, sound designer and crazy instrument experimenter. He’s managed to combine parts of a piano and parts of an electric bass into a fantastic DIY instrument that he calls the Bassoforte.

He used the neck of a broken bass, a cabinet handle for the bridge and the pickups from a guitar. The big metal part on the end is a chiminey cap (!), which works as a resonator and is also used as a percussive sound.

Diego says:

A few days ago I started thinking about how I could re-purpose the keyboard of the dismantled piano I keep in the garden, so I thought to build a new instrument by combining it with some other parts I had laying around.

Nice. How many people have a old piano laying around their garden?

The neck is slightly tilted, so the keys are pressed, he can fret all four strings at the same time. The problem is that piano keys are not perfectly perpendicular, which results in tuning that is a bit imprecise. The upside of this is that he can use the piano keys to generate microtones.

Diego goes on to describe the inspiration for the Bassoforte:

The track I created is a tribute to my Dad who is a big fan of Western comic books and “spaghetti western” films, and because of him I am too.

Video of the bassoforte below:

• The talking piano
• Swizzle stick thumb piano
• Electronic, pitch bending, thumb piano
• The Piano Table