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Judy Garland

How One Man Turns Old Cookie Tins and Cigar Boxes Into Handmade Instruments

To see more of Barry’s photos, check out @great.plains.handmade on Instagram. For more music stories, head to @music.

How do you transition from punk rock to folk music? For Barry Rust (@great.plains.handmade), who builds custom instruments from found objects, it all began in an unremarkable town in central Illinois. “I was in high school and I started listening to punk music from the ‘70s where they were kids who just got a guitar, didn’t really know how to play, but banged out some songs,” he says. “I love that idea, that you don’t have to enter in some sort of course of study before you are allowed to enjoy playing music or being creative.”

Combine that with a childhood surrounded by tools on his family’s farm and, as Barry puts it, growing up “around this potential in everything,” and you’ll end up with Barry’s current gig: transforming old cookie tins, cigar boxes and other objects into handmade banjos, ukuleles and fiddles.

Working out of a studio in Brooklyn, Barry can spend up to 20 hours making a coffee tin into a ukulele — and while the result is certain to be beautiful, he never knows if he’ll totally pull it off. “That first strum is pretty magical,” he says. “It’s hard to know before that if it’s really going to work.”

In the handmade instruments business, Barry balances practical considerations — a box made out of cedar will resonate well, a metal tin will produce a quirky twang — with aesthetic ones. At thrift and antique stores, he finds inspiration from objects that tell their own stories. “The best boxes are the ones that have writing all over them,” he says. “It makes you think about who was it that owned this box, and what they were storing in there.” With a little help from the Internet, Barry was even able to revisit his own childhood. “There was a candy factory that I remember touring when I was in elementary school,” he says. “It was eventually bought by Nestlé and then closed down a few years ago. But I found somebody online who was selling really old tins of those candies from when I grew up. So that was an amazing personal find for me.”

Above all, it’s the connection to real life and real music that keeps Barry motivated. “Folk music — there’s not a lot of artifice around it … you pick up some instruments, and you sit around in a circle and you play.” See? A lot like punk.

Happy New Year :)

Vahdah with a style 3 Ditson ukulele. Circa 1920