I was changing the toilet roll in the bathroom the other morning when I inexplicably thought about how toilet rolls were in the 1950s.

Yes, I’m that old.

Anyway, I thought about the old Izal toilet rolls. 

They were a bit like tracing paper. In fact, we sometimes used them as such. They were hard and very scratchy. Horrid.

‘What has this to do with music?’ I hear you ask.

Well, while it was not good for its original purpose, it was brilliant to use with a comb to make a paper and comb musical instrument.

For those who don’t know about this, you wrapped the paper loosely around the teeth of the comb and made a buzzing sound with your lips. This made the paper vibrate and make a sound. By altering the pitch, you could play a tune.

We used to take a piece of broad-leaved grass, hold it vertically between our thumbs. Blowing our thumbs made a sound. 

Admittedly, not a nice one!

Paper straws could also be made into a kind of noise-producing item. Cut the end of the straw so it made an inverted V shape and blow. This didn’t last long, though, as the end got wet and stopped working. Pitch could be varied by the length of the straw. A group could play a simple tune. (Theoretically!)

Blowing across the end of bottles was a good noise-maker, too. If you got different sized bottles, you could make different notes.

We also made noises by cupping our hands together and blowing between our thumbs. But raising the fingers of the top hand, we made different notes. Favourite was a cuckoo’s call.

Tapping a pencil on your teeth and moving your mouth would also change the pitch of the tap, and you could ‘play’ a tune.

The last one I remember took some organising.

You took a wine glass (your mother’s best worked well) and added a little water. You dipped your finger in to make it damp, then ran it gently around the rim. It made a ringing sound. 

If you added different amounts of water to several glasses, you could, with a lot of trial and error, get a scale, thus play a simple tune.

Admittedly, some of these can hardly be described as music, but still…

Did you do any of these things? Do you know of any other things we did in childhood to make sounds? Let us know in the comments.

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