iN VIDEO: Penticton man turns scrap into music one piece at a time

An old door left to rot in an alleyway, a once-loved skateboard that has since been abandoned or an old cookie tin at the back of your cupboard might seem like things that have outlived their purpose, but a Penticton musician doesn’t see them that way.

Dan Lybarger is a musician and an award-winning photographer, but turning weird things into working, playable instruments is something he enjoys.

“It’s exciting. It makes me want to get up in the morning,” he told iNFOnews.ca.

“I’ve been doing it for 28 years, and having a lot of fun doing it, finding things in my kitchen and at yard sales and down back alleys, and actually making instruments that are playable out of something that was thrown away.”

Lybarger said he’s made 34 different types of instruments.

You name it and there’s a good chance Lybarger has made an instrument out of it.

Beer cans, skateboards, tennis rackets, cutting boards and gourds make great string instruments once he’s done with them. He said an old cedar plant pot makes a great drum and PVC pipe easily becomes a flute.

One of Lybarger’s tennis racket guitars was featured by tennis player Noëlly Nsimba on Quebec’s singing competition show La Voix. Pros come around to try out his guitars like Brian Russell who played lead guitar for Anne Murray.

Lybarger started building instruments 28 years ago in an RV park in Arizona when his group of friends started making cigar box guitars.

“We would find an old cigar box at a yard sale, and we’d find a stick of wood and attach it to the cigar box. And it was awful. And it was just the worst possible thing that you could play,” he said. “But we persisted and got better at it.”

He sells his creations and some of them end up on stage in the hands of musicians who love their unique sound like his cookie tin lap guitars.

He sold his first cookie tin lap guitar to a friend who was keen on the idea when they saw Lybarger building it.

“Now that I’m looking for things, I find this cookie tin. So I get really excited when I see something like that. I tap on it, and it’s got good resonance,” he said. “I didn’t put frets on it, so you had to play it with a steel. So it was a slide steel. It was like a Hawaiian lap steel guitar. But it sounded like a banjo.”

The projects are a combination of his craftiness, passion for music and desire to clean the world up one piece at a time.

“I’m saving the world, the earth, from having so much garbage. I walk down back alleys, and I’ll find a door, and I’ll bring it home, and I’ll make an instrument out of it,” he said.

He said sometimes he gets totally consumed by a project.

“One day I had a project, and I went out before breakfast about 6 o’clock… suddenly it’s 8 o’clock at night, and I’ve been working for 14 hours. I’m still not tired because it’s so exciting. I said to myself, ‘you know what? I should probably go in and talk to my wife.’”

He hopes that people will take some inspiration from his upcoming Brown Bag lecture at the Penticton Museum, Feb. 10.

“Maybe they’ll build new instruments,” he said. “It’s fun. And I’ve had 28 years of fun building 387 instruments.”