Honestly I'll take instruments constructed very cheaply out of modern materials too.
So I have this love for the Cigar Box Guitar, and it's been expanding in the last few years to include the home built anything.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qRNC5k9s09E For anyone who's curious what a cigar box guitar is, this is a video in which a guy actually has a transparent one! You can see what the innards look like and everything. The idea in general though is that the Cigar Box Guitar was a depression era American instrument that was made by folks cuz we were too broke to make whole guitars. Consisting of a stick, a cigar box, and some strings. Folks have really put a science to it, but the idea of making them out of whatever remains and I think that's super cool.
The Cigar Box Guitar is sort of a tradition, and is real big in bluegrass and blues sounds. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zf2b4akr170 Here's a guy with a cigar box banjo that's made of an old tambourine and a cigar box. And to further expand the idea of the home built instrument here's this guy who will play a contrabass garden hose for my next example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Iu60MwpMiow
I think it's a really liberating idea to be playing an instrument that's unconventional by design. It's hard for someone to really tell you you're "Doing it wrong" when your instrument is unique, you know? I also think it's neat to be exploring instruments from other places or cultures and I've been looking into just that idea for a hot minute. Which gets me to the thing I wanted to talk about actually.
Yo y'all ever heard a shamisen? If you're a weeb you bet you have. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wTUemZP-0RE Here's a hot Naruto cover with some shamisen in there for context. So on my Cigar Box Guitar journey I've been dabbling with the idea of instead making a Cigar Box Shamisen. I've been looking into the general shape and design of a shamisen and it seems to share a lot of ideas with the western banjo.
The big sticking point for making your own was until this afternoon the stretched hide drum head. It's glued on in a unique way, and requires a lot of fussin. I'd considered maybe making a frame and subframe to hold something taught, like a banjo! I'm not afraid of gettin' wild with a design or defying convention (I linked a man playing a garden hose.) but that sort of went out the window today when I learned a new name. "Gottan"!
https://takaramon.com/products/traditional-new-wood-sanshin-shamisen-sangen-okinawa-ryukyu It turns out post-war Japan had the same sort of bad economic fuckery as depression era US, and they came to the same conclusion. "Let's just make an easier instrument with what we have!" Replacing the stretched and glued skin on the front with a wooden surface and resonator chamber.
Anyway if you've read this far I just think this is a super cool example of all the folks on earth bein' funky little dudes. Somewhere up in like, an alien version of cohost there's probably some guy writing a post about us where maybe he's observed the same thing and he's gotta' just be all: "Man, these humans are so funny. You give any group of them some string and eventually they'll figure out a way to twang it." Anyway, this has been a ramble, so on the way out enjoy this fun jazzy Shamisen music https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xPe4fdhp0Sg
And remember. The first version of anything was just something some guy made up. Get out there and make something neat!