One of the most immediately distinctive features of world music is the incredible range of instrumentation. While other musical genres may use a fairly limited range of standardised instruments, folk styles draw on a vast supply of non-standardised, ad hoc and often home made instruments — some peculiar to a particular region, some even particular to a family or individual musician!
Many are true ‘folk instruments’ in the sense that they developed in an organic way among the common people, and usually don’t have a known inventor, directly paralleling the way that traditional music itself has developed. Folk instruments are easy to construct from locally available materials and often made by the musicians themselves. Each maker/musician modifies the design depending on the sound or appearance they want and the materials to hand. They might also modify the instrument to suit their own body shape or to make it more portable. Some examples:
In other cases, common instruments from other musical genres have been adopted by traditional musicians. Sometimes the instrument has proven to be particularly well suited to playing traditional music (the fiddle) or the instrument is cheap, readily available and can be adapted to suit the music (the wooden flute in the 19th century and the guitar in more recent times).
Even in the case of these ‘standardised’ instruments, the urge to customise, modify and innovate comes through. This can be quite subtle — many fiddlers deliberately let the rosin build up on the faceplate of their instrument to ‘harden’ the sound — or it can be more substantial as in the common practice of using alternate tunings on guitars.
Even if the instrument itself isn't modified, the playing technique usually is. An obvious example would be the wide range of bowing techniques and playing postures used by traditional fiddlers, most of which would probably horrify their classically trained cousins!
While the music itself often influences the choice and design of the instruments, sometimes the available instruments can also shape the music. For example, the popularity of the guitar (and guitar players) has led to many world music traditions starting to use chordal arrangements with melodies in recent years (see also The Tune).
