Bart Hopkin is a builder of experimental musical instruments[1] and a writer and publisher on the subject. Hopkin runs the website windworld.com, which provides resources regarding unusual instruments.
Hopkin published the magazine Experimental Musical Instruments for 15 years and published several books and CDs specialized in a specialisation of certain types of instruments, such as wind chimes, plosive aerophones and marimbas.[2] For these publications, Hopkin regularly asks experts on the subject to co-write the books, such as Carl Dean for the book about how to build and tune marimbas. Getting a Bigger Sound is a book Bart Hopkin wrote with Robert Cain and Jason Lollar about amplification of sound sources with several types of pickups ranging from piezo disc pickups to common pickups often used in electric guitars. Jason Lollar is a known builder of hand-wound electro-magnetic pickups.
Besides writing, he has also built several experimental musical instruments such as wooden saxophones, the Bell Tree, harmonic zithers, the Savart Wheel, the Trillium Harp, the Trillium Cluster, and many other instruments that are difficult to categorize.[3]
In 2012, he published the book Nice Noise, about prepared guitar techniques written by Hopkin and experimental builder Yuri Landman. The book also features contributions by other builders such as Bradford Reed, Sam Dook (guitarist of The Go! Team), Fred Carlson, David Canwright, Dante Rosati and Neil Feather as well as info about John Schneiders microtonal guitars. The book was simultaneously released with 60 sound samples on bandcamp[4] and SoundCloud.