What musical instruments were used in the 1920s?
Pretty much any instrument you see today that doesn’t require a power source was available back then too. Depending on the musical style, most instruments swapped having the melody line, allowing the performer to highlight their skills for the audience. Try Google-ing some of the older performances of Louis Armstrong for some examples.
This list is going to be constantly growing, as the number of instruments is grows whenever a new one gets invented. I see that the waterphone, invented by Richard Waters, is on the list at oddmusic.com. It really isn’t such an odd instrument, because practically everyone has heard it at one time or another. It has been a favorite for adding spooky or spacey sounds to Hollywood movie soundtracks for at least 40 years. I can think of a long list of instruments that don’t appear on the list, many of them invented from the 1920s – 1980s by American composers Harry Partch and Ivor Darreg and others. The difficulty of making a comprehensive list of instruments should be obvious already, but if it isn’t, here’s an excerpt from http://musicmavericks.publicradio.org/fe… (this is a fun web site by the way. They have “virtual” versions of Partch’s instruments.) By 1969, the year he recorded “Delusion
