"Is that a whale call?", "Is that two crickets mating?" No, friends! It's a waterphone! It's a clackamore! Telecasters, electric basses and drumsets are all great, but once in a while you need a sound that can't be found at your local Guitar Centre. Gideon & Hubcap are here to talk you thorough the joys of four unique instruments they use in their two-man vaudeville act The Gideon and Hubcap Show. Some originate from ancient cultural practice, others were invented in a garage last month, but all are totally unlike anything you've heard before. From the Jaw Harp to the Shruti Box, each is guaranteed to blow your ears wide open.

Jaw Harp

This tiny instrument is one of the oldest in the world and found in cultures all over the globe. The jaw harp has a deep, satisfying tone often likened to a didgeridoo, and can produce extraordinary overtones and percussive effects. Played using the teeth as a resonating base, or lips for a muted effect, the jaw harp can also be sung into for a particularly striking sound.

Many ancient peoples also used it as a method of practicing cunnilingus.* Jaw harps can be made from bamboo, steel or aluminium, and come as large as a hand or as small as a coin. Add one to your band today, and everyone's jaw will drop--except your own, which will be rocking out on a harp.

The first time Gideon & Hubcap picked up our very own harps we were seventeen years old and we took them to Union Square in NYC. We started playing and were soon joined by a bongo player and a woman with a guitar and a freestyle rapper. It was a wonderful New York moment. We were harping hard and as we were just beginners our overly eager twanging of the flexible metal tongue kept hitting our bottom lips. We played as we bled with increasing abandon from our mouths. We couldn't stop, our fellow musicians were depending on us. A crowd started to gather both to listen and to see what was this instrument that one bled to play? It was a messy and beautiful beginning to a lifetime of harpery.

*this claim is unsupported by science and common decency.

Shruti Box

Used in Indian classical music, the Shruti Box is a drone instrument, meaning it produces a continuous, uninterrupted tone by means of a hand-pumped bellow-and-reed system. No other instrument (besides Donald Trump) can produce such a stream of unending noise. Traditionally, Shruti Box provides the accompaniment for patterns and improvisations to be played on Tabla, Sitar and other Indian instruments, but whatever the context, the drone produced by a Shruti can help induce a trance-like state. The Shruti is one of the first sounds we use in The Gideon and Hubcap Show, because we feel it helps put the audience in an ethereal, abstract space. So do drugs of course, but the Shruti Box is insurance in case our audience forgot to take any.

Whirly Tube

Basically a long piece of corrugated plastic piping that goes by many names, like most of the objects on this list, a Whirly Tube can be obtained at your local toy store for a few quid (or, even more cheaply, by deconstructing your vacuum apart and whipping the suction tube around your head). If you want the finest in whirly tubes, however, you must embrace the New Age philosophy of Australian Sarah Hopkins, who makes the best Whirlies on the globe and will ship them right to your house, in any key you desire. But she doesn't make them just for their gorgeous, ethereal sound--for her, these sonorous sound tubes also alleviate depression and cleanse auric fields. In The Gideon and Hubcap Show, we twirl Whirlies until even the surliest burly feels pearly. However, because we perform in people's homes, we are very careful not to accidentally whirly into someone's great-aunt Shirley, thus ending her days prematurely.

Doc Kazoo

The Kazoo might be the cheapest instrument one can procure. A tiny plastic bauble that you probably have somewhere in your house but can't remember where it came from. Their distinctive buzz is attention-getting but not, perhaps, particularly musical, for all its dime-store charm. The Kazoos made by Doc Kazoo are something else entirely. Doc situates himself firmly in the Appalachian folk tradition from which the Kazoo first arose. By crafting each instrument by hand in his shop, Doc creates kazoos that are beautiful to behold by eye and ear, with a tone unmatched by their plastic cousins. These suckers are loud and models such as The Carolina Pine Picker, The Double Fatboy, The Slim Gem and The Pocket Piper each have their own distinctive character. With every kazoo he makes, Doc will send you a video documenting its construction, complete with killer kazoo factoids--did you know the Kazoo likely originated in Africa as part of tribal ceremonies to disguise voices? We duet on these bad boys every night and the crowds love it. They chant "kazoo! kazoo! kazoo!" Though, weirdly, they forget the "ka" part and pronounce "z" like "b". We just figure most of our audiences have speech impediments.

Gideon Irving and Nate 'Hubcap' Sloan are neo-vaudevillians touring the world one living room at a time. 'The Gideon & Hubcap Show' has now finished in Edinburgh, but to keep tabs on where they are going to be next visit gideonandhubcap.com