Buy a Musical Instrument Day

Commonly recognized families of instruments include: brass, strings, woodwind, percussion and keyboard. Make sure it's the right instrument for you. Learning an instrument can be a noisy affair. Consider investing in a mute, a muffler, or a soundproofed bunker in a remote woodland.

Talking drums were used in Africa for centuries to transmit messages over long distances by mimicking speech. When these were brought to America during the slave trade, they were banned because they were being used by the slaves to communicate over long distances in a code unknown to their enslavers.