Have you ever heard of the band, "Bela Fleck and the Flecktones?" Their music is a blend of jazz and bluegrass. Bela Fleck plays banjo. Go figure. Actually, their music is pretty interesting, though I can only take so much of it at a time.
Anyway, their percussionist is Roy Wooten, otherwise known as Future Man. Though he's capable of playing a standard drum kit, his instrument of choice is an electronic drum synthesizer shaped like a guitar. He calls it a "SynthAxe Drumitar." He achieves remarkable sounds from it. Truly.
From Future Man's Wikipedia article comes this:
Future Man's interest in invention, combined with an inclination toward science and mathematics, has led him to experiment with creating other instruments. The most notable of these is the "RoyEl," a piano-like instrument with an arrangement of keys based on the periodic table. In an attempt to fuse music and nature, Future Man took the atomic number of each chemical element and multiplied them by powers of the golden ratio until obtaining a value corresponding to a frequency within the range of human hearing. This method, of course, leads to pitches that do not fall within the chromatic scale, producing unusual and dissonant sound.
I thought you might find that interesting or amusing, or both.
His Wikipedia writeup is here:
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