Uncommon Instrument Awareness Day is a holiday that’s observed every July 31st and encourages music lovers to listen to instruments that are less common than what they have already been listening to. It’s also a day that recommends that musicians try out an uncommon or unusual instrument to try to play.

There are hundreds of different musical instruments that fall into the uncommon or unusual category, so we can’t cover them all in this holiday article. However, we can list some of our favorites.

These include the Dan Tre, Tenor Cornett, Mayuri, Copper Serpent, and the Russian Bassoon. Anyone who doesn’t know about these instruments should really look them up because they’re quite fun and perfect for this holiday.

The History Of Uncommon Instrument Awareness Day

Unfortunately, we’re unaware of who invented this holiday or precisely when it was invented. We don’t think that it’s a holiday that’s been around very long, even though people have been playing strange and usual instruments for hundreds of years. With that being said, we’ll continue to try to find the origins of this holiday and perhaps one day we will.

Rock Songs With Unusual Instruments

Okay, we simply can’t resist listing some of the songs that we know about that feature unusual instruments. Although the following list of songs is only a small sampling of the ones we found, we do think they will give people a good place to start their search so they can observe this holiday.

• The Hurdy Gurdy was played on the Led Zepplin song “Gallows Pole.”
• Tin Whistle is the song by Paul Simon called “You Can Call Me Al.”
• Spoons in the Soundgarden song “Spoonman.”
• Bagpipes in the AC/DC song “It’s a Long Way to the Top.”
• The Viola in the Velvet Underground song “Heroin.”
• The Marimba in The White Stripe’s song “The Nurse.”

Observing Uncommon Instrument Awareness Day

Although some people might avoid celebrating this holiday because they aren’t a musician or don’t have access to unusual instruments, we would like to encourage people to celebrate it anyway.

They can do this by listening to music that features unusual or uncommon instruments. And there are plenty of songs with unusual instruments features on them. The 80s Midnight Oil song “Beds are Burning” used a Digeridoo, while Jimi Hendrix’s “Crosstown Traffic” used the Kazoo.

Of course, those are only two examples out of the thousands of examples we could list, but we believe the search for these songs is half the fun. If a person does find a song that features an unusual instrument, they can take the time to tell the world about it using the hashtag #UncommonInstrumentAwarenessDay on social media.