Listen With Others

I guess that the initial inspiration for this puzzle came to me whilst attending a concert early last year, when I thought that I would try to represent the layout of a full orchestra in a crossword grid. However, it soon became apparent that even using the various sections of an orchestra rather than individual instruments, it would be impossible to do this, so I quickly abandoned that idea.

I then decided to try to incorporate as many musical instruments as possible into a puzzle but rather than having the instruments as actual grid entries, I thought it would be more challenging for solvers if the instruments were somehow incorporated into larger words, replacing one or more letters from clue answers. I spent some time making a list of instruments and possible words containing these instruments.

Having manged to complete the grid, I felt that I had to make some use of the replaced letters and so came up with the idea that these letters should be able to be arranged to form other musical instruments. This resulted in me having to revise a number of my original clues/grid entries.

It took me a while to think of an appropriate title for the puzzle that wouldn’t immediately give away too much information about the actual theme. Eventually I thought that the same idea of replacing a letter(s) with a musical instrument would be the way to go and after much thought the word REORGANISATION as a title came to mind. Thus changing REALISATION into REORGANISATION seemed to be appropriate. Finally, I felt that it would be necessary to incorporate the dropped AL from the title into the formation of the other instruments. Once again this resulted in me having to change a couple of clues in order to form the 3 additional instruments as the finale to the puzzle.