Music

Take your creations beyond the workshop and onto the stage with diy music instruments! Let us show you how these creations range from simple, basic setups that produce beautiful sounds to more complex projects that require a greater level of engineering knowledge. With these tutorials and examples, we’ll guide you on this journey to make your own musical instrument for experimental, artistic or everyday use – so whether you’re starting out new or a seasoned sound creator, come explore the wonderful world of making your own music.

Owen Grace: Guitar Zeros

Watching the stream from the MAKE and CRAFT demo stages, I was totally impressed by Owen Grace and the work he’s done with Electronic Arts converting game controller guitars into playable instruments. In a Maker Faire success story, Owen told of how he made his game controllers into instruments as a personal project, got some friends together to form a band, and then caught the ear of the executives at Electronic Arts. They liked his maker project so much that they offered him a job, where now he continues his project of passion as his profession. Owen and his band are featured on the cover of Make, Volume 15.

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RFID Radios in MAKE Volume 26

In MAKE Volume 26, there’s an article about Matt Brown‘s clever laser-cut RFID radios, written by Thomas Wilson. The idea is to affix an RFID chip inside a laser-cut, flat-pack paper radio, and then pair the radio with a speaker base with an RFID reader. Each radio would be designed by a different musician or […]

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How-To: Make a Daft Punk Helmet

How-To: Make a Daft Punk Helmet

Here’s an amazing how-to from Harrison Krix, a self-proclaimed dork living in Atlanta who spent 17 months (yes, months) designing and building this awesomely cool Daft Punk Helmet. Then he got a photographer friend to snap some shots of him wearing the helmet in various situations. More merry fun and the complete step-by-step how-to can […]

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Xylophone Made from O’Reilly Books

We’ve always prided ourselves on the resonant quality of O’Reilly titles amongst our readers, but we didn’t mean literally. This Japanese maker found that they generated the best sound when building a book xylophone. Apparently Japanese paper is too moist and returns more of a thud. But O’Reilly books are just right. And the varied […]

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Heard of Codebending?

Heard of Codebending?

Have you ever heard of codebending? I hadn’t. Apparently it’s the physical patching together of little bits of computer code, using jacks and patch cables, and then bending the resulting code-cum-sound. Nifty. And you’ve got to love this modular codebending console, called the illucia. It’s a gorgeous piece of geeky tech-art. And any code can […]

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