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.
John Park of Make: magazine builds a fun audio playback device using an Arduino, VoiceShield, and 2-axis joystick from the Maker Shed http://www.makershed.com/ProductDetails.asp?ProductCode=MKSKL3&Click=37845
Instead of chaining multiple guitar effects in search of a new sound, I decided to mod just one. Using an Arduino microcontroller board + digi-pot chip, I was able to add a variable gating effect to a fuzz pedal.
source code + more infos here:
http://blog.stage.makezine.com/archive/2009/08/collins_lab_guitar_pedal_modding_wi.html
video, audio, & riffs by Collin Cunningham
This shows an early incarnation of the Sporenspiel, a glockenspiel which is automatically played based on the amount of spores falling from a mushroom in real time. This video shows the Sporenspiel being played from a video file of mushroom spores, but it will eventually be triggered by real life mushroom spores. [Thanks, Adam!]
Incredible, a MIDI accordion for under $100! Ukraine’s Dmitry Yegorenkov wanted a way to practice accordion while wearing headphones, and didn’t want to shell out over six grand for the Roland model with MIDI out, so he made his own, source code and schematics included. Accordion Mega [via Arduino Blog]
The C60 concept was created to bring tangibility to the digital music experience. A card represents a song or a collection of songs. Placement of a card on the C60 table causes the music represented by the card to be played. Multiple cards placed on the table form a clockwise ordered playlist. [Thanks, Dave!]
Summary Hack a day has an excellent “Intro to Circuit Bending”. Their article combined with some previous coverage and pages of MAKE will allow you to make incredible retro, blippy, noise :) Electronic musical instruments are a lot of fun for a hacker because, with a small palette of tools, know-how and curiosity, they are […]
In Volume 23, we featured Ross Hershberger’s Squelette, a see-through amplifier (“squelette” means skeleton in French). There has been some lively discussion happening on the Squelette article page, and among those contributing to the conversation is Brian J. Andonian, a design engineer at Ford. He built his own version of Squelette out of cherry and […]
