Music

Mark’s Clubhouse Strummer

Mark’s Clubhouse Strummer

MAKE Editor-in-Chief Mark Frauenfelder made this stringed instrument last weekend and posted it on Dinosaurs and Robots: My goal was to make an electric string instrument that uses drone tuning. I don’t know anything about music theory, but drone tuning is a way to tune an instrument that makes it sound good no matter what […]

The Eye-Pod Victrola

The Eye-Pod Victrola

The folks at Steam Gear Lab made this wacky fully-functional Eye-Pod using a 1st gen Nano. Steam Gear Lab has broken the chains of small electronics obsolescence. Behold! The Eye-Pod Victrola! From MAKE magazine: Check out MAKE, Volume 17: The Lost Knowledge issue! Buy your copy in the Maker Shed Subscribe to MAKE Access the […]

Hardware/software synth for Arduino

Hardware/software synth for Arduino

Gijs posted details for building his “Hardware” Software Synthesizer 2 project using Arduino compatible parts. His prototype combines all components onto a standalone board but it appears this could easily be adapted to a standard Arduino. Altogether, it’s a whole lot of functionality with a relatively low part count. Features include – 6-bit resistor DAC […]

Story of the Telharmonium

This enjoyably quirky documentary tells the tale of Thaddeus Cahill’s Telharmonium, the monstrous forerunner of the analog synthesizer, making music before even the age of popular radio – The Telharmonium was a 200-ton behemoth that created numerous musical timbres and could flood many rooms with sound. Beginning with the first instrument, constructed in the 1890’s, […]