[Bea Thurman] had a retro music conundrum. She loved the classic Greengate DS:3 sampler, but couldn’t buy one, and couldn’t find enough information to build her own. [Bea’s] plea for help caught the attention of [Eric Schlaepfer], aka [TubeTime]. The collaboration that followed ultimately solved a decades-old mystery. In the 1980s, there were two types of […]
Ever hear of the Phoniebox project? If not – tune in, that’s a hacker’s project your entire family will appreciate. Phoniebox is a software suite and tutorial for building a jukebox controlled through RFID cards, and it can play audio from a wide variety of sources – music and playlists stored locally, online streams like […]
Although it’s still possible to grab a couple of friends, guitars, and a set of drums and start making analog music like it’s 1992 and there are vacant garages everywhere yearning for the sounds of power chords, the music scene almost demands the use of a computer now. There are a lot of benefits, largely […]
Automated musical instruments aren’t a new idea. From water chimes to player pianos, they’ve been around for a while. But we can’t remember the last time we saw a player ukulele. [Zeroshot] shows us one, though, and it uses an Arduino. You can see and hear it in the video below. Honestly, with all the […]
MIDI is normally baked into the chipset of a synthesizer, or something you use a microcontroller to handle. But that’s not the only way to speak the language! [Kevin] decided to have some fun doing MIDI with discrete logic instead, with some pretty neat results. [Kevin] had previously built a control voltage step sequencer called […]
Bumper stickers are usually political, crude, or otherwise inflammatory. Rather a more fun example is this digital creation from [Guy Dupont], who made a bumper sticker that broadcasts what he’s listening to on the stereo. [Guy] found a nice wide 11-inch bar LCD that was the right aspect ratio to suit the “bumper sticker” aesthetic. […]
The chiptune scene is dominated by Game Boys and other Nintendo hardware, but one should never forget the gorgeous, beautiful tones that come from the hallowed Commodore 64. [Linus Åkesson] knows this well, and it’s at the heart of his work on the Commodordion. Now, he’s built an even better version. The original idea he […]
There are some that enjoy the human element of a musical performance, delighting in the unique way an artist teases the desired sound from their instruments. Then there are those of us who listen to random bleeps, bloops, and buzzes tortured out of some crusty sound chip pulled from an 8-bit computer. It’s all very […]
When the electric guitar was first produced in the 1930s, there was some skepticism among musicians as to whether or not this instrument would have lasting impact or be a flash-in-the-pan novelty. Since this was more than a decade before the invention of the transistor, it would have been hard then to imagine the possibilities […]
There’s something inspiring about echos. Who among us hasn’t called out or clapped hands in a large space just to hear the sound reflected back? Radio takes this to a whole new level. You can bounce signals from buildings, aircraft, the ionisphere, or even the Moon itself. Humans have been bouncing radio waves from the […]