Guitar Hero was all the rage for a few years, before the entire world apparently got sick of it overnight. Some diehards still remember the charms of rhythm games, though. Among them you might count [Joseph Valenti] and [Daniel Rodriguez], who built a Keyboard Hero game for their ECE 4760 class at Cornell. Keyboard Hero […]
Electric guitars are great, but they’re just so 20th century. You’d think decades of musicians riffing on the instrument would mean there are no hacks left in the humble axe. You’d think so, but you’d be wrong. [Michael], for one, has taken it upon himself to reinvent the electric guitar for the digital era. Gone […]
Ethernet is how we often network computers together, particularly when they’re too important to leave on a fussy WiFi connection. Have you ever thought about listening to Ethernet signals, though? Well, you totally could, with the NSA selector from [wenzellabs]. The NSA selector is a Eurorack module, designed for use as part of a larger modular […]
Modern musicians may take for granted that a wide array of musical instruments can either be easily connected to a computer or modeled entirely in one, allowing for all kinds of nuanced ways of creating unique sounds and vivid pieces of music without much hardware expense. Not so in the 1930s. Musicians of the time […]
We loved keygens back in the day. Our lawyers advise us to clarify that it’s because of the demo-scene style music embedded in them, not because we used them for piracy. [Patch] must feel the same way, as he has a lovely historical retrospective out on “The Internet’s Most Illegal Music” (embedded below). After defining […]
The Hurdy-Gurdy continues to worm its way into pole position as the hacker’s instrument. How else could you explain a medieval wheel fiddle being turned into a synthesizer? Move over, keytar — [Rory Scammell]’s Balfolk Boombox is the real deal. It began life as MIDI-outputting SAMgurdy by [Sam Palmer], which we sadly missed covering (though […]
Sometimes, all you need to make something work is to come at it from a different angle from anyone else — flip the problem on its head, so to speak. That’s what [Keizo Ishibashi] did to create his Cantareel, a modified guitar that actually sounds like a hurdy-gurdy. We wrote recently about a maker’s quest […]
If you’re looking for a long journey into the wonderful world of instrument hacking, [Arty Farty Guitars] is six parts into a seven part series on hacking an existing guitar into a guitar-hurdy-gurdy-hybrid, and it is “a trip” as the youths once said. The first video is embedded below. The Hurdy-Gurdy is a wheeled instrument […]
If you’re a solo musician, you probably have lots of gear you’d like to control, but you don’t have enough hands. You can enlist your feet, but your gear might not have foot-suitable interfaces as standard. For situations like these, [Nerd Musician] created the OpenMIDIStomper. The concept is simple enough—the hardy Hammond enclosure contains a […]