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 […]
The humble piezo element is often used as little more than a buzzer in many projects. However, you can do more with them, as [Something Physical] demonstrates with their nifty piezo noise box. Check out the video (and audio) below. The construction is simple enough, attractive in its own way, with a rugged junk-assembly sort […]
As far as giving mechanical instruments electronic control goes, drums are probably the best candidate for conversion; learning to play them is challenging and loud for a human, but they’re a straightforward matter for a microcontroller. [Jeremy Cook]’s latest project takes this approach by using an Arduino Opta to play a tongue drum. [Jeremy]’s design […]
If you’ve put in all the necessary practice to learn bike tricks, you’d probably like an appropriately dramatic soundtrack to accompany your stunts. A team of students working on a capstone project at the University of Washington took this natural desire a step further with the Music Bike, a system that generates adaptive music in […]
Regular ding-dong doorbells are fun and all, but it can be nice to put something a little more special by your front door. To that end, [Arpan Mondal] built this neat little piano doorbell to make visiting his home just a touch more fun. The heart of the build is an ESP32 microcontroller. It’s responsible […]
[Moby Pixel] wanted to build a fun MIDI controller. In the end, he didn’t build it just once, but twice—with the aim of finding out which microcontroller was most fit for this musical purpose. Pitted against each other? The ESP32 and Raspberry Pi Pico. The MIDI controller itself is quite fetching. It’s built with a […]
These days, when you think reverb, you probably think about a guitar pedal or a plugin in your audio software. But you can also create reverb with a big metal plate and the right supporting electronics. [Tully] from [The Tul Studio] shows us how. Basically, if you’ve ever smacked a big sheet of metal and […]