If you purchased an E-mu Audity 2000 ROMpler back in 1998, you almost certainly got a rig with the 1.00 firmware. It was fine, if a little limited, particularly where upgradability was concerned. E-mu would later offer firmware upgrades over MIDI with the 2.00 firmware, but to get the 2.00 firmware, you needed to ship the […]
The usual input device for playing a synthesizer is the good old piano keyboard. However, you don’t have to stick to such pedestrian interfaces when making music. [Daisy] has a fun build that shows us how to put together a ribbon synth that makes wonderful little noises. Naturally, the heart of the build is a […]
There is likely to be more than one of you who has eyed up a child’s toy synthesizer in a second hand store, and considered making something more impressive with it. In many cases these instruments are underwhelming, having a very small subset of functions based into their black-epoxy-blob microcontrollers. [Make Something] found a Casio […]
Over the years we’ve been entertained by an array of musical projects from [Look Mum No Computer], and his latest is no exception. It’s a tape delay, loop generator, and synth all in one. Confused? That’s what you get if you position a load of tape heads around a rotating disk with magnetic tape on […]
“Emergency Law Enforcement Officer Hologram program activated. Please state the nature of your criminal or civil emergency.” Taking a cue from Star Trek: Voyager, the Seoul Metropolitan Police Agency is testing a holographic police officer, with surprisingly — dare we say, suspiciously? — positive results. The virtual officer makes an appearance every two minutes in […]
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 […]
How it started: a simple repair job on a Roland drum machine. How it ended: a scratch-built FM drum synth module that’s completely analog, and completely cool. [Moritz Klein]’s journey down the analog drum machine rabbit hole started with a Roland TR-909, a hybrid drum machine from the mid-80s that combined sampled sounds with analog […]
A piece of musical history is the Maplin 4600, a DIY electronic music synthesizer from the 1970s. The design was published in an Australian electronics magazine and sold as a DIY kit, and [LOOK MUM NO COMPUTER] got his hands on an original Maplin 4600 that he refurbishes and puts through its paces. Inserting conductive pegs […]
The LM3914 LED bar graph driver was an amazing chip back in the day. Along with the LM3915, its logarithmic cousin, these chips gave a modern look to projects, allowing dancing LEDs to stand in for a moving coil meter. But time wore on and the chips got harder to find and even harder to […]