MIDI Controller Looks Good, Enables Your Air Guitar Habit

We all want to be guitar heroes, but most of us have to settle for letting a MIDI board play our riffs using a MIDI controller. [Joris] thinks a MIDI controller should look like a cool instrument a…

Balloon Guitar Is An Absolute Gas, Helium Or Not

Guitars are most typically built out of wood. Whether it’s an acoustic guitar with a big open cavity, or a solid-body electric, there’s generally a whole lot of wood used in the constru…

MiniDisc Player Supports Full Data Transfer

Between the era of the CD and the eventual rise and domination of streaming music platforms, there was a limbo period of random MP3 players mixed in with the ubiquitous (and now officially disconti…

Big Audio Visualizer Pumps With The Music

A spectrum analyzer is a great way to create exciting visuals that pulse in time with music. [pyrograf] wanted a big one as a display piece, so set about whipping up something of their very own. An…

How The Roland 808 Cowbell Worked

Every generation has an instrument which defines its sound, and for those whose formative musical years lie in the 1980s, a very strong contender to the crown is the Roland TR-808 percussion synthe…

Pitch Sequencer Turns Tascam Tape Deck Into Instrument

The cool thing about magnetic tape is that by varying the speed at which you play it back, you can vary the pitch of the output. [Issac] decided to take advantage of this, executing a fancy digital…

Patching The Kurzweil K2500 Synthesizer

Despite being a computer with some extra chips, synthesizers today are still quite expensive. They used to cost far more, but we tend to think of them as instruments instead of computers. And just …

Mini MIDI Synth Uses Minimum Number Of Parts

The 80s were the golden age of synthesizers in pop music. Hugely complicated setups that spared no expense were the norm, with synths capable of recreating anything from pianos and guitars to percu…

Pianolizer Helps Your Musical Projects Distinguish Notes

[Stanislaw Pusep] has gifted us with the Pianolizer project – an easy-to-use toolkit for music exploration and visualization, an audio spectrum analyzer helping you turn sounds into piano not…

Bare Metal Gives This Pi Some Classic Synths

We’re used to seeing the Raspberry Pi crop up in a wide range of the projects we show you here, but it’s fair to say that they usually feature some sort of operating system. There&#8217…

Bungee-Corded Bass Zither Really Slaps

Surely we’ve all played some bass riffs on a stretched-out rubber band before, right? [Nicolas Bras] found that the ultimate musical rubber bands are bungee cords, and used seven of them to b…

3D Printing A Guitar Neck

A lot of first-time guitar builders focus on making the body and skip the neck, which has lots of tricky dimensions to get right to if you want a nicely playable instrument. However, [Jón Schone] o…

Making Windshield Wipers Rock To The Beat

When you’re driving around, you might occasionally notice your indicators or windscreen wipers sync up fortuitously with the music. [Cranktown City] wanted to ensure his wipers would always m…

Raspberry Pi Creates Melody

For those who are not into prog rock in the 70s or old radio shows from the 40s, the Theremin may be an unfamiliar musical instrument. As a purely electronic device, it’s well outside the rea…

Rotary Phone MIDI Controller Still Makes Calls

[Kevin] has long wanted to do something musical with a vintage rotary phone and an Arduino, and has finally done so and committed the first of several experiments to HTML in a five-part series. He …

VFD Character Display Turned Into Audio VU Meter

Humans love visualising music, whether it’s in the form of an inscrutable equation drawing squiggles in Winamp, or a simple VU meter pulsing with the beat. This build from [mircemk] is of the…

Daft Punk Word Clock Goes Stronger And Faster

What would you call a word clock that doesn’t tell time? The concept of a word clock is that all the words needed to be used are already there and then just selected. [Ben Combee] realized th…

Antique Beat Box Showcases 1950’s Engineering Prowess

Before you could just put a drum machine app on your phone, or fire up Garage Band, there were breakthroughs like the Roland 808 drum machine. But that’s not where it all started. In 1959 a c…

Learn To Play Guitar, Digitally

Learning to play a musical instrument takes a major time commitment. If you happened to be stuck inside your home at any point in the last two years, though, you may have had the opportunity that […

A Gameport Joystick To USB-MIDI Converter

These days, live music performance often involves electronic synthesizers and computers rather than traditional instruments played by hand. To aid in his own performances, [alekappa] built a specia…